and the Music City bombast of the late 1980s get the close-read treatment. Both the acoustic style practiced by Monroe, Ricky Skaggs, et al.
#Country music ken burns narrator full
The music is alive, well and very much still here.Īnd while the phrase “country music” might bring to mind a certain specific type of tune to you - maybe it’s the lightning-speed breakdowns of bluegrass maybe it’s the arena C&W of Garth Brooks - Country Music endeavors to go full Baskin-Robbins and give viewers as many flavors as possible. Occasionally, one of the talking heads will start singing an old ditty right after Burns gives us a verse of the original, and time collapses in an instant.
Roy Acuff and bluegrass pioneers Bill Monroe and Ernest Tubbs keeps the lineage in line. Hearing modern musicians wax poetic about Jimmie Rogers, Hank Williams, Grand Ole Opry O.G. The Carter Family staple “Will the Circle Be Unbroken?” is either name-checked, played over the soundtrack or briefly sung by interviewees in seven of the eight episodes Johnny Cash shows up in Part 2 as a toddler and shuffles off this mortal coil as an old man in Part 8.
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). Country Music, Ken Burns’ PBS docuseries on a musical journey that spans from hollers to honkytonks to hit parades, is a whole lotta things.
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