What Ken Burns’ 16-Hour ‘Country Music’ Epic Leaves Out

THE WESTERNER ^ | 9/15/2019 | Frank DuBois

[cowpoke]

Country music has been having an identity crisis since it crawled out of the cradle. Call it diffuse or call it elastic, but it has always run on two tracks: one was rough and one was slick, one rooted in tradition, the other more modern. Think about that serendipitous August in 1927 in Bristol, Tennessee, when, two days apart, both Jimmie Rodgers and the Carter Family auditioned for the Victor Talking Machine Company (which would ultimately become RCA Records). Ralph Peer, the record company’s producer and talent scout, immediately signed both acts. That was a big week for country music. But Rodgers’ and the Carters’ music, while similar, drew upon dissimilar traditions. Rodgers sounded slicker, more commercial, like Tin Pan Alley injected with the blues and a yodel. The Carters were more about spirituals and traditional mountain music. But both appealed to the working class white audience that record companies were just beginning to cultivate. So who was going to fuss about stylistic differences when the records were selling? Together, over the course of a century, these two strands stitched a durable crazy quilt broad enough to accommodate Bill Monroe and Lynn Anderson, the Bakersfield sound and countrypolitan, fiddles and syrupy violins. Sometimes the two strains were at odds, and sometimes the tension between the two created works of genius. Another word for this, of course, is schizophrenic. If you want to see this study in multiple musical personalities displayed in fascinating detail, tune in to Ken Burns’ eight-part documentary on country music that debuts tonight (Sept. 15) on your local PBS affiliate. It’s not as much trashy, surreal fun as any given performance of the Grand Ole Opry or even Hee Haw, because Burns just doesn’t do trashy, but if you need a starter course in country, this is it...MORE

Keep in mind the source of this review is the left-wing Daily Beast, so you will find the usual  obligatory criticisms,  such as this on race:

...Because sometimes you get the feeling while watching Country Music that they were afraid of offending anyone. Nowhere is this more awkwardly obvious than on those occasions where the doc bumps into the subject of race. The elephant in this room is that country is white people’s music, and the African-American artists brought in to testify to the contrary, even when they say sensible things, sound woefully like tokens. Because no matter how many country songs Ray Charles sang and no matter how many No. 1 hits Charley Pride had, country is just white to the bone. The performers were white. And so were their audiences. Likewise, the often ugly conservative and sometimes downright racist impulses articulated by more than a few performers in the ’60s and ’70s are glossed over almost completely. We don’t hear a peep about Marty Robbins recording “Ain’t I Right,” a song mocking civil rights freedom marchers, or Guy Drake, whose “Welfare Cadillac” shot to No. 5 on the country charts in 1970.  

So just consider this as a reminder the series begins tonight on PBS.

I will admit I had never heard the Marty Robbins tune Ain't I Right. It turns out to be an anti-communist tune. Give it a listen:

https://youtu.be/0XxYwWg7F8I

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Same goes for Welfare Cadillac by Guy Drake, which mocks the welfare system. Hard to say it is racist, since whites are the largest group of recipients:

• 43 percent of Medicaid recipients were white, 18 percent were African American and 30 percent were Hispanic in 2016. [Source: KFF]
• In 2016 36.2 percent of SNAP program beneficiaries were white, 25.6 percent were African American, 17.2 percent were Hispanic, 3.3 percent were Asian. [Source: USDA]
• Of TANF recipients in 2016, 27.9 percent of were white, 19.1 percent were African American 36.9 percent were Hispanic. [Source: Department of Health and Human Services]

Here is the Drake tune:

https://youtu.be/hq-hx73or30

[Southside_Chicago_Republican]

Bookmark

[higgmeister]

How much time will Ken Burns devote to Ray Charles and Charlie Pride?

and now Darius Rucker - Wagon Wheel (Official Video)

[rrrod]

Try a bit of Justin Trevino....

[apillar]

Likewise, the often ugly conservative and sometimes downright racist impulses articulated by more than a few performers in the ’60s and ’70s are glossed over almost completely.

Lol! So I guess that means David Allen Coe's underground stuff won't be making an appearance....

[Ruy Dias de Bivar]

Red Foley’s “Ozark Jubilee”

I remember that from the 1950s! I personally am a Bob Wills and Spade Cooley fan.

[Celerity]

Modern country music is all about how great “country people” are. And how the lifestyle is superior.

It’s rap with a twang.

[Drawsing]

Here’s my two cents - probably all that its worth:

I love country music, but here’s a couple of things I don’t like:

Country songs with lists of country things is overdone - you know - skoal ring in my backpocket, beer in my hand, truck flingin’ gravel on a Saturday night, spittin’ tobacco juice in a can. I am tired of this attempt at establishing bonafides. “Look, I’m real country! I know about country stuff!

Songs talking about “shootin’ out the streetlights”. That’s just over the top delinquent and criminal. I have no sympathy for some drunken idiot destroying property. I grew up in towns where a lot of the street signs were riddled with bullet holes. I don’t see that as good-natured fun.

[SkyDancer]

Ken Burns is a liberal flake.

[Ruy Dias de Bivar]

I noticed fifty years ago, 1969, ago that Country music of that time was just a remix of 1950s rock and roll.

[higgmeister]

Liberal just don’t get “poor” doesn’t have a color

Isn't that the truth! I spent a few years on the farm as a kid using the outdoor johnny house and a porcelain chamberpot/slop bucket at night if you didn't want to walk fifty yards outside in the dead of night in the rain. And yes, we did use the pages of the Sears Roebuck or Montgomery Ward catalogues to wipe with. It was us kids who had to take turns every morning emptying the morning bucket to use for the pigs slop each day.

We had a lot of days eating mackerel patties and peanut butter. But we were blessed to have the whole world outside to play in as long as the chores were done.

[SanchoP]

The problem with the “modern sound” in country music is that it has become indistinguishable from pop music.

Country music died with Ol' Possum. (George Jones)

[PA Presbyterian]

His “National Parks” was unwatchable. Pompous, pretentious, full of flaky people trying to sound profound about the spiritual qualities of the outdoor experience. Burns is an effete snob whose success has gone to his head.

[JZelle]

Or Freddy Fender?

[Responsibility2nd]

I recently watched Ken Burns’ documentary on the Roosevelts. Very fascinating. I learned quite a lot. I have a lot of respect for Teddy’s conservation efforts. But not his imperialism. I have a lot of respect for FDR‘s guidance through the war. But not the depression. Of course I have no respect whatsoever for Eleanor.

[Vermont Lt]

Jesus, can’t people be satisfied that someone did a history of country music?

Why do they have to crap all over before it even airs?

Let’s see the critics do a better job.

[TADSLOS]

Ken Burns is a liberal flake.

A BIG TIME lefty from a lefty family and a Trump Hater.

[MarvinStinson]

Ken Burns: Student of History—or Left-Wing Gasbag?

https://www.aim.org/special-report/ken-burns-student-of-history-or-left-wing-gasbag/

[a fool in paradise]

https://www.hoopladigital.com/title/12380593

All You Need Is Love (documentary series from the 1970s) is available on Hoopla Digital and possibly other streaming services

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In Episode 11: Minnie Pearl & Doug Kershaw / President Nixon & Country Music / Carl Pearl Butler / Country Music Hall of Fame / Jimmy Driftwood & The Ozarks / Jimmie Rodgers & the Hillbillies / Ernest Tubb, Roy Acuff, Uncle Dave Macon & The Grand Ole Opry / Bill Monroe & Bluegrass / Carlton Haney & Seldom Scene / Roy Rogers & Dale; the Sons of the Pioneers / Tex Ritter / David Allen Coe & the Rednecks of Nashville / Ernest Tubb, Minnie Pearl & Roy Acuff Will The Circle Be Broken? / Rev. Jimmy Snow & Grand Ole Gospel Time / Troy Hess – “the world’s youngest recording star”

Popular music is now an essential part of our daily lives. Yet we know comparatively little about it – where it came from, how it developed, how it has influenced or been influenced by social change. Today, the popular music industry controls billions of dollars; it has a greater revenue than the combined efforts of cinema, theatre, sport and all the other entertainment industries put together. Yet that industry depends, ultimately, on the creative talents of a group of remarkable individuals. The story of popular music, therefore, is a story of the struggle by these individuals to survive the demands of an avaricious, thieving and capricious industry. This critically acclaimed TV series, originally broadcast worldwide between 1976 and 1980, is featured here in its entirety – 17 episodes, encompassing ragtime, blues, jazz, vaudeville, the musical, folk, swing, country and western, rock’ n’ roll and beyond.

“Palmer at his most acerbic. All You Need Is Love displays everything that is best in informative and entertaining television, and will undoubtedly make Palmer into the Lord Clark (of Civilisation) of popular music, to the intense annoyance of more-or-less everyone else.” – The Times

[MarvinStinson]

In his 14-hour World War II film, “The War,” Burns completely ignored contributions of Hispanic veterans, who have won more Medals of Honor than any other ethnic group in proportion to their numbers involved. When outraged Hispanic groups asked private donors Anheuser-Busch and General Motors Corp. to end their sponsorship of the film, Burns insisted that re-editing the film was out of the question, with PBS defending him in the name of artistic freedom. Eventually some mention of Hispanic soldiers was added.

Author and journalist Raoul Lowery Contreras points out that Burns also ignored Hispanics in his special PBS series, “The Civil War,” although two of the very first Civil War Medal of Honor recipients were Hispanic. He similarly ignored Hispanics in “The Roosevelts,” even though Teddy Roosevelt’s favorite company commander, Maximiliano Luna, led the charge of Company A up San Juan Hill.

https://www.aim.org/special-report/ken-burns-student-of-history-or-left-wing-gasbag/

[MarvinStinson]

In “How Ken Burns Murdered Jazz,” critic Jeffrey St. Clair writes, “Burns doesn’t really like music. In the 19 hours of film, he never lets one song play to completion, anywhere near completion. Yet there is a constant chatter riding on top of the music…In a film supposedly about music, the music itself has been relegated to the background.”

Burns’ “Jazz,” contains a host of shortcomings, including further demonstration of Burns’ apparent lack of affinity for Hispanics with his complete omission of Latin Jazz from the 19-hour film, over-reliance on Louis Armstrong, dismissal of jazz after 1960 and the slighting of Bill Evans, Miles Davis’ influential pianist, possibly due to Burns’ narrator Stanley Crouch’s long history of animosity toward Davis.

Alex W. Rodriguez writes, “Ken Burns’ Jazz ultimately does a disservice to the jazz community because it presents such an inaccurate, flawed, rigid, politically biased framework.”

https://www.aim.org/special-report/ken-burns-student-of-history-or-left-wing-gasbag/