Here is Hank Williams's tragic honky tonk life, Dolly Parton rising to fame from a dirt-poor childhood, and Loretta Lynn turning her experiences into songs that spoke to women everywhere. With the birth of radio in the 1920s, the songs moved from small towns, mountain hollers, and the wide-open West to become the music of an entire nation -a diverse range of sounds and styles from honky tonk to gospel to bluegrass to rockabilly, leading up through the decades to the music's massive commercial success today.īut above all, Country Music is the story of the musicians. The eight-part film, in the works for six years, is set to premiere on PBS on September 15.This gorgeously illustrated and hugely entertaining history begins where country music itself emerged: the American South, where people sang to themselves and to their families at home and in church, and where they danced to fiddle tunes on Saturday nights. Country Music is no exception.Ĭountry music rose from the bottom up,” he said it was a way for so-called hillbillies, people of “all races but more from a certain economic class” who “felt looked down upon or disregarded entirely – a way they could tell their story.” Country music, he described, is mostly “lyric and melody.” The docu focuses on the artists who created it, including the Carter family, Jimmie Rodgers and Bob Wills, Hank Williams, Johnny Cash, Loretta Lynn, Charley Pride, Willie Nelson, Dolly Parton, Merle Haggard, Emmylou Harris, etc., and the times in which they lived.Īnd, like all Burns documentaries, TV critics have come to expect to hear Burns wax eloquent about the parallels between his history project and contemporary issues. Burns’s latest film will follow the evolution of country music, tracing its origins in minstrel music, ballads, hymns, and the blues, and its early years when it was called hillbilly music played across the airwaves on radio station barn dances.
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