Utterly American

For documentary filmmaker Ken Burns, the stories he chooses to illuminate help explain the history of America. Few can better tell that multifaceted tale than Burns, whose palette birthed the seminal documentary The Civil War in 1990, as well as introspective studies of Baseball, Jazz, The War, The National Parks, Prohibition, The Roosevelts, and The Vietnam War.

In September, Burns and his long-time collaborators—including writer and producer Dayton Duncan and producer Julie Dunfey—will premier Country Music, a wide-ranging look at a truly American style of music that got a spark in Bristol, Tennessee, a region where southern Appalachian residents had long been composing and sharing songs of struggle, heartbreak and faith.

Everything represented in modern country music pays homage to what came out of the hardscrabble lives of Southern Appalachian balladeers, Burns said earlier this spring when he, Duncan and Dunfey visited The Birthplace of Country Music Museum, kicking off a 30-city bus tour “to spark conversation about this unique American art form and the people who created it.”

The eight-part, 16-hour documentary begins on PBS September 15.

Paying homage

Smoky Mountain Living had a chance to listen as Burns, Duncan and Dunfey spoke in Bristol, and the next day as they stopped in Sevierville, Tennessee, to pay homage at the statue of Dolly Parton, located outside the Sevier County Courthouse.

Burns and Duncan said the documentary, which they had bandied about for ages but which consumed six years of research and filming, explores wide-open questions such as “what is country music?” and “where did it come from?”

Dunfey said the filmmakers turned up never-before-shared audio and photographs of the titans of the genre.

A corps of stars occupy the core of the story: the Carter Family, Jimmie Rodgers, Bob Wills, Hank Williams, Patsy Cline, Johnny Cash, Merle Haggard, Loretta Lynn, Charley Pride, Willie Nelson, Dolly Parton, Emmylou Harris, Garth Brooks and more.

For some natives of southern Appalachia, this documentary will further secure for their region a place high on the list of crucibles where modern American and global music tastes were formed.

“Bristol is the beginning of it,” Burns told SML. “This is where it happened; where the Big Bang happened.”

From Galax to Liverpool

Longtime SML readers are familiar with the story of music in Bristol; how in 1927 producer Ralph Peer traveled from New York City to Bristol to record regional musicians performing traditional songs for the Victor Talking Machine Company.

Those recordings—made at what became known as the Bristol Sessions—helped form musical tastes in the country as the science of recording was becoming a money-making industry. According to Johnny Cash, the recording and distribution of 76 songs at Bristol were “the most important event in the history of country music.” Those musical styles and the evolution it spurred shaped the sound and presentation of a variety of artists, from Cash, Bill Monroe and Flatt and Scruggs to younguns learning to play a guitar in Liverpool and beyond.

So the museum was the obvious place for Burns and company to kick off their tour.

“The Bristol Sessions are ground zero for the story: the coming together, the creation of country music,” Burns said.

“In country music, we found a love for storytelling that translates everyday experiences into universal truths that we can all identify with,” Burns said. “We’re very excited to share this film with the country, in towns large and small, from one coast to the other.”

From Sevierville, the bus tour traveled to Nashville for taping of Country Music: Live at the Ryman, a Concert Celebrating the Film by Ken Burns. 

Burns has said coming to Ryman Auditorium was “a dream for us.”

Whiskey and worship

Some of the initial Bristol recording contrasted the piety and reverence of worship on a Sunday morning with the raucous, whiskey-fueled honky tonks of Saturday night, Duncan said.

“The big acts Peer recorded were diverse in style, with the Carters recording a number of religious songs and Rodgers emerging as a honky-tonk performer, he said.

Burns said the idea of doing a documentary on the history of country music had been “on a list for years,” but it wasn’t until a friend in Texas a few years ago said, “‘have you ever thought about country music,’ and it was a kind of an explosion going off in my mind.”

Duncan said the production team goes into every project with the idea that they know very little about the topic. “What we do is, in every film that we do, we don’t start with any preconception about what the story is that we’re going to tell.”

He said “the worst thing you can do is to say ‘I already know what the story is.’ That would not only be bad history, but boring,” he said.

“We enjoy the act of discovery, and once you start to look into the history of country music and talk to people from Ketch Secor to Bill Malone, who is in his 80s and is the dean of history for country music, and look at it, the diversity is not hidden. It has been there from the start, just waiting for somebody to recognize it and bring it forward, and that is what we love to do,” Duncan said.

What struck them in doing the documentary on jazz and now with the focus on country music, is that artists don’t pigeonhole people and categorize tastes.

“People categorize things,” Burns said. “We do that for everything.” Yet, “artists don’t see that. They don’t feel like they have to carry passports from one kind of music to another … if it’s true, it’s true across all musical genres. Louis Armstrong said there ain’t but two kinds of music in this world, good music and bad music, and good music you tap your feet to,” Burns said.

In filming Jazz, Wynton Marsalis pointed out how musicians look for connections across the spectrum of society. “Because they do not recognize those arbitrary political, if you will, borders, they see a vision of us being together, that maybe society—or the tribal impulses that we have—don’t have,” Burns said. “So the artists have that possibility of leading us.”

Look back in country music and you see the mashup, he said. “Louis Armstrong appears with Jimmie Rogers. He even comes back and he’s on Johnny Cash’s television show. Nobody can quite figure out what to do with Willie Nelson because his phrasing, it’s so odd, it’s jazz phrasing. It owes more to Django Reinhardt than anything else,” Burns said.

To drive that point home, Burns said people should listen to the panoply of voices in the Birthplace of Country Music Museum exhibit of the song Will the Circle be Unbroken. “All of the circles sound the same except for Willie’s. Every stop sign in all the other ones, he runs right through, and every place there’s clear sailing in all the others, he stops. It’s just, that’s Willie, and he’s one of the great country artists,” Burns said.

Learning harmonies

The documentarians spoke to a wide variety of top musicians outside the normally defined boundaries of country music. “Wynton is the obvious one,” Dunfey said. “We also interviewed Paul Simon, who had some wonderful, wonderful things to say about how he and Art Garfunkel tried to study the Louvin Brothers,” popular regulars at the Grand Ole Opry back in the day, “to figure out how they did their harmonies, and they would just listen and listen and listen. ‘How were they doing that?’ They tried to get that into their music,” she said. 

Elvis Costello, who is associated with the first wave of the British punk invasion, “worked with Loretta Lynn on some songs. He talked about some of the early Johnny Cash being like punk music … because it’s so elemental, it’s so stripped down,” Dunfey said.

The filmmakers interviewed musicians as modern as Jack White, the lead singer for the garage rock band The White Stripes, and “throughout the film there’s lots of other people that come through our episodes, like Elvis Presley, like Bob Dylan, like the Beatles,” Burns said. “You learn about the ways in which the centrality of country music (is) to all of those people, and what they think. And there’s always this big overlap, particularly post-World War II overlap, between country and what we call folk, and how it divided, sometimes along political or geographical” lines, Burns said. “It’s not Tennessee, it’s New York; it’s protests, it’s not a reaffirmation of their values. You begin to see Dylan,” an early folk stalwart, “all of a sudden … he’s down in Nashville, because they get things done, and there’s something happening there,” Burns said. “You begin to realize, again, he didn’t need a passport. You have Emmylou Harris, who’s coming from a folk tradition and a rock tradition. You’ve got the psychedelic, the Byrds, coming, trying to make sense here, and Nashville trying to make sense of them.”

“A lot of these artists who are outside the genre of country music, they help us place country music in the great American songbook,” Dunfey said. “They’re coming from a lot of different influences, but they help ground it. We understand what they love, what they’re influences by in country music, and how the boundary disappears,” she said. 

The big miss

Who does Burns wish he could have interviewed for the documentary but couldn’t get?

“We wish we’d gotten Bruce Springsteen. That was the one ‘get’ that we didn’t get. He told me he’d do it, and then it was impossible to do it. But we’re OK.”

Duncan said he “is still mourning” that missing conversation. “One of the reasons we wanted to interview Bruce Springsteen, not just because he’s the boss, but he credits in his autobiography the turning point for him in his songwriting, as a songwriter, was listening to Hank Williams, and realizing what Hank Williams was doing in his songs. He thought, ‘my early rock ‘n’ roll songs aren’t reaching that level, and that’s what I want to aspire to.’ He overtly credits that to being a transformational moment for him as an artist. Because he didn’t get in — he didn’t say it in the film, I’m saying it now.”

Burns said Paul Simon also said Hank Williams was a rock on which he stands. “Early on in this project … the first thing he did was send me everything of Hank Williams, because he wanted me to understand the centrality of Hank Williams. We’ve got an entire chapter called The Hillbilly Shakespeare, our third episode, which is not all about him, but it’s so guided by his spirit and the fact that he still, up to this moment, because of the clarity of his poetry and the elemental simplicity of his music, is arguably the most important person in country music,” Burns said.

‘This is my life’

Old Crow Medicine Show founder and Grammy award-winning musician Ketch Secor, who is a narrator in the film, said he’s been a Ken Burns fan for “most of my life.”

He said The Civil War documentary touched him as a pre-teen growing up in the Shenandoah Valley. “It was so wonderful to have my county championed by this man. I saw all the ghosts around me, (and) seeing this documentary form as a way of conjuring up something in my own backyard and making it real for me,” Secor said.

“The next thing to do that were records, and the records that were recorded in Bristol and Johnson City,” he said.

Secor first talked with Burns and the documentary makers about seven years ago at the Ryman Auditorium. “They said: ‘We’ve been looking to talk to you. Marty Stuart said we should get in touch because you know about the early days of country music.’ Then I started to see them everywhere. Ken invited me to his birthday party, to his house. We had ice cream cake. I met his dog.”

Working on and then seeing the film “was just so powerful,” Secor said. “I’ve been at this for 20 years now. I’ve only lived a country music life from 1998 to the present, or whenever I got turned on by it. But watching the film, I just felt so often, this booth announcer voice, “THIS IS YOUR LIFE.” They were talking about Jimmy Rogers or Pop Stoneman, a life lived 100 years before mine, so I feel very much a part of the story of country music, because of this film.”

‘A magnificent tapestry’

“We’ve never had a subject that was as resonant as country music, and I think we need the story of country music even more today,” Burns said. “As we see the magnificent tapestry of what our country is becoming, frayed with the ancient animosities that seem to set one group against the other, we are reminded of the way in which country music is an amalgam of lots of different forms. It has been so omnivorous and reached out and embraced other forms and other people that it reminds us of what we share in common,” Burns said.

Duncan agrees. “We discovered that country music isn’t—and never was—one type of music; it actually is many styles. It sprang from diverse roots, and it sprouted many branches. What unites them all is the way the music connects personal stories and elemental experiences with universal themes that every person can relate to. And as it evolved, from the bottom up, it created a special bond between the artists and fans that is unique among all other musical genres.”