When I was quite young, there was one night of the week the entire family gathered around the TV to hear “Hello, I’m Johnny Cash”. The evening would be funny, beautiful, sad, and overwhelmingly entertaining. This was country before country was cool.
Now ken Burns, in that profound and exquisite way he has, is bringing his talents to the music of our nation; of the people who defined us as hard-working, honest, fearless; about family and God and most certainly God’s country.
This 8-part series is a reminder of us at our best, our kindest, our funniest, our most real and the timing could not be better when so much of your country seems to be behaving at its worst. This is TV time well spent. It is a myriad of stories our children need to hear. There are moments when we find out who we really, really are. This is full of those moments.
Here is what some of the big guys have to say.
The New Your Times said:
For the sake of a television audience that might be unfamiliar with country music, all the famous stories are here. How Hank Williams, “the Hillbilly Shakespeare,” died in the back seat of a car during a snowstorm. How a young Willie Nelson drove to Patsy Cline’s house in the middle of the night to play her the demo for “Crazy,” a song he’d considered calling “Stupid.” How Dolly Parton finally convinced Porter Wagoner to let her leave his television show by singing “I Will Always Love You,” which she’d written for just that purpose. How Merle Haggard was an inmate in the audience during Johnny Cash’s first concert at San Quentin prison. How Loretta Lynn, instructed not to hug Charley Pride onstage at the Country Music Awards, defied orders — hugging him and kissing him, too.
Rolling Stone:
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. Hearing modern musicians wax poetic about Jimmie Rogers, Hank Williams, Grand Ole Opry O.G. Roy Acuff and bluegrass pioneers Bill Monroe and Ernest Tubbs keeps the lineage in line. 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. The artists are gone. The music is alive, well and very much still here.
The Boot:
One songwriter defined country music as “three chords and the truth,” but the editor of Variety in 1926 called country people “illiterate and ignorant … poor white trash … with the intelligence of morons.” Burns’ film, however, shows that the music and its makers and promoters were anything but ignorant or moronic–and they certainly weren’t simple. Carson, for instance, benefited from the rise of radio as a mass medium: WSB in Atlanta (call letters that stood for Welcome South, Brother) put him on the air, and together with a growing market for phonographic records, the twin technologies helped fuel the creation of what became known as the music business.
