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

[smalltownslick]

Did you ever make a Left and Then a Right?

[smalltownslick]

Dale Watson!!

[morphing libertarian]

define “put down” was it the truth

[John S Mosby]

In re:?

[smalltownslick]

A song. I had seen your name and wondered if you were the singer, and when you mentioned industry people who are your friends, I was pretty certain you were. I just thought using the song was an indirect way to ask you.

[NKP_Vet]

Leftist Burns is a rock fan. This documentary has had its moments but overall it’s been terrible. Burns has an obsession with Johnny Cash, not because he was a great singer, which he of course was not, but because Cash was a liberal social justice warrior who ran around with liberal rock singers. Great country singers have been ignored while over-the-hill rock singers and bands have been glorified. Barely a mention of Lefty Frizzell, no Conway Twitty, no Hank Thompson, no Mel Street, no Stonewall Jackson, no Wynn Stewart, no Stoney Edwards, etc, but hours upon hours of Johnny Cash and his protest songs and Kris Kristopherson and Bob Dylan, neither of which could carry a tune in a 50 gallon drum.

[NKP_Vet]

This latest Burns documentary is all about race, race, race, and over the hill rock singers and Burns obsession with Johnny Cash and his social protest songs. Lefty Frizzell and Conway Twitty all but ignored while liberals like Cash, Bob Dylan, and Kris Kristopherson got hours upon hours. The series should be called “Johnny Cash Life Story in 8 two hour episodes.” He’s been been featured each and every episode. Burns must be homosexual.

[gibsonguy]

As expected, Burns is a leftist hack.

[nutmeg]

.

[John S Mosby]

Barely mentioned— in episode 2 the Foundational male duet act— The Delmore Brothers. Alton and Rabon. Cotton sharecropper brothers who lived alongside poor blacks on sharecropper “rent” land of old large plantations. Day to day on meager income— doing 5AM radio live shows and then personal appearances the same day, for YEARS in the 20s into the 40’s. The original “hillbillys” that WSM radio abused constantly, including the “great” roy acuff. The days of Uncle Dave Macon whom they toured with— the only guy nice to them, it seems. And the original hillbilly rock n roll:

“Blues Stay Away From Me”- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YUk9UDoVyKk

Johnny Cash married a Carter (the dysfunctional Carter Family of Hiltons, VA)— did crap loads of booze and drugs for “authenticity” and because he was an addict, speed and booze. Nothing new there— (See: Hank Williams, who was a terrible loss that could have been prevented, and was a true writer). Merle Haggard— a real car thief who did time, was inspired personally by Cash performing at the prison where Haggard was incarcerated.

Burns— being a victim mentality— identifies with the “pain” that Cash brought on himself, much as Burns and his predilections and leftist bent on victimhood. Would be nice if this guy was an actual musician instead of a fake historian.

[John S Mosby]

George Strait and Alan Jackson made the hit out of Cordle’s
“Murder on Music Row”.

John Hartford has been dead well on 15 years now.