Mr Burns’s series is meticulously researched. Even the snobbiest viewers will gain a new appreciation of country
was imported to America by immigrants from the British Isles. The banjo was played by slaves brought from Africa. The fiddle and the banjo met in the American South. “That’s why the first episode is called ‘The Rub’,” says Ken Burns of “Country Music”, his new 16-hour documentary series. “The rub is that friction caused by blacks and whites.”
Like his explorations of the civil war, jazz, the Roosevelts and the Vietnam war, Mr Burns’s series is meticulously researched and sometimes solemn, featuring grave narration and rare footage.
As Mr Burns shows, that was the decade in which the genre was commercialised. An insurance firm in Nashville opened a station,, thinking it a cheap way to sell policies to working folk. Its Saturday night barn-dance slot became the “Grand Ole Opry”, the longest-running show on American radio. As Marty Stuart, a country prodigy, puts it, ever since Nashville has had a “guitar in this hand. Briefcase in this hand”.
According to Harlan Howard, a songwriter, the music itself trades in “three chords and the truth”—a theme much broader and deeper than the cheatin’ hearts and pick-up trucks of stereotype. Cash, for example, once dedicated an album to Native Americans, but initially country stations wouldn’t play it. In 1975 some banned Loretta Lynn, who had crooned about her hardscrabble life as a coalminer’s daughter, because of her song “The Pill”.
The series opens with a shot of a mural at the Country Music Hall of Fame, which depicts a barn dance, the railway, a church choir, river boats, fiddles, cowboys, a blues musician and slaves in the field. “It is the closest thing visually really to what country music sounds like,” reckons Kathy Mattea, a singer. That sound is always evolving—to the ire of traditionalists, who have worried about the influence of rock ‘n‘ roll, foreigners, hip-hop and much else.
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