Which tells you that there’s just complete cross-pollination. And the single from that album, “I Can’t Stop Loving You,” just dominates the airwaves that summer. Most significantly to us, in our fourth episode is the fact that when Ray Charles is given creative control of an album for the first time in his glorious career and he does Modern Sounds in Country and Western Music, which is a huge hit. There are obliterated borders among the artists who travel back and forth. So we have all these people in country music all along different parts of the spectrum. But the differences, the various shades of it, it’s all spectrum. Like, is there one kind of rock & roll you guys have been covering for years? No. It was always this amalgam of American music and it sprang from a lot of very different roots and then, as it grew, it sprouted many different branches, but they’re all connected.ĭo you think that’s a common misconception of country music, that people think it’s all one thing? People love to use the phrase “traditional country,” but the tradition really seems like one of evolution. The central point is that country music isn’t and never was just one type of music. We have goal posts for this film.ĭayton Duncan: It’s like an album, which has a lot of individual songs, but it’s also a concept album. We’re trying to weave together stories so some have to stand in as emblematic. But also, the act of songwriting is an important character in our film. We’re interested in following those cities and those places, obviously the people, for the music and the songs as they change. We are interested in telling a complex story with generations and lots of people in different places. Ken Burns: This is a central question of our whole method. With a broad topic like country music that spans so many decades, how do you actually select the pieces that will distill it down into something the average person will understand? With Memphis fading in the mirrors of the bus and Nashville up ahead, Rolling Stone sat with Burns, Duncan, and Dunfey to talk through the process of re-telling the rich history of country music. You can do the math.” (In March, Burns donated the rest of his interview footage to the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum, so it won’t go unseen.) “Dayton cries 10 times more than Julie and me,” says Burns. Burns and team piled up 175 hours of interview footage in the process, only a small portion of which is featured in the 16.5 hour run time of the series, a fact that still brings the team to tears. Written by Duncan, Country Music was created over the course of several years that included 101 interviews with legendary artists or other individuals close to the country business, many of whom have since died, along with hours of archival footage, music cues, and still photos. Covering bluegrass, Western swing, honky tonk, cowboy songs, the Nashville sound, the Bakersfield sound, and much more, Country Music also drives home the point that it’s not a music bound to one particular geographic area. Country music sprang from disparate sources and has never been just one sound, the series argues, as it traces the music’s path from its pre-commercial folk origins through its high-water commercial peak in the mid-Nineties. In addition to drumming up excitement for the eight-part documentary series Country Music, which premieres on PBS September 15th, it was an effort to illustrate a recurring theme of the series. Related: 100 Greatest Country Artists of All Time Their itinerary included several places with significant ties to the history of country music: Bristol, site of Ralph Peer’s 19 recording sessions that first captured the Carter family and Jimmie Rodgers Knoxville and Sevierville, central to Dolly Parton’s story among others Memphis, the birthplace of rock & roll with Sam Phillips’ Sun Studio and a major crossroads for blues musicians and, of course, Nashville, home of the Grand Ole Opry and the place where the country music industry was eventually consolidated. Earlier in 2019, Ken Burns and his Florentine Films collaborators Dayton Duncan and Julie Dunfey took a whirlwind bus trip that whisked them around and across the entire state of Tennessee in a few short days.
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