Posted on 09/15/2019 1:40:34 PM PDT by cowpoke
...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.
Burns’ “Baseball,” includes errors such as film of a pitcher supposedly pitching in a World Series who did not play for either team. The blog, “So many mistakes in Ken Burns Baseball,” lists many more.
When PBS viewers complained about Burns’ choice of documented plagiarists Mike Barnicle and Doris Kearns Goodwin as narrators for his baseball sequel, “The Tenth Inning,” PBS ombudsman Michael Getler defended Burns’ choice: “We all, of course, make mistakes, and most of us, I think, believe in redemption and second chances.”
Boston writer Mark Leccese didn’t agree: “The ombudsman for PBS nonchalantly classifies plagiarism as a mistake most of us are ready to forgive. Not so fast…Plagiarizing is one of the most immoral things a journalist can do. It involves not only the theft of someone else’s work, but the deliberate deception of readers…I do object ‘loudly’ to the ombudsman for PBS brushing off plagiarism as a mistake we should stand ready to forgive and forget.”
https://www.aim.org/special-report/ken-burns-student-of-history-or-left-wing-gasbag/
Yes it did- and its musical eulogy was performed by the great Merle Haggard and preserved for all time by Glen Campbell.
The beginning of the tearing down of the genre and the roots was the attempt to demolish the Grand Old Opry’s Ryman Auditorium... for which the one and only John Hartford, dead now for 15 years— began a “save the Opry” project... which preserved it.. starting with this song: “They’re Gonna Tear Down the Grand Ole Opry”:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N1FFyyJz8wc
Finally- friend Larry Cordle wrote, to describe the crap that is still nashvegas/lost angels fake, with “Murder on Music Row” (Hank wouldn’t have a chance.... They’d even tell The Possum to pack up and go back home:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=03AUqXUQDrc
Ken Burns claims, “For nearly forty years now, I have diligently practiced and rigorously maintained a conscious neutrality in my work.”
This “neutrality” includes the following: In 2008, the Democratic National Committee chose Burns to produce the introductory video for the late Senator Edward Kennedy’s Democratic National Convention speech, which, according to Politico, presented Kennedy as “the modern Ulysses bringing his party home to port.” When Kennedy died, Burns produced a eulogy video for his funeral.
When Burns endorsed Barack Obama for the U.S. presidency in December 2007, he compared Obama to Abraham Lincoln. In 2012, Burns wrote, “Like FDR, Obama has walked us back from the brink. He averted a depression, ended one war and put us on the path ending the other, rescued the auto industry…Obama has deployed the shrewd combination of speaking softly and using a big stick. Ask Bin Laden.”
In speeches, Burns sneers at the U.S., mentioning “our spurious sovereignty” and “all the distracting jingoistic talk of exceptionalism.”
Burns hammers at left-wing mantras in his documentaries, using standard and easily recognizable left-wing media techniques. He omits the long racist history of Democrat politicians in his documentary “Congress,” presenting the period just before the Civil War to the post-Reconstruction era without ever identifying a single pro-slavery congressman or senator as a Democrat. He omits the strong anti-abortion views of Susan B. Anthony in his suffrage movement documentary “Not For Ourselves Alone,” since that did not fit the left-wing ideology he was pushing.
When a white shooter killed black churchgoers in 2015, Burns said, “As most Americans were, I was stunned, shocked, reduced to tears by what had happened in Charleston and felt like all the old ghosts were all still present with all the force they’ve always had in American life.” But when a Muslim terrorist killed 50 gays in Orlando, Florida, in the deadliest mass shooting in U.S. history, Burns said of Donald Trump’s advocating a temporary halt to Muslim immigration to America: “Do not think that the tragedy in Orlando underscores his points. It does not.”
In an outright falsification, Burns, who is largely dependent on taxpayer-based funding from PBS for bankrolling his work, said he hoped that 2012 GOP Presidential candidate Mitt Romney “doesn’t get his way, and PBS isn’t eliminated.” However, in the real world Romney never suggested that PBS be eliminated; he merely urged ending its U.S. taxpayer support.
Burns hit all the obligatory left-wing mantras in his June 12, 2016 Stanford University commencement speech, attacking candidate Donald Trump: “As a student of history, I recognize this type…the prospect of women losing authority over their own bodies, African Americans again asked to go to the back of the line, voter suppression gleefully promoted…These are all virulent strains that have at times infected us in the past…Edward R. Murrow would have exposed this naked emperor months ago. He is an insult to our history.”
https://www.aim.org/special-report/ken-burns-student-of-history-or-left-wing-gasbag/
Be sure to catch Ken's "Conservatives in the Mist," in which these strange creatures are studied with conscious neutrality.
LMAO.
Yeah, neutrality my a$$.
Lying leftist hypocrite.
I gave up on Burns after his WW II embarrassment, where the war was won by African Americans and Women.
Did Rosie the Riveter help? Of course, and ditto the RedBall Express. But they were one small part in a massive worldwide effort.
Sad, for Burns to have bought into the current historical narrative, where every general’s minority/female cook singlehandedly won the war or changed history.
Nobody wants to sit through 16 hours of boring virtue signaling liberal garbage, but thank you for outing yourself as a PBS and Ken Burns fan.
Thank you for outing yourself as a poor redneck a-hole.
I tried to watch it. It was sooooo boring...like watching paint dry.
Burns is over the hill. To quote a country song: “He’s too old to cut the mustard anymore.”
In the ‘70s, there was “progressive” country. Now, there is hick hop.
“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 “
Great song! It should be promoted everywhere now!
I strongly disagree about modern “country” music.
Garth Brooks utterly ruined country with his integration of a more “rock-ish” sound. It became more POP than Country.
Tom Petty, who all likely agree was a fantastic singer/songwriter/poet/artist said: Country now is just BAD rock with a fiddle.
It has gotten worse, and now there’s no fiddle!
A beautiful example of how low country has fallen is This 6 song country mashup.
SIX different songs, by six different “artists”.
They are all THE SAME SONG!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FY8SwIvxj8o
Oh, this is from FOUR YEARS AGO. It has most emphatically NOT gotten any better!
Country music S U C K S!!
#6 About 50%. The other 50% will inference that people who like country music hate black people.
That was a truly great series. So much so that leftists did a sequel 50 years later called Civilizations. Watch the first and skip the remake.
Great song and you have to love that cover. Cordle has written/recorded many great tunes.
No matter how many records he sold, Garth was not a singer, he was a promoter. He was a singer like Fabian was a singer. Merle Haggard and Randy Travis were country singers. Most of todays "country" singers are just big hat entertainers.
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