If country music had a Mount Rushmore, Hank Williams would be a shoo-in.
Many music fans would agree with that assessment, but it means a great deal coming from Dayton Duncan, the lead producer and writer of “Country Music,” a new documentary directed by Ken Burns.
Burns puts it another way: “To me, Hank Williams is the bee’s knees. ... If all you have is Hank Williams, that’s it. That’s all you need."
Williams, who died in 1953, remains a legendary figure in the music world and a singer-songwriter of enduring influence. Small wonder, then, that he’s prominently featured in Burns’ PBS film, an epic production that spans eight episodes and covers much of the 20th century.
“Country Music” debuts tonight on Alabama Public Television at 7 p.m. CT. Subsequent episodes, each about two hours in length, will air at the same time Monday through Wednesday, Sept. 15-18, and September 22-25.
Viewers will have to wait until Episode Three to encounter Williams, as each installment in the series covers about a decade’s worth of songs, artists and history. And although his primacy is made clear, Williams is just one crucial figure in a pantheon that includes the Carter Family, Johnny Cash, Loretta Lynn, Merle Haggard, Dolly Parton, Jimmie Rodgers, Bill Monroe, Tammy Wynette, Emmylou Harris and George Jones.
Burns says his team conducted 101 interviews for the film, including 40 members of the Country Music Hall of Fame, and listened to tens of thousands of songs. “Country Music” took about eight years to complete, and the 16.5-hour film was distilled from about 175 hours of interview footage. The finished product also includes photos, videos and narration by Peter Coyote.
Birmingham’s Bobby Horton, a music historian and multi-instrumentalist, worked on this film, as he has done for several other Burns projects, including “Baseball,” “Mark Twain,” “The National Parks" and “Lewis & Clark.”
Horton was present in March — and applauded by the audience — when Duncan, one of Burns’ longtime collaborators, offered a sneak peek of “Country Music” at the Alabama Department of Archives and History in Montgomery. Vignettes shown that evening mostly focused on Williams, but they also highlighted another pioneering act from Alabama, the Maddox Brothers and Rose.
During recent interviews with AL.com, Burns and Duncan talked about the contributions of Alabama musicians, country music in general and “Country Music” in particular. Here’s what they said:
Q: What was so compelling about this subject? Why were you drawn to it as a filmmaker?
Burns: It’s the story of human experience. People make fun of country music, saying it’s about good ol’ boys and hound dogs and six-packs. But it truly deals with universal human affairs. It’s about jealousy, rage, a broken heart, getting right with God. It’s a beautiful piece of poetry and a beautiful piece of music, wedded together. All of my work has been trying to figure out who we are, what makes us tick. I’m a mechanic at heart. I love to lift up the hood.
Duncan: This one precisely fits what we’ve done in the past, and what our passions are, which is to explore the history of the United States, particularly to explore who are the people who call themselves Americans. … We’re more interested in the bottom-up stories than the top-down stories. Country music rose from the bottom up. It was principally driven by the need and desire of people who often felt looked down upon, or left out, to tell their story, or to speak to each other, or to speak to the world, about who they were and what they go through, through music.
It also is a story that can remind us, if we listen to it, that we’re all it together. We experience the same emotions, is what country music’s all about. It’s about these elemental but universal things. It’s heartbreak. It’s death. “I saw the hearse come rolling, to carry my mama away,” right?
It’s about being cheated on. It’s about cheating on somebody. It’s about failure. It’s about hard times and hard work, and sometimes the hope for redemption. All those things know no boundaries, because they’re human.
Q: What did you learn about country music as you worked on this film?
Burns: Everything. I’m a child of R&B and rock ’n’ roll. This wasn’t my music. It didn’t mean I hated it; I just didn’t know it. To me, this was like saying you dipped your toe in a swimming pool, and suddenly you dived into the deep end. So many issues are raised in this film, about geography, economics, racism, women. I just don’t think that I was prepared in any way, shape or form for the emotions I was going to feel.
Duncan: What you find in country music, once you start looking at it and how it developed, is that there are no boundaries. There are no racial or gender boundaries to it, because it’s an art form. The artists know before the rest of the culture does, what works best is when you’re out on those edges and encountering something else and drawing from it, drawing it in and reconverting it into something that has meaning to you.
All the major figures in the pantheon of country music — A.P. Carter, Jimmie Rodgers, Hank Williams, Johnny Cash, Bill Monroe — all of them were influenced when they were young by African-American musicians. And it wasn’t a one-way street. Charley Pride wanted to sing like Hank Williams. He got discovered when he was a semi-pro baseball player in Helena, Montana, working in a (metal factory), playing baseball and working in a bar, singing. Two guys from the Grand Ole Opry heard him sing a Hank William song, and said, “Man, with a voice like that, you ought to come to Nashville.”
The thing that comes up continually in our film is sort of a cross-pollination. If it’s good music, it’s for everybody, and to become good music it can’t just be in a narrow silo or fenced in. In country music, that’s America at its best.
Q: How important to country music is the state of Alabama and its musicians?
Burns: To me, Hank Williams is the bee’s knees. Kris Kristofferson said it with great poetry: “I wish he had lived to be as old as I am, because I know there’s a lot of great songs in there. I didn’t know anything at 29, but he’d already written ‘Hear that lonesome whippoorwill’ and ‘I got a hot rod Ford and a two dollar bill.’" If all you have is Hank Williams, that’s it. That’s all you need.
Duncan: Alabama’s very important to country music, because Hank Williams is central to that story. He embodies everything that country music is. He’s the only person that we named one of our eight episodes after. The title of Episode Three is “The Hillbilly Shakespeare.” Hank was an agent of change and expansion of country music through honky-tonk, and he’s also a representative of it at its best in songs of heartache and heartbreak. He’s a major part of our third episode, and in subsequent episodes, like Episode Seven, you can see the people who are influenced by him.
He’s so important to subsequent generations that Townes Van Zandt, a great troubadour, not from Alabama but Texas, was fixated on the fact that, on his 29th birthday, he spent it thinking he was going to die, because that’s how old Hank Williams was. That’s how big Hank Williams is, and what a long shadow he casts. … If you had a Mount Rushmore (of country music), Hank Williams would obviously be on it.
Q: Several other Alabama musicians show up in this documentary. How significant was Emmylou Harris, who was born in Birmingham?
Duncan: I hope one of the things that our eight episodes does, is that it places Emmylou Harris in the important role that she played in the 1970s and early ‘80s, in influencing a whole generation of listeners.
Her first two solo albums, along with Waylon Jennings’ ‘Dreaming my Dreams,” brought me back to country. I wore all those albums out. With Waylon, it was his attitude and the songs he sang. With Emmylou, of course, it was her voice. It’s impossible not to fall in love with her voice. But she was singing these songs, many of which I didn’t know, but they were from the country music songbook, like Buck Owens,’ “Together Again.” Her rendition was unbelievable.
Then there’s “Love Hurts,” an Everly Brothers song that was written by Felice and Boudleaux Bryant. So she was bringing that in, but giving it a flavor and a little different angle, that invited a new generation to country music. People like Dwight Yoakam say, “The reason I got into this, and went to California to be a country singer, was because of Emmylou Harris.” OK? Full stop. I think she will be seen, hopefully, as this incredibly important person in the evolution of country music.
Q: Alabama has produced other musicians who were seminal to country music, like the Louvin Brothers. What role do the Louvins play in your film?
Duncan: They’re very important. They don’t get the space and time that Hank Williams gets in the film, or the space and time that Tammy Wynette gets, or the space and time that Emmylou Harris gets. But we talk a lot about, in the ‘50s when rock ’n’ roll was seeming to blow country music off the airwaves and in record sales, we talk about different responses to that. That’s when we introduce the Louvin Brothers. Part of the point we make is they still kept that “brother harmony” alive, but they introduced an electric guitar and drums to a style of music that had previously not allowed that. That was a little bit in response to rock ’n’ roll.
Later, when Emmylou talks about getting her tutorial in country music from Gram Parsons, she said, “I’d never heard of the Louvin Brothers.” She said, “I listened to the Louvin Brothers. I didn’t know Ira Louvin was a man, with that high voice.” But she said, “Gram introduced me to that, and I wanted to go out and buy all the Louvin Brothers albums.”
When she was finally doing her own albums after Gram Parsons died, the two music cues we use in the episode are “Boulder to Birmingham,” which was her emotional response to the death of Gram Parsons, and “If I Could Only Win Your Love,” which was an old Louvin Brothers song.
Q: Watching this film, viewers will learn about “America’s Most Colorful Hillbilly Band,” the Maddox Brothers and Rose. They were originally from Alabama. How did you discover them?
Duncan: Merle Haggard gave me some time (for an interview), and he said, “The Maddox Brothers and Rose; do you know about them?” And I said, “No, sir, I don’t.” And he said, “You want to look into them. They’re great.” He loved talking about them. With some of those folks, they get more energized talking about the history, and their heroes, than about themselves.
Q: Do the great country artists have anything in common?
Duncan: Well, you didn’t have to grow up poor, or in hard circumstances, to be a great country artist. But a lot of the great country artists we cover in the film grew up very poor or in hard circumstances.
Hank’s dad, in essence, went out of his life when he went into the hospital. Tammy Wynette sure had it hard. Brenda Lee was the main breadwinner for her family in Georgia when she was 7 years old. Dolly Parton’s parents paid the doctor who delivered her with a sack of cornmeal.
There’s Loretta Lynn, the coal miner’s daughter. And George Jones … his family lived in public housing in Beaumont, Texas, and his dad the drunk beat him at night unless he’d sing to him. His father stood him up on a street corner, because he had such a good voice, to panhandle, to busk. He was this young kid, 9 or 11, and the father would take the money from his son and go out on a bender.
Q: Was there anyone you wanted to interview for the film, but it didn’t work out, for some reason?
Duncan: Ray Price agreed to be interviewed, but he died before we could get the interview set up, and the same thing with George Jones. He had agreed to an interview, and we were just too late getting the wheels in motion. But we did get “Cowboy” Jack Clement, the legendary producer, in his office, his tiny office, eight steps from his bedroom, about a month before he died. We got Merle probably a year before he died. We got Little Jimmy Dickens.
Q: The film has a sweeping timeline, but it ends before the present day. How did you decide on a stopping point?
Duncan: We stop around 1996. The reason we do that is because we’re historians and not journalists. The difference of that is an expanse of time, that allows you to look back and triangulate, and see what was important at that moment that might not have been recognized, because something was overshadowing it. All of the films we’ve done have had what I call that historical arm’s length.
By 1996, Garth Brooks has exploded onto the scene. He brought the popularity of country music within America to stratospheric heights. It was an iconic change, and we also follow what that meant to the pressure on producers. The expectations for sales had been lower. You know, it went from “A gold record would be good” to “A quadruple platinum album would be good.” This is also the year when Bill Monroe dies, and we’ll have been following him since the second episode.
Q: If you had to pinpoint one big takeaway for folks who watch “Country Music,” what would that be?
Burns: These are human stories. I happen to work in human history, the way a painter works in watercolors or oil. Human nature doesn’t change. What we see when we tell our historical stories are evergreen themes. … We are, as Americans, an alloy. There is no us; there is no them. This is the message of country music.
https://www.al.com/life/2019/09/alabama-artists-make-an-indelible-impression-as-ken-burns-explores-country-music.html
2019-09-15 11:01:18Z
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