Songs that took cues from Western cowboys, below-the-Mason-Dixon-line minstrel shows and vagabond medicine shows finds a popular national footing thanks to a down-home barn dance broadcast out of…Chicago.Īnd while most of the foundational business is laid out in the first episode - every subsequent installment covers a timeframe, from between four to a dozen years - all of Country Music‘s chapters seem to have one eye on the past as they rocket forward into the future. Suddenly, regional music is working-class America’s music. (Both would help form rock & roll.) Old-timey notions of rural “primitives” picking and grinning get beamed into parlor rooms courtesy of technology, i.e. Mass popularity made them both too big to ignore or dismiss. The early recordings of what was called “Hill-Billy Music” shared labels with “Race Music,” as well as a sort of sneering bluenose contempt from so-called respectable society. You are never allowed to forget that this sturm und twang was forged in the flaming-blowtorch fusion of the American South, incorporating melodies from English/Irish/Scottish ballads sung in the Appalachians and instruments brought over by European immigrants and African slaves. Like Burns’ 2001 deep dive Jazz, it puts the music’s cultural and geographic roots front and center. Ken Burns: Inside the Filmmaker's Epic 'Country Music' Seriesīut most of all, this epic, essential survey (which premieres on September 15th) is both a history lesson of an American art form and 20th century U.S.A. How Ken Burns Connected Every Dot of Country Music's Rich History in New Film Related: 100 Greatest Country Artists of All Time (The five-CD soundtrack doubles as a good ol’ Country 101 primer.) And by God, it’s most definitely a Ken Burns’ production in every way, shape and form, right down to the slow-zooms into sepia-toned photographs and soup-to-nuts testimonials you have not lived until you’ve heard the filmmaker’s go-to narrator Peter Coyote utter the phrase “quaint and quirky backwoods hayseeds” in his weathered baritone. It’s a love letter to something that’s old enough, and big enough, to encompass scratchy field 78 rpm recordings of centuries-old folk songs and 64-tracked platinum albums sold by the millions. It’s a tribute to artists with colorful nicknames like “The Singing Brakeman” and “The Hillbilly Shakespeare,” and those who can be identified by a single moniker: Willie, Dolly, Merle, Emmylou, Waylon, Reba, Garth. It’s long, which is a given when you consider the authorship - clocking in at a shade over 16 hours, this eight-episode megillah’s running time falls somewhere in between Burns’ look at WWII ( The War) and his recent exploration of the conflict in Vietnam ( The Vietnam War). Rife with endlessly fascinating anecdotes, the stories in this sweeping yet intimate history will captivate longtime country fans and introduce new listeners to an extraordinary body of music that lies at the very center of the American experience.Country Music, Ken Burns’ PBS docuseries on a musical journey that spans from hollers to honkytonks to hit parades, is a whole lotta things. Here, too, are interviews with the genre's biggest stars, including the likes of Merle Haggard to Garth Brooks to Rosanne Cash. Here is Hank Williams' tragic honky tonk life, Dolly Parton rising to fame from a dirt-poor childhood, and Loretta Lynn turning her experiences into songs that spoke to women everywhere. With the birth of radio in the 1920s, the songs moved from small towns, mountain hollers, and the wide-open West to become the music of an entire nation - a diverse range of sounds and styles from honky tonk to gospel to bluegrass to rockabilly, leading up through the decades to the music's massive commercial success today.īut above all, Country Music is the story of the musicians. This deeply researched and hugely entertaining history begins where country music itself emerged: the American South, where people sang to themselves and to their families at home and in church, and where they danced to fiddle tunes on Saturday nights. The rich and colorful story of America's most popular music and the singers and songwriters who captivated, entertained, and consoled listeners throughout the 20th century - based on the upcoming eight-part film series to air on PBS in September 2019
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