Somewhere on this fruited plain of American exceptionalism, there is, I suppose, a person who has watched all 16 hours of Ken Burns' Country Music without missing an episode and in proper order. I am not that person. It's my estimate that I have seen about half of the show -- that is, eight hours -- and, then, out of order. I reckon that this is enough to achieve a broad sense for how this program works, that is, it's characteristic methods. After his craven PR job for the Mayo Clinic, a film that is basically a corporate advertisement and a meretricious disgrace by any standard,, Burns seems to have withdrawn into his more grave and austere role as national chronicler. He ends the program with the death of Johnny Cash in 2003, but concludes the musical offerings with records released in 1996 -- it seems that Burns wants to leave a dignified gap of time between the present and his historical record, presumably to avoid seeming to endorse any artists currently active. Like a museum curator, Burns realizes, I suppose, that his coverage can raise the value of an artist's stock -- and, so, I think he is cautious not to advance the film beyond music first heard about a quarter of a century before today. One gathers that a generation must pass before one can take objective stock of the hurly-burly of events surrounding us. Despite my reservations about Burns and his films, most viewers will be powerfully affected by the music and images in this documentary and may, even, shed a few tears -- it's the nature of music to awaken powerful passions.
Like most of Burns' films, the director's methodology is all wrong and the mawkish sentiment underpinning the narration often subverts the ostensible sobriety of the presentation. But, as is also the case, the movie is well-paced (within certain limitations), contains great footage, and the "plot" as it were, is effectively, even, suspensefully presented. The subject matter and its personages are so fascinating that the defects in the way that Burns' makes movies don't really matter too much in the end. It's an odd effect: you can dislike Burns' for his morose patriotism and simple-minded view of American history -- you can even detest him, as I do, for his dishonest use of visual imagery (he illustrates his movies with unattributed stock footage that often has nothing to do with what the film is presenting). But the movies are certainly gripping, stir strong emotions, and present a well-nigh encyclopedic depiction of the subject at hand. Country Music is wholly characteristic of Burns' work although more shapeless than his films based upon subjects that have a strong diachronic historical narrative: the Viet Nam war film, after a prelude, starts in the beginning and ends at the end. The history of country music, by contrast, is cyclical -- each generation defines itself as departing from the norms of the genre and, yet, ends up endorsing the traditional characteristics of the musical form. As a result, the film can't really progress in the way that Burns' movie about jazz or, even, baseball can show evolution or development in the style -- Country music is conservative, even, reactionary at heart: for every step forward, it takes two steps back and, as a result, the series is weirdly static and formless: it turns into an encyclopedia of Country Music's major stars with each luminary given four or five minutes screen-time and, some, like the Carter family, Johnny Cash, Emmy Lou Harris, and Willie Nelson accorded through-narratives that are expounded in short vignettes across three or four two-hour episodes. The film has a fractal quality -- anywhere you enter the picture will be more or less like every other part of the movie. Peter Coyote narrates: there's a picture of some downtrodden folks sitting on porch (everything looks grim in black and white but, in fact, the images are indistinguishable from those in the family albums of most White middle-class Americans -- after all, we all come from farms three or four generations back.) We see a little kid proudly holding a toy guitar. Coyote tells us that "X was born in Toodletown, Mississippi to the subtenants of the tenants of sharecroppers so poor that they ate cotton for their meals and lived in an egg carton. From his alcoholic father, employed as an offal-sorter at the rendering plant, X learned the value of hardwork, although inheriting his father's demons. His mother took X to the Great White Throne Baptist Church where the boy sang in the choir..." The narration continues with the hero forming bands, playing at local honky-tonks and, then, going to Nashville where he is kicked around for six or seven years and has to work collecting road kill with a municipal crew. After a stint in jail or a bad divorce or a failed suicide attempt, the hero is discovered, usually while singing soulfully in the Blue Bird Cafe and lands a recording contract. Fame and fortune ensue, but when the studio bosses try to impose too tight a control on the hero's artistic freedom, he decamps for Los Angeles, achieves even greater success, disdains Nashville, and either lives happily ever after or drinks himself to death. The story is always more or less the same. We hear extended snatches of the music made by the protagonist and, then, a witness is summoned to explain the excellence of the lyrics to the hero's songs. History is written by the victors or, in this case, the survivors: the principal talking head witnesses are Marty Stewart, Garth Brooks, Emmy Lou Harris, June Carter Cash and Brenda Lee (among others) -- all of them except the supernaturally beautiful Emmy Lou Harris a little the worse for wear. The film is generally clear-sighted about the nexus between money and art and there is a "mainstreams of modern country western music" approach that defines the progression in the art as passing through Jimmie Rodgers and the Carter Family or Bill Monroe. In this film, the song "Will the Circle be Unbroken?" provides the haunting "Ashokan farewell" musical motif that plaintively holds the picture together acoustically. The film subscribes to several pernicious lies -- one of them is that the people who make country-western music comprise a "sort of family". This is abundantly untrue from the evidence presented in the movie itself -- Dolly Parton makes the point aggressively but she's always been a fraud in some respects. The show is unified by continued references back to the Ryman Auditorium of the Grand Ole Opry in Nashville and, despite its scattered, listing or encyclopedic approach to the artists, the musical theme ("Will the Circle be Unbroken?" and the repeated shots of the cathedral-like auditorium serve as counterweights to the film's centrifugal energies. From its outset, Country Music has been a pious fraud or, better put, embodies a "noble lie" about America's rural population -- it's music carefully designed for maximum profit pretends to be ancient or to have ancient roots. A famous country song, featured in the film "The Long Black Veil" exemplifies this aspect of the music: the song sounds like its immemorially old, a relic from 200 or 300 years ago -- but it was written by Marijon Wilkins and David Dill for Lefty Frizzel in 1959. It's no surprise that Country Music is more popular now than ever before at a time when there really is no "country" -- that is, no rural population -- left living on the land.
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