Green Light with Chris Long - Ken Burns on the Making of Country Music.

Episode Date: August 14, 2020

0:47 - Open. 4:50 - Ken Burns on the Making of Country Music. 35:06 - Women in Country Music 1:00:47 - Quick Hitters. 1:05:28 - Chris Long's Recap of Country Music. Green Light with Chris Long: Subscribe and enjoy weekly content including podcasts, documentaries, live chats, celebrity interviews and more including hot news items, trending discussions from the NFL, MLB, NHL, NBA, NCAA are just a small part of what we will be sharing with you. http://bit.ly/chalknetwork Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

We got to go on his bus, cramp bus, motor running, Friday afternoon, rush hour, Washington, D.C., next to the W. Hotel and the Treasury Building, redolent of some other smell besides tobacco. Yeah, I know. And Willie comes in and he sits down across the little dinette table for me. I mean, it's like, like, I feel like two feet away. He was wonderful. Happy Friday, everybody. This is your host, Chris Long.

This is the Greenlight Pot. I know that a lot of y'all come here for sports, but this is not a sports podcast today. Full disclosure, I'm way more excited about this podcast than would be talking about college football or pro football or the NBA. We've got Ken Burns on, the preeminent documentarian in the United States,

a guy who brings history to life, it's so colorful, it's so visual. If you've heard of him, you know the work he does. He's done a series on the Civil War. on Vietnam, on sports, baseball. He's done documentaries on music, jazz. Now he's done within the last year, to be exact, a country music documentary. It's eight episodes over 16

hours long. If you like country music, if you don't like country music, go watch it. And I know you're thinking country music, you know, I don't like country music today. Neither do I. I don't like today's country music. There are certainly outliers. But what Ken does is illustrates how irresponsible it is to boil country music down to what you're hearing today. Country music has been one hell of a journey

as he as he so eloquently lays the storyline out in the series. And there's so much cross-pollination between genres. There's so many artists that you're going to learn, their favorite artists were, and we're talking artists

like the Beatles, artists like Ray Charles, Whitney Houston's biggest hit, there's country roots there. And these favorite artists, yours and all types of genres, had favorite country artists and were influenced by, because country music wasn't what it is today. And I think Ken Burns, as usual, does a terrific job of getting to the point, which is, don't pigeonhole this thing.

I mean, it's just such a great, great story. It's the story of American music, and he did a great job. So we'll get them on in a second, but I will say this. When it comes to documentaries, I think the value of what Ken Burns does is that he makes learning accessible to anybody. Not everybody has the attention span to read through a big book or a biography. Maybe not the time. And certainly maybe you don't have the time to digest eight episodes in over 16 hours of really footage that I never got bored with. Commentary, I never got bored with. But maybe you don't have time. Ken Burns, though, makes it attention. attainable, achievable to understand at least on an elementary level, a genre of music with a ton of tentacles over a hundred years span in one series. And it's like when you're in school, it's not really school when they roll that VHS in, at least to me. And everybody knows that sound. If you're 30-something years old, you grew up. When I grew up, they roll that thing in. It either means you're going to take a nap or, man,

I'm excited. I get to watch a video for once. I was losing my focus here a little bit. I was the guy that didn't take a nap. I was really entertained when they had those kind of documentaries roll into your history class. And I loved history anyways, but Ken Burns is the guy that brings that to life. And he makes it colorful. He makes it vibrant. And he tells stories. And he gets you to know of these people. So I think the biggest thing that he accomplishes here, and you have to trust me, if you haven't watched it or had no desire to watch it, maybe stick around and listen, Ken Burns, he's so interesting.

The biggest thing that he accomplishes is he proves that the most irresponsible thing we can do is boil country down to this really rigid genre that we see today that maybe you don't care for, and maybe rightfully so. it's been much different throughout history. And I'll let Ken shed some more light on that. Sit back and enjoy. Guys, this is a big deal. Okay, I've been glued to my TV.

I decided to save it for a binge. And I finally, this summer, finished Ken Burns' country music documentary. And I'm familiar with Ken's work. I've watched a lot of historical stuff. But this one hit home. home and it was so illuminating and it's such a privilege to have Ken Burns here on the green light pod. Ken, the burning question is, how many games of the Patriots win this year?

Oh, my goodness. I don't know. First of all, we have to have a season. I'm just talking with an epidemiologist who thought that the fall was going to be pretty rough for all of us. So I don't know. I really don't know. You know, there was a moment. I was watching the game when Drew Bledsoe went out. I thought, oh, great, they're putting Tom. I had grown up in 60s in Ann Arbor. I mean, nowhere near Tom when he was there. But, you know, because I went to a small college that didn't have football, I followed Michigan and followed all the sequence of great quarterbacks there and loved Tom and thought he'd had

unfairly been put aside. But he's gone and now it's Cam, it's Stidman, it's whoever. Yeah. Yeah, it's going to be interesting. I mean, so. The bigger question is in some way. those players, really great players who have opted out, whether the next man up can actually do the kinds of things that Bill Belichick has always brought up, but he always had those

few great Hall of Fame set pieces to, you know, to go going in. Well, I think the biggest thing is, and you just touched on it, the next man up thing, they're very good at that there. So they're well equipped for not only sort of a mini-exist of players, but they're also well equipped for the chaos that is this year. I mean, Joey Bosa said, who plays for the Chargers formerly of San Diego, he said that the most responsible team might win the whole thing. And by virtue of geography, if they're able to actually to do this thing, you know, like living in Foxborough is not a distraction.

Also, you don't want to piss Bill Belichick off. Now they lost Dante High Tower. That's a big deal. But outside of that, I think that they could, you know, they could be all right. Yeah, no, I think so too. And so, you know, my feeling is as a Patriots fan and a longtime Patriots fan, not like a Patriots fan when they're winning. Yeah, good for you. I'm not greedy. It's like I'm a Red Sox fan. And like, you know, people are raging that we didn't win the world. We were terrible. I go, we just won four world series in two decades where we'd spend 86 years without one. Yeah, you're the perfect guy to remind people. And the same thing.

You know, I wish Tom the best. Yeah. And, you know, to me, I head to head with the bucks is still not a hard thing. I'm for the Patriots. And I hope he throws 500 yards, but I hope we win in the last second. Good, good. Well, let's get to the series because I could ask you questions for days. I'll start with one guy that, to me, you kind of picked it up as it was going,

turned out to be, and correct me if I'm wrong, a very central thread, almost like the protagonist of this entire experience, and that was Johnny Cash. Did you go into it that way? No, no. And I would argue, I mean, I know why you said that, and I kind of agree with you, I think he's the burning art of this music.

And his arc is the arc, the story arc, the biographical arc, the musical arc is the story of country music. Having said that, you know, no, we set out to tell the whole story of it. We knew that some people would show up in episode one and leave in episode one, Jimmy Rogers, who dies at the end of episode one. We knew that some people would show up in episode three, Hank Williams,

and sort of die in episode three, but his stuff would live on. And Johnny Cash arrives in episode four and never really leaves. The real end of the film is his death and looking forward from there. And so I think, and for me, when Roseanne sang in his memorial service, one of my favorite country songs of all time. I still miss someone. Yeah. You know, it's, it, it just, I can still, you can look,

anybody can look at it in YouTube. You don't have to look at our, our whole thing. But it, it's so moving. And it speaks to what country music is and what people don't think it is. A lot of people who think they don't know it or think they don't like it, treated as some sort of lesser form, not one of the great linchpins of American music that is not in its own separate silo, but has been borrowing from black music,

vice versa. Like when Ray Charles had created a control of an album for the very first time in his professional life, he recorded modern sounds in country and western music. And in 1962, the year that album came out, the number one hit in the summer of 62 was I can't

stop loving you by Don Gibson. And if you listen to it, you're hearing one of the greatest if not the greatest soul singers singing a country song. So everybody's blended. And the idea that we're all separate was one of the great exploding myths of country music. It owes it to

gospel. It owes it to Appalachian stuff. It owes it to bluegrass. It owes it to black songs. It owes it to the blues and rhythm and blues and rock and roll. It's one of the parents of rock and roll. I think anybody who now, certainly you could look at country now and listen to country now and think

what you want about it. I certainly have my reservations of turning on country radio right now. But like country at its roots, and it's even almost it's necessary to boil it down to a genre, but it was so multifaceted and you know you're hearing and fast forward into episode one because i want to get there in a second was like you're hearing songs from the 1600s you're hearing irish ballads you're hearing

people repurposing them in the 1920s and i thought that johnny the reason i say this and everybody takes different themes from your work i'm sure but when i listen you know to the interviews and when i and i've watched a ton on johnny i love the highway man you know my son's name is waylon okay um but like Johnny to me, he's just magnetic and he was magnetic for me because he refused to be in a box. That duality that was touched on so much early, the redemption, you know, that was a huge theme for me.

And redemptive, you know, nature stuff with him. I mean, you said he wouldn't die. He wouldn't go away. It was because you couldn't kill him. You couldn't kill him. And so I think you've hit the nail on the head because I think part of the misunderstanding about country music by those who think they don't like it,

as I said, because most everybody who would roll their eyes, everything you've done, Ken, when I was working on it, he said, everything you've done, Civil War, baseball, jazz, great, but country music? Why? That's not going, you have no idea what unbelievable great stories. So here you have a musical form that is elemental.

It is about as Witten Marsalis, the jazz greats, and in the country music film, it's about the joy of birth, about the sadness at death, about falling in love, about losing love. about seeking redemption. I mean, these are the main themes of human life. And it does it with a kind of simple poetry and unbelievably straightforward music

that is like mainlining. Winton in another part of the film says that music is the art of the invisible. And so you think it's the art form that works the fastest on it. It's not film, not ballet, not theater, not, you know, movies, you know, documentaries, writing, it's music. Two notes and somebody's got you. And country music is expressing those

elemental things. There is no one on the planet who doesn't know what Hank Williams meant when he said, I'm so lonesome, I could cry. Yeah. I mean, it's the human condition and it's just captured. I thought that Johnny, and I've always thought this, but like what I loved about him, we mentioned the redemption. I mean, you had so many acts dropped from his label even after being the star that he was, for decades, you know, coming back from the jaws of addiction as he saw, like, his peers and, and, you know, the folks that came before him that didn't make it out. I mean, so he had so many redemptive stories. And then there was also the limitlessness that, you know, we touched on that was, you could not put him in a box. He was not tribal. He could be, exactly. And that's where we are

right now in America. When you say, I don't really, you know, want to talk about turning on country music. That's because it's all these white guys playing this stuff that sounds like pop rock. They're not saying anything that Johnny Cash said. Anything that Johnny Cash said. There's nothing. It basically falls into all the tropes that people say, oh, it's just about hound dogs and six packs of beer and pick-up trucks, you know? And you go, actually, there are a couple songs like that, but it's really about this. Johnny Cash was in Memphis could play maybe two chords on a guitar. walks down Beale Street, bumps into a guy named Jimmy Cannon, who's been playing since the Jug Band days, a black blues man.

He learns and chops from him. They start to go into the record studio and they start recording at the same time as Elvis. And yet he wants to put a gospel thing in. He wants to do, he's friends with Bob Dylan. He likes the folk. He likes rock. He's willing to do it. Who redeems his career at the end? Of course, he does in his voice. But it's Rick Rubin, who's a hip-hop producer. Yeah, yeah. Rezner, of all people who provide him with this delivery system to do it. Now, I've worked with Trent, and I mean, you think Johnny Cash and Trent belong in the same sentence? Yeah. But hurt?

Yeah. Like, one of the greatest tunes ever, and it's both country and it's not. It's holy Trent's and it's holy Johnny's. And that's what I liked, is his ability to go in and I'm old enough to remember his TV show. And sure, he'd bring on country acts, but he'd bring on James Trens. Taylor and he bring on Odetta. On Bob. I mean, you know, that was a big deal. The biggest deal ever, as Roseanne said, I was the coolest 13-year-old.

Yeah, that was really cool, you know. That was really cool. It was cool to hear from her so much. But, I mean, it was also, you know, the redemptive part crossed over in his family life. I mean, he was just, he was, he was a, he was a Christian in the truest sense of what you think about a Christian from that era being is like, I'm trying not to sin. I do stray sometimes. I stray off course. But he was authentic.

And that's why I loved about him. You know, you talk about the limitlessness. He was as prickly as he was caring. You know, like he, and I saw the Nixon documentary, which I thought was pretty good. You know, I, he rebelled against the president. He rebelled when country music establishment didn't want him to say stoned. You know, he rebelled against, he fought for disenfranchised people with Native American tribes.

But he also took care of people. I mean, there was so many stories. Yeah. This is what I love. This is, you know, in some ways you're picking up on this, it mirrors, of course, in a totally minor way, my own professional life in which I've got my own opinions. Yeah.

And, you know, political or otherwise. But my films don't reflect them. My films are saying, I'm making them for everybody. Here's what I learned working on country music. I've been making, I've been doing this for four. 40 plus years. I've been making films about the U.S. for 40 years. And the one thing I suddenly realized that when I was out on the road last summer

kind of promoting this is that I've also been making films about us. That is to say, the two-letter, lowercase, plural pronoun. So all of the intimacy of us and we and our and all of the majesty and the complexity and the complexity and the contradiction and the controversy of the United States. And that in that, that for every villain, there's a positive side. For every hero, there's a negative side. And that if you have a complicated thing, then you don't devolve to the kind of tribal madness.

And what I understood is, after 41 years, there's only us. There's no them. And anytime anyone tells you there's a them, run away. Yeah. That the great embrace of country music at its heart is just that. An embrace. It's like, come to me, sinner.

Come to me, saint. I will heal you both. Everybody's in need of healing. You know, it's a really, as you said, it's the operative word is a redemptive state. And he wouldn't, to your point, I mean, he went and played for Nixon. I know that he struggled with internally.

He didn't want to be a pawn. He disagreed with a lot that was going on. He didn't just, and for somebody who skipped the White House twice as a Super Bowl guy, I feel like the guy in office now transcends, I mean, almost anything we've dealt with, even though we've had to really check her past. It's the greatest crisis in America. Yeah, but I look at Johnny and I'm saying to myself, not only did he not play the song that Nixon wanted him to play to little people on public assistance,

but he did it smoothly. That's right. He didn't give him the middle finger. Didn't give him the middle finger that you see the Johnny Cash middle finger poster that everybody has. Like, he got that in him, but he knows when to use it and when not to. Exactly. And that's the genius of it. And he was saying, and country music did that.

I mean, you know, like one of the big anti-counterculture stuff of the late 60s was Merle Haggard, Oki, from. I was going to ask you about that. Yeah. You know, Merle, everybody in Merle's bus was smoking marijuana when they passed Muskegee. Yeah. You know, he knew that's where he was. his folks have been from, they moved to the Central Valley of California before he was born. He was born there and lived the life, the discriminated life of Oki.

And so he got picked up and used in a way. And that wasn't what it was about. And those of us who were hippies in those days, we just loved it. Yeah. You know, we don't smoke marijuana and fine. Yeah. And that's where we lost and where I think country music could be a bridge for us to get back to that ability to talk with on one another. I think with the Soviet Union collapsed, as great as that was, in geopolitical,

it gave a lot of people no enemy to hate. Right. And then all of a sudden, you decided, well, the other party are the people to hate. Right. And so all of a sudden, you know, Democrats are as bad as this or Republicans are as bad as that. And you go, what happened when Democrats and Republicans passed the Civil Rights Act? What happened when Democrats and Republicans help pass the Voting Rights Act. What happened environmental stuff when people got together? You know, it was just like now. We act out of fear.

We act out of, you know, we've just been pulled to these opposite polls. And I couldn't help thinking when I'm watching and you'll be bringing up now, so I'll just get to it. But like, I'm watching and I'm thinking about the people that could not be stereotypically more different. You know, you would assume. And I watch sometimes I watch my favorite stars. I mean, like I said, I have a son named Waylon.

Lynn, it was great as I've learned about the highway men. And I've had people pepper me. It's my header on Twitter. People that hated when I skipped the White House or spoke out against, you know, oppression or that. So, you know, what do you think those guys on your fucking header would think? I go, actually, read a fucking book about the guys on my header. But as you go back, you realize from Loretta Lynn giving Charlie Pride a hug when she was supposed to step back to, you know, the influence, the cross-pollination, the respect to the artists had for each other. it felt like the industry was the one polarizing people, not the artists.

Now, I'm sure there were bad actors, but I felt like, you know, like when Charlie's trying to sing green, green grass a home, they're telling them you can't because you're talking about a blonde-haired woman. That's from the top. And poor white people and poor black people are being divided. Yeah. And the worst crime in the larger political sense is that people who should be naturally, there should be a natural affinity between poor whites and poor blacks because they've suffered the same indignities

or most of the same indignities, African Americans, obviously much worse. Yeah. Do slavery and Jim Crow and the fact, you know, I said, you know, COVID's been a great equalizer because only till now do we know what an African American feels when they go to the convenience store. Like now it's an existential event. Right, right. And what's going to happen to me now?

But yeah, you have to think about everyday actions where you didn't before. African-Americans have been thinking about forever. Yes. So I think that what happens is that there's a magnificent, there was a magnificent embrace. Country music, as in everything. There's no baseball without commerce. There's no football without commerce. There's no country music without commerce.

And so they're always there. Commerce wants to duplicate what was successful before and the artists want to do something new. And neither are completely right. And so there's got to be a meeting. But, I mean, for example, people hated and decried what was first called the Nashville sound, the smoother sounds in the studios with Chad Atkins and others in the late 50s and 60s. And then the cosmopolitan, which was even more like Phil Spectre-like wall of sound. But that stuff, you know, when we ask people of 101 interviews, what was the most important country song,

more people said he stopped loving her today by George Jones, which is country politin with things, not fiddles, right? Choruses, not back up, harmonies and nasal, this or that. And yet at the same time, all those, he owes everything to the beginning. And at the beginning, people say, all country music is the same. Oh, really? Yeah. You listen to the Carter family and to Jimmy Rogers.

These are the two great acts that came together within a week's time in Bristol, Tennessee, and they record with Ralph Pier and they go on to become superstars and there's nothing alike in these two groups. They're already at the beginning night and day. Country music has never been one thing. And the sadness today,

and it won't be temporary, is just how homogenized it sounds on the radio. Yeah. Our great thrill is after the series. No, no, you know, we had tens of millions of viewers, really high ratings, awards, and, you know, all that sort of stuff. nothing was better than clogging the arteries of the billboard country charts.

People who hadn't charted in decades. Middy Gritty dirt band. It blew up. You guys talked about them for just a little bit. And it's a nice little wrinkle. And I'm like, you know what? I'm going to go listen to that album.

I haven't, you know, I haven't done it in years. And I'm glad you mentioned, you know, the Carter family and, and Jimmy because, you know,

to me it felt like Bristol was the big bang. Yes. There's a country universe. You know, it felt like the odds. And this was also cool about that whole first episode and the early episodes. Some of my favorite episodes were just to paint a picture of how different it was. I mean, the likelihood that you have, you know, and they called it the flip side of the same coin, the family side, the home side in the Carter family, the traditional, you know, family structure.

And then you had the rambling side and Jimmy Rogers. And those two forces collided the same day. It's unbelievable. And jazz between Saturday night and Sunday morning. It's what we feel in our life. And these battles occur not so much between people, but within people. Yeah. You know, the guy who needs Sunday morning is the guy who's been out carousing on Saturday night.

Yeah, that's the way, equal and opposite reactions. I mean, other side of the same coin, you said it. That's exactly it. And that's what I love. And that's where I hope that we as Americans can get out of this thing that we temporarily get into. It's stuck. Our pickup truck is in a rut. It's in the ditch.

It's up to its hubcaps in mud, and we can't get out of it. And we think if we just step on the accelerator and send more dirt kick and we're going to get out. And we're not. And what we're going to need to do is- We've proven that. Can you help me get out? Can you get push? And what if it's African-American?

And then you've got to do this. I like looking at those early years and saying, okay, the Carter family. AP Carter and had an African-American mentor. right? Leslie Riddle. Jimmy Rogers, everything came from the blues for him. He steeped in the sounds of the railroad gangs that he was a water boy for in the beginning. Bill Monroe, who invents a whole sub-music, blue band, had his uncle Penn as a mentor and Arnold Schultz, an African American. Hank Williams said he learned everything he knew about music from Rufus T. Tot Pain, a blues man. And of course, I already said about Johnny meeting Gus Cannon on the streets of Memphis in the early 1950s

and setting off a revolution. It's, it just, if you're going to put those folks up legitimately on the Mount Rushmore of country music, you also have to say, they, meeting these African Americans took their chops from here to here. So why are we still in this division stuff? Yeah. I looked at that painting. I looked at that painting at the beginning of the documentary.

I'm saying it doesn't sit quite right with me because there's one black dude off in the corner. Yeah. So much of, you know, this whole thing. And I get it. There was cross pollination both ways for sure. But I think it's really in a way kind of poignant that we're having the discussion right now. Your business is one of the greatest entertainment forces in the world. Mm-hmm.

And 70% of its employees are African-Americans. Right. In a country whose population is 13, 14% African American. Yes. You know, look at popular music. What's going to? Why is this? Why are we still relitigating the civil war?

That's over. Yeah. That's over. Jimmy was so interesting to me because, listen, I've heard his music before, but I'm on a real rabbit hole now because of what you guys have done. And so do you remember, and you've done music docs, other music docs, right? You did a jazz, yeah, which do you remember a musician that played through a terminal illness with such success in such a prolific way than Jimmy Rogers, who's coughing up blood and dies in a New York hotel room? Like, how long did he have TB?

Most of his adult life. Yeah. He caught it on the thing. Yeah, no, he's, that. last session in New York where he's sitting down, he's lying down, he's going to sleep between takes that they're doing. And he lays down these songs. And I thought Merle said it great. We're so, Merle's like Zeus in the film. Like every time I was thinking to myself, if there's one guy every time he spoke, I just leaned in. Yeah, you just lean in. He says, in the opening. He says,

it's about things that we, that we, that matter, but we can't see. like dreams and songs and souls. You know, and he's talking about what Winton says in the last episode about the art of the invisible, which is music and it's dealing with these fundamental things. But Merle said, we were all getting together saying, could anyone just name the top, you know, five Jimmy Rogers songs? And we decided it was the top 50. Yeah.

You know, I mean, it's like, that's Jimmy Rogers. And everything has that energy. And Hank's the same way. I mean, our third episode is the only episode that's really named. after somebody. It's called the Hillbilly Shakespeare. Yeah, you know exactly who it is. Because, you know, hear that lonesome Whipple Will,

he sounds too blue to fly, midnight train is whining low. I'm so lonesome, I can cry. I mean, there's nothing difficult about that, and yet there's nothing better than that. It's refined poetry of the highest order. And you can take somebody like Chris Christopherson who took it up and not,

Sunday morning coming down, or me and Bobby McGee, But they're all where, what is the genre that these poets want to express themselves in? Bob Dylan, you know, for three or four albums, Nashville's the only place he can express himself, you know? Yeah. And I want to say, I love Chris is just such a legend. When Jimmy died, one of the things that struck me, because you guys did a great job of making me feel like I knew Jimmy Rogers for years. Like I felt like that whatever year period was in the best way, like I felt his lifespan.

I felt like I knew him. And when he died, you guys kind of tied it together by saying, and it was kind of casual, but that in New York, it didn't really make the news as much as, so how does that happen? How is somebody, was that just the way the world was, communication-wise and for a sharing art? I think in the beginning, country music wasn't even called bad. It was, you know, old-time hill music or hillbilly music. I hadn't really found a name that stuck. was mostly of the rural population.

I certainly had fans in New York and still does. I mean, one of the biggest radio stations in New York City is a country music station. That's the way it should be, and people forget that up here in New Hampshire. You know? Yeah, they like country up there. The station is country music.

So I think it's just in the very beginning, it's beginning to move out, right? And now country music sort of is with rap and with pop, like the whole thing. I mean, there was a time when jazz music, late 30s, early 40s was 75% of all record sales in the United States. Jazz me. Now, if it's 2%, I'd be super surprised. I wish it was still 78%. Yeah, no, me too.

I love this music too. And country has had its ebbs and flows, but it's big. now it's huge now and that's where they're too safe they're too cautious it's got to be just the same white guys in tight jeans and yeah the same subject matter

very clean every sound is clean a little overproduced a little too much drums well too much electric and you miss the kind of stuff but you know what we live in this age where you don't have to listen to it you know you can listen off and you can get into

Americana which is probably the roots in Americana probably closer to what the real mainstream of country music is than what's being played in country music, which is locked out the women. And you know, you would assume that with women's liberation beginning to happen in the 1960s or the name, the term coming into thing, that it would be a rock or it would be folk that would lead the world. Well, Joan Baez and Grace Slick, we're not singing, don't come home and drinking with love and on your mind.

That's Loretta Lynn. Yeah. She's not arguing for a particular philosophy. She's not going to say she's a feminist. She goes, what? But she's arguing things that are speaking to women everywhere. And then Riba takes that up. And Kelle Mata takes that up.

And of course, Dali rules the roof. You've got the greatest voice, one of the greatest composers, right up there with Angoyans and Jimmy Rogers. I mean, I would put Jolene or I will always love you And think about that. It's got a chorus that goes, I will always love you, I will always love you,

I will always love you, you and I can write a... We can write that song. We can't produce it. We don't know how to be that simple. Yeah. And when you learn the story in our film about why she wrote it

and under what circumstances she wrote it, Whitney Houston's number one selling single, which is great, not to take anything away from Whitney Houston, but, you know, Yeah. No, that was the bodyguard song in the 90. Right, exactly. Whitney, God rest of soul was amazing, but it's just another example of. When you understand Dolly's, dollies, dollies is as good if not better than Whitney's.

Yeah, and it just further illustrates that your favorite artists had a favorite artist, like, whether it was the Beatles, and you went down the line and they all had, by the way, George is the king, in my opinion. But, but like they all. Can we stop and do, of course, because we have to talk about the Beatles? You know, you, you, you, everybody argues between Lennon and McCartney and I'm a Lennon guy and, you know, my best friends are McCartney guy and George. All this stuff. But, but if you said, what about the person who wrote, here comes the sun, something and while my guitar gently weeps. I mean, you know, hey Jude and let it be, which I love. I like the Wilson Pickett rendition better anyways. So like, you know, yeah, George, I was thinking about.

that today. So when you brought it up, I had to like, Hey, dude, I get in these arguments with people all the time. I'm kind of a contrarian. So I get in these like, hey, the Beatles are cool, but they're more important than I enjoy listening to them. And all things must pass is better than any Beatles project. Now, I'm just a huge, because I love that sound that George brought in. And I love his taste.

And I like his voice better than Johns. I know some people might not think so. And I also loved the Scorsese. I mean, it's a long, heavy trip. But the trip he took with George. Living in the material world. Yeah, it was very... I loved it. I saw it at premier at Tell Your Eye Film Festival, and Olivia was there. Olivia Harrison was there. Oh, wow.

Yeah, and I have an Olivia. One of my babies is named Olivia. And so I got her to sign the book. Oh, that's so cool. Olivia to Olivia. Georgia legend. But women in country, I mean, I love the part about Loretta and Tammy, like, writing for each other. But it's back there with Mother Maybel. Who's the original American guitarist in any medium? Oh, she was badass.

Bill Carter. And who's the original vocalist, the Keening voice? It's Sarah Carter. And so it's all they were shooting from them. And Sarah's not going to put up with a distant husband AP, and she's going to fall in love with who she's going to fall in love with. So you have independent women in every single decade and in every single episode of our film. And I can't convince our audience that we release, we finish the editorial work, not release the film.

We finish the editorial work before the Me Too movement started. They go, nah, nah. And then when we did Vietnam, they said, man, you knew Trump was coming. I said, we finished this. We started it in 2006 and we finished it a month before the Iowa caucus. It's almost like history matters. It's just going to matter anyways. It repeats itself.

Yeah, it's going to matter anyways. You don't have to contrive it. It doesn't repeat itself. It just, as Mark Twain is supposed to have said, it rhymes. So if you're looking at something, everything that's happening now is a manifestation of human nature. And so if you're recognizing aspects of human nature, you'll see it 10,000 years ago and you'll see it, you know, 100 years ago and you'll see it 10 years ago.

And so if you tell a good story in that time, it will resonate in the present. How about AP Carter? Because that was one of the guys that I'm like, I'm not sure what to make about him. He seems like he got a really, like in one way he lived a really important life. Yes. But in another way,

he was the third. He was the third wheel, and, you know, his wife leaves him maybe rightfully so for a younger man that she found by playing a song on the radio, like half a country away. I mean, like, AP Carter, what's his legacy? I mean, it's so intriguing. It is an important one in that he first of all hears Sarah singing and falls in love with the voice and the woman and brings her back. He lived in Poor Valley. She lived in Rich Valley in rural, rural Virginia. And then they bring in, you know, Maybel Carter, who marries AP's brother.

And there's a, you know, there's this triumvirate. And he goes out, he's restless and he's distracted. And he goes out with Leslie Riddle, they song collect. And they bring it back from the hollers that are white and the hollers that are black. And stuff happens. And they transform it. So they take an old gospel song when the world's on fire that Leslie Riddle taught them, they turn it into Little Darling Palomime.

Woody Guthrie hears it, loves the melody, and turns it into this land is your land. That's American music, which means we are all related. There's only us know them. And it's connected. And if you hear when the world's on fire, it's a kind of fiery African-American church gospel stump. And then you hear Little Darling Palomine is a beautiful, sweet, absolutely appellate. country song. And then you hear of this land as your land is one of the iconic anthems of our country, the same melody. And God knows what the history was before the African American church.

Right. Right. AP, though, made me wonder where the line is between theft and influence. I know he wasn't stealing because at some point, especially in the infancy of American music, there has to be direct influence. As amazing as those journeys were. I mean, I can't even imagine. I forget something when I get back from the store. You have to walk. miles and miles through rural Virginia, house to house, hearing melodies and his buddies and his buddies listening to Melodies and A. Leslie Riddle, the African-American cohort is doing and so I think we've gotten very fond of talking about stealing or cultural appropriation. Yeah.

But I think this is the human nature. This is what we do. We listen and we think, ah, let me now do this with that. And that's very, very human. I mean, don't you study films? Absolutely. Yeah. So, I mean, we are all about improving, and the only thing we can improve on is the human example before us. Now, if we are going to devolve into our separate tribal stuff, then yes, we can say this is appropriation. And if we do not properly credit, it's appropriation. At the same time, if you hear something good you want it, I mean, this is, Winton, Marcelus said something to me. He said that minstrelsy is horrible thing. It's a horrible thing.

It's degrading stuff. But it was also a white curiosity about how African Americans live. Like, what did you eat? Where do you live on the other side of the tracks? How do you dance? How do you make love? What matters to you? And because you're so embarrassed,

because of the legacy of slavery and your own racism, you have to degrade it. But at the heart of it, maybe, or at least at the side of it, is a consequential curiosity about the other. And we don't ever get anywhere, as a civilization unless we've got curiosity about the other, unless we can walk a mile in another person's shoe,

unless we can empathize with them. And our biggest complaint right now at the highest level is, where's the empathy? Where is your sense that you can convince me you've given for one nanosecond a damn about somebody else for one fraction of a second, right? Yeah, that's a real, that's a real. Art, all the things that we do has to do with that kind of, kind of epithetic. You can't be in a relationship or real relationship with your kids or your

significant other, whatever it is, unless you have that sense of empathy. I mean, I got a teenage, I've got grown daughters who I collaborate with, but I got a 15 year old upstairs who I don't even know she's up yet. Well, if she's anything like me when 15, you wait till, oh, well, it's, it's three o'clock. I mean, it could be four o'clock. She's on, you know, Instagram or TikTok or But it's funny you said that. It's funny you said that about Jimmy Rogers because, you know, they, I think it was Jimmy. They said like it was like taking a trip to the other side of the tracks. And that's why.

And that's the grandfather of country music. So just knowing where that comes from, the influence part to me was so interesting because before radio, and I want to get into the Opry and the radio battles that was really illuminating to me. That was an aha moment for me. But, you know, influence before the radio and in, in, in, in, the time and place of somebody like AP Carter, everything was in person. You couldn't, you couldn't be influenced by Spotify. Today, you could turn on TV and be influenced. You can be

which is great, but I also wonder if that influence person to person face to face, that Merle Haggard at San Quentin, you know, that Chris Christopherson leaving the army because he heard Johnny Cash, you know, AP in every holler in Virginia, that's the most powerful way to be influenced Or am I wrong? No, you're absolutely right. And in fact, Ricky Skaggs and Marty Stewart, and we have to give our props and blessings to Marty, who was elected to the Hall of Fame.

Oh, correct. You know, Ricky Skaggs is already in, but Marty deserves to be in like nobody else because he basically had two employers, Bill Monroe and Johnny Cash, you know. Yeah, that's pretty amazing. And also, he was a great narrative to have. He just understood the whole thing,

and he was so generous and love. loving to everybody. He wasn't trying to make the other person wrong, which is what we do. But he and Ricky both at one point came to a moment where they said, I have to press to zero. I have to reset. I have to remember that I can just, I don't need to take an amp along. I can go play on a porch. I can play in a school. I can play, you know, in a church. And that that intimate thing that you're talking about has still got to be the number one thing about music. You know, And it's so funny because my little gal who's not, I sing to her every night. I've got a voice for the shower, but I, you know, I sing.

And now she wants, what she wants to hear is, you know, I'm so lonesome I can cry or hate me looking by Hank or she wants to hear I still miss someone or, you know, other stuff. And she, you know, it's great. It's great. And it's just the two of us. And I'm lying in a dark room and there she is. And I'm singing to her. And I tell you, I don't know any time I'm happier than I guess.

It kind of reminds me, you know, the power of a voice, of a sound. I mean, pictures worth a thousand words, and you do a great job in dealing with bringing that back to life. Okay. But doing a music documentary, is it more powerful? Because I think an audio file is a bigger time capsule than a picture in so many ways. I agree. I agree completely. And, well, what it is is the marriage of two really powerful forces.

one is that notion that a photograph is worth a thousand words. Maybe even in today when there's so many of them, it's been devalued. But 500 words is a lot, right? Then you've got music, the art of the invisible that works on you right away. So two notes. And so something which in traditional film,

documentary as well as feature film, the music is the background. Suddenly it's the background, it's the middle ground, it's the foreground. And when you're deconstructing a song, it's the hyperspace of the play. And man, it really works. I had a woman come up to me.

The eighth episode of country music is got a leer. You know, it's like a five-hanky film. And she said to me, thanks for country music. It's cheaper than therapy. I had five good cries in episode eight, you know, whether it was, you know, where have you been? Kathy Matea's song of her husband, John Vezner, whether it's go rest high in that mountain and hearing how, you know, Vince Gill wrote it, whether it's...

Who seemed to be the greatest dude on Earth, Vince Gill. He is... On the planet. Everything you thought. I mean, he is... Just emanate selflessness through the screen and just, like, you know, unassuming. We did this great thing where we sort of had a concert that was the kind of promotional vehicle for the whole series, and we had a concert at the Riem in Nashville.

and we taped it in March, and then it came out a week before the series started. And I was titularly the emcee, but my writing partner, Dayton Duncan, who wrote this magnificent script and really structured this baby, was there and spoke. Our other producer, Julie Dunphy, spoke,

but so did Vince and other people. And Vince was highlighted a few times. But when he wasn't doing the song or he was singing, and he's the one who sang, as a male, I will always love you. And in rehearsal, we were like going, oh well, you know, like this is not going to be the highlight of the evening.

Standing ovation when that red light went on. Vince is un, he's invincible. And then between these starring turns, either speaking to the audience or playing and singing, he's back as one of the session musicians. He's backing up just about every act that night. And it was just like, that's Vince. If you know him, as I count it among my lucky,

things is that he's that person. He turned down Mark Knopfler to go play with Tire Straits. It's like, yo, dude, you are just a different dude in a great way. In a really, really great way. And he's, he's humble and he's a great artist. He's a great singer. And he's a phenomenal songwriter and musician. I mean, he was a top session musician before he became Vince Gill. You know what I mean? Well, he came up through the ranks of really, I mean, those session guys worked their asses off. That was one thing that was very illuminating. When it came to, you know, keeping, trying to bring people back to life and that sort of thing and, you know, making people feel like they're still there, okay? You have 100 plus interviews.

You've had a number of icons that have passed away. I'm watching Merle Haggard. And I'm wondering, is Dwight Yocham getting emotional because he got interviewed after Merle passed? Yes, yes, yes. I did that thing. I had no idea. And neither did Dwight, who I also. also adore who can be, for a lot of people, kind of opaque and diffident.

He's an amazing human, obviously a great talent, a great singer, a great songwriter. But I love Dwight. And when he began that answer telling me about that song, you know, of Murals, holding things together. He didn't know he was going to cry in the middle of it. He didn't know. But that tells you how sincere he was that he could communicate that. And, you know, it says, I mean, Lou Harris says in the film that if you want to know about country music, pick any Merle Hagger record, anyone, put it on any cut, any cut, and start there.

Because Merle, I think people don't realize that because at the end of his life, he got that kind of Jed Clampett, kind of, you know, who cares kind of thing. And had been known if he was known by non-country people for Oki from Muskogee. But he is really with Johnny Cash, with Hank Williams, with, you know, Jimmy Rogers, with Dolly, I would say, and Loretta. The foundation of, you can't even understand anything about it unless you have wrestled to the ground these towering, protean figures, who changed everything. And Merle is fantastic. And, you know, in his heyday, he looked as handsome as Warren Beatty. He looked better than me and he was, you know, 80 years old in the documentary. I'm like, this dude is just a man. I love what you said, though.

Every time he came on, we did the same thing. Finally, I just said, I'm going to call him Zeus. Was he the one that made you lean in the most? Oh, God, yes. Every time we, you know, and it'd be funny. Like, you'd think that making a film like this that's so long, that's, you know, 16 and a half hours, that it's additive. It's like building a house.

No, it's subtracted, right? We've got 40 or 50 times that 16. There's some amazing stuff I'm sure didn't make the cut. No, and the cutting room floor is filled with not bad stuff, but good stuff. But as you're working, you're going, what's wrong at the scene? And invariably, the question is, did Merle say anything? You know, so we could go back to the outs and go, yes, Merle said something.

And all of a sudden it's like the Calvary coming in and sitting in the scene. Anytime you could put Merle in, you just sort of felt, okay, that was a good day. Somebody said Willie was, I mean, was kind of known to be a tough interview sometimes. He doesn't like to talk. So was that the most intimidating one for the guys? And for you, are you doing a lot of the interviewing? Yeah, I didn't do Merle. Dayton did that.

I'm still as jealous as can be. But I did Woody. And, you know, Woody, we chased him for several years. And it was, oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. And I kind of knew he'd do it because I thought, you know, Austin City Limits, It's the oldest running variety show. It's PBS. It's my network.

You know, whatever. And that proved it in fact. But the interesting thing is I was on the view once with another film I'd made with my daughter called the Central Park Five. And we were explaining stuff. And then we watch from the green room, Willie, who's promoting a book. And somebody's interviewing and said, so, you compiled all these anecdotes of the road. What's your favorite one? And he goes, we should read the book.

He's like, yeah. You know, he probably didn't even read. Anyway, I just said, oh, no. And you just shrink. Before we did our interview, he had been given the Gershwin Prize at the Library of Congress. And we were there at a reception. He was being interviewed by someone who was dying because he was saying monosyllabic stuff. So we go into his bus.

He won't let us set up, you know, in a hotel room or some set. We got to go on his bus, cramp bus, motor running, Friday afternoon, rush hour, Washington, D.C., next to the W hotel and the Treasury building, redolent of some other smell besides tobacco. Yeah, I know. And Willie comes in and he sits down across the little dinette table for me. I mean, it's like I feel like two feet away. And I'm thinking, you know, we'd already taken our three and a half pages

and condensed it down to a half page. You'd just answer these questions. It'll be open. So fortunately, I didn't redo it. I just had the other stuff crossed out in pencil. So all of a sudden he started responding. And he answered every question on the three and a half pages. We just kept going and talking.

He was wonderful. But it certainly gave us a scare. Certainly gave us a scare. I mean, you probably know so much music. Is there anybody who had, to me, it just struck me as, and I knew about Willie, because I liked some of his earlier stuff. But it never, as a kid growing up in the 2000s, it's like you don't realize how late of a bloomer he was.

Is there anybody in popular music history? that was a later bloomer than Willie Nelson. No. And that's what's so amazing. And I think that what we tried to do in this series is not just cut, in the case of Johnny Cash, to June Carter. But you get to know for two episodes, his wife Vivian and the home life with Roseanne and her sisters. And then there's the love affair and then marriage to June. And I think with Willie, he just doesn't jump out at the moment he's successful. He's writing crazy and nobody's buying his version of it.

And then Patsy Klein records it. It's still the number one jukebox song of all time. But then he's got, you know, they're putting him in Nehru jackets. They're putting him in Bermuda plaid shorts with his arm around a pretty gal, showing her how to put. He didn't look comfortable. He did not look comfortable. He was on you finally, you know, just as Whalen, he said, don't.

He said to, Wayland, don't go to Nashville. And Whalen goes, I'm going to Nashville, and I'm just going to do it my way. And he did. Willie just said, I have to leave. I mean, he told us. He went out of Tootsie's one night and lay down in the middle of Broadway, fully expecting to wake up dead.

And he wakes up, and nobody's run over him. And he goes back to Texas. You know, his house burns down. He's only able to save his feet. And his guitar case filled with pot. He goes back to Austin. And all of a sudden, he's the Willie Nelson we know. And the great thing that connects, you know,

I spent many years working on the jazz series and many years working on this. My favorite artist in jazz, and it has to be in the world is Lewis Armstrong. Right. He was just like God. And the favorite song that I began to identify with in the film was Start Us, which Louis completely, Lewis completely rearranged this Hockey Car Michael thing, got a poppy nothing song. and he totally rearranges it.

And then Willie does the same thing. And Stardust is got, I mean, that album, you know, stay on the charge for something like five years, you know. And I'm a red-headed stranger guy. I mean, like, listen, hearing the story about what they thought, it's kind of like the kid, it reminds me a story when my parents are like, we don't want Chris to play football,

so we're going to let him go out and, yeah, as a 12-year-old and get hit in the mouth, and he's not going to like it anymore. we're going to let Willie do it his way and he's going to fail. Yeah. And then guess what happened? Nobody could tell him shit afterwards, rightfully so. But the coolest thing about Willie is it's like a made for movies life.

I know they did the Johnny Cash movie and it was brilliant. Willie would be a fabulous story. Vacuums selling vacuums. Can you imagine buying a vacuum from Willie if anybody's still alive from that era and not knowing that you could have bought a vacuum from Willie and not known that Willie Nelson and sold you a vacuum. Being a concert promoter at 13 and 14 years old and going to some Texas town and borrowing a piano

and getting it on a flat bed and moving it to the town where the thing is going to be. It's just, you can't. Stranger than fiction. Well, this is why, you know, people keep saying every time I had early success 40 years ago, people say, now you're going to Hollywood. And I'd say, uh-uh.

Because the, you know, Shelby Foote said to me when I was working on the Civil War thing. He said, God's the greatest dramatist. Like, there's one thing. I mean, Shakespeare took histories and, you know, combined characters and rewrote the phone, changed the country. But, you know, everybody's drawing on human experience

and human stories. And my feeling is, if you obey the same law as a storytelling, it doesn't have to be like Castro, you know, take this, it's good for you, documentary. This is like you tell stories the same as Hollywood. I have to obey the same law. is Stephen Spielberg. He and I were interviewing each other on a stage. And I just

said that. And I said, the only difference is you can make stuff up and I can't. He goes, that's exactly right. So who does the Willie Nelson biopic and who plays him? Oh, God, I don't know. I'm pinning you down here. We'll find somebody. I guess you'll have to play him, right? Okay, good, good. No, I can play Willie. I'd like to hang out

with Willie before it's all said. He's fantastic. But he does have, you do have to gain his trust. I mean, he's interested. He's interested in his music. And I think why we were so lucky is because I think spending all that time on the bus, he's just watching PBS documentaries. And so he knows my stuff.

And he knows this is not the interview to just say no. Yes. And, you know, we asked everybody, what is that one country song that you would have the NASA scientists send out beyond the solar system to some other world, you know? I was going to ask you. And well, you know, everybody, as I said, said, he stopped loving her today or whatever. And Willie said, when I asked him that, he said, can the songwriter go to? That's amazing. And then I said, only if you come back.

Yeah, you got to come back. We did a DVD extra. And usually DVD extras, as you know, are kind of like three minutes, seven minutes. And they are. There's a 33-minute DVD extras on the country music DVDs that, is about everyone answering that question. And it ends with Willie. And it is worth the price of admission.

I think it's almost that 32-minute film is almost as good as the series itself. Absolutely. And he is. And we throw this around too much American treasure. Willie Nelson is an American treasure. I want to ask you a couple more rapid fire before we get done here. But definitely one that interested me, the future of making these documentaries. I can't help but think about the fact that when you're searching for,

archival footage or pictures, they're few and far between you work with what you got. And also the other element to that is I get lost in these beautiful black and white photographs and studios. I'm thinking to myself and I've been in situations where people are photographing you as an athlete. That's not

totally organic. So you do lose a, is it a positive or a negative that now we all have camera phones? There is a surplus of footage. And so in 50 years when somebody does a documentary on an athlete or a musician, you'll have more, you'll have more kind of like organic stuff.

But will the, will the luster be taken away, the novelty? I don't know. I think art will out, expression will out, good narrative, storytelling will out. But you're right, there is a tyranny to choice, as there is a tyranny to no choice. If you've got a million images to sift through rather than, you know, I filmed by hand.

By hand, 16,000 photographs during the Civil War, Not one of them is a battle. And of the 11 and a half hours, I'd say 25 or 30% of the film, it's during a battle, right? So what are we showing? We're really struggling to show stuff. Sometimes it's a close-up of the cannon or the blurry edges or sometimes it's the dead on the battlefield after the battle. Whatever it is, you're trying to figure out how to work with it. In other cases, it's very interesting in something where we have tons and tons of footage,

we sometimes just go back to that still image because you can, you know, If you've got a beautiful picture of Babe Ruth, you can say anything. You can talk about his unhappy childhood. You can talk about his trouble with women. You can talk about his cantankerous relationship with management and his teammates. You can talk about his great accomplishments. If you've got footage of him running around the base, you can basically talk about him running around the base. So at that point, you're liberated in a funny way, whereas so many of my colleagues are going,

oh, my goodness, I don't know how you do it in the 19th century with only photographs. I'm so happy to get newsreels. And so they cut away really quickly. I'll stay on a face for 30 seconds and look at it and meaning, as you know, a cruise and duration. But your effect allows that to be possible to give a little bit more movement and some dynamic quality to just staring at it. When I was a little boy growing up, I wanted to be a Hollywood feature filmmaker. All I'm doing is I'm taking a still photograph and I'm going back to Hollywood. I'm saying, oh, that's a master shot.

in it. I can find a long shot, a medium shot, a close-up, a tilt, a pan, or reveal. And I want to make that moment come alive. It may be arrested, but it had a past and it would have a future. So, let's have the horse and wagon go through the speakers. Let's hear those can inspire. Let's hear the bat cracking and the crowd cheering, you know, and the saxophone wailing. Right. Okay, rapid fire here, let you go. You've been very gracious with your time. This has been two minutes. Yeah, no. That's how I feel. I wish I did like a Joe Rogan. You got to come back sometime.

I'd love to have you back. It would be my pleasure. But one recording session, cross genre, any music that you want to be a fly on the wall, like historically, you just teleport there. Yeah. Well, I think it would probably be, you know, one of the easiest things to say is the Bristol sessions with first the Carter family and then a week later, Jimmy Rogers, because it's just lightning doesn't strike twice, or so they say, but it did.

there, and it's, as you quite correctly called it, the Big Bang, I'd like to do that, but I'd like to just be there because I love these two songs so much, and I mentioned them already, I'd like to be there when Hank Williams laid down, I'm so lonesome I could cry. And when Johnny did, I still miss someone, although I wish even more to have been in the audience when Roseanne trying to memorialize her father, you know, at my door the leaves are fallen, a cold, wild wind will come. hearts walk by together, but I still miss someone. I go out on a party, look for a little fun, but I find a darkened corner because I still miss someone. Oh, I'll never get over her blue eyes. I see them everywhere and miss the arms that held me when all the love was there. I wonder if

she's sorry for leaving what we begun. There's someone for me somewhere, but I still miss someone. Yeah. The lyrics are just so amazing. I mean, she's Louise. My mom died when I was 11. And we wouldn't be talking if she hadn't died. I mean, that's the big hole. And to me, my little girl made me change it from blue eyes to the brown eyes that my mom had. Wow. So now I sing when I sing it to her, I sing it with brown eyes because she said, that's who you're really missing.

What series would you be most proud to show your mother? Oh, my goodness. You know, first I got to show her my four girls because they're the most important co-productions I got. But I don't know anymore. The hardest was Vietnam. The most joyous was country music and the most moving. But Civil War still is the one that gets the most people. And baseball.

I mean, have people who say, I've seen baseball more than you. And I go, no, you haven't. And then my dad and I watch it every January. And I go,

yes, you have. Because it's been out for 21 years. And so, you know what? Someone asked Duke Ellington, and he's the most prolific of our composers, 2500 pieces.

his most important work was. And he said the one I'm working on now. And I kind of feel that, Chris. Like, I'm just, like, the finish film means something to you. The practice means something to me. Yeah. All I've got to know, like, I'm working on eight films right now. I just have finished the editorial on a film on Ernest Hemingway, three part six hours.

Wow. I'm on a four-part, eight and a half hour series on the life of Muhammad Ali. I'm doing history of the United States in the Holocaust. lost. I'm doing a big biore fee two-part on Benjamin Franklin, doing a history of LBJ and the Great Society. We're doing a history of the buffalo, how the animal was used and brought to the brink of extinction and then brought back. We're doing a film, a big series, the next war is on the American Revolution. We're deep into it. And we're doing our first non-American topic on Leonardo da Vinci. I can't put my head on the pillow every evening and say, I made one of those

films better. Like yesterday, this whole last 10 days has been Muhammad Ali. Yeah. And today I shifted over to Revolution and did a little bit of Ben Franklin. And I know I've got some stuff tomorrow that will be a couple of the others. So, I mean, I got the best job in the world. So to me, it's just about practice. It's like you, you know, maybe you can say, oh, that was the best game ever. But it's really not. It's the totality of the excellence you can try to bring to each moment and the honesty with which you can say, I could have done better here or let's make this better, right? Yeah, you got to love the grind. I mean, you got to love the grind. You got to love it. You got to love it. And for those of you listening, Ken Burns is a grinder. His stuff is awesome.

This country music series, I'm telling you, you don't have to love country. I do. I had, I thought I knew. I had so many illuminating moments. Go check it out. You'll love it. You'll, You'll have aha moments if you've never heard country before because it's crossed into so many genres. Ken, I really appreciate the time, man. Very gracious. Hope to have you back soon. Yeah, let's do it again. This has been great, Chris.

Take care of. Good luck. So that was amazing. I mean, like, I wish I had hours upon hours, talk to Ken Burns. He could literally come on weekly and talk history. I would never get bored with it. You don't feel like you're working when you interview somebody like Ken Burns. What a dude?

He really did a great. great job. And he does a really good job of putting things in context. And he's somebody who, you know, and I guess most historians are probably like this, they're not just looking backwards. They're saying, what can we learn from it? And he touched on today's themes a lot during that interview. I thought that was interesting. A little bit of background with me and country is, I'm a country fan, okay? Like my favorite country is the older country. The older, the further back you go to a degree, the more I like it. Again, I don't like the stuff today. But I grew up on the 90s country. And I only grew up in the 90s country because I moved to Charlottesville when I was eight and a half years old.

And that's that's, that's not the south south, but, you know, people listen to the country in Virginia. It's rural. Okay. My lovely wife, we first got a house downtown, as I call it in Charlottesville. She was like, wait, you call it. I'm like, hey, you know, we live in the city. I'd say that. And because I grew up in Charlottesville effectively since I moved from L.A.

I don't remember L.A. that well. she was like, you really call this the city? This is not a city city, which is probably right. But it's just a different scene. And so was the music. I mean, like from ages one to eight, I didn't have a lot of musical interests. Okay. So kind of growing up, moving to Charlottesville, and turning on the radio, 997, to be exact,

if you grew up in Virginia, as well as 975. Shout out to Big Greasy Breakfast, if anybody remembers that. I used to listen to that stuff all the time in my room. I used to listen to it once I got, you know, the keys to my first car, which I still own, by the way, 1996 Bronco. Low mileage, too. I'm not getting rid of that bad boy. When I get in my car, that was what was on. And in the 90s country was pretty good.

Brooks and Dunn, Alan Jackson, George Strait, you know, nitty-gritty dirt band, Diamond Rio. a whole plethora of acts to choose from that you really liked. And I started working backwards. I think it's really hard to learn music or a genre of music for the first time from the beginning, if it's at all popular. Like, I could go start at the beginning when it comes to, like, Ethiopian jazz or something, because I'm not listening to it every day. And it's not mainstream.

Country is relatively mainstream, and it's especially mainstream now. and in the 90s it was. I mean, Ken talks about it at the end of his, his documentary. So I'm naturally going to hear the latest stuff first, especially as a kid. My journey went backwards. I went from those artists in the 90s, you know, who would drop references to older music or maybe I just dug on their influences. And then eventually it was, you know, outlaw country. And from outlaw country, you know, where I gravitate to Whalen, and Willie and Johnny and Chris and don't ask me who's my favorite.

I named my son Whalen, but I love them all. You know, Whalen introduced me to Bob Wills. And Whalen's long gone by the time, you know, not long gone, but he's not around by the time I really started heavily listening to him. But here's a guy who's not with us anymore and you've got this teenager in Virginia

listening to his music. And I'm able to go backwards because he references Bob Wills actually an entire song is about Texas Swing and Bob Wills. And I go backwards to Bob Wills, for instance. And the same thing happens with a lot of these artists. You know, the thing about country music is they shared a lot of songs. So you hear a song that you like and you say, well, who wrote that? And you didn't realize how prolific songwriter Willie Nelson was.

You just go backwards and backwards and backwards until you end up at the stuff in the beginning. like a Jimmy Rogers who I who I did listen to some Jimmy Rogers and I liked him but to pair the story with the music like like Ken Burns did is just so powerful and even for somebody like me who who loves country again asterix not country like today country uh I'm talking about like good country loves and that's why I get so excited when somebody like Sergio Simpson comes out, you know, or Stapleton, who's, who's just, they're just different. They're just different. And, and there's more names like that. They're still out there. There's still good bluegrass. I love bluegrass. That's why you get excited because they're, they're the exception, not the rule

these days. But Ken does a great job of taking a journey for, I'm sure, some people who don't know so much. And I had a bunch of aha moments. I know some of this stuff, but I learned a lot watching. And he makes it linear without like point A to point B, 1920s, 1930s to 1996. Take from it what you will that he ended it in 1996. And he makes it linear without making it, you know, A, B, C, D, E, F, G, you know what's happening next. He teases in new characters.

You know, even characters you know well, you'll have moments where you're like, wait, he did that, she did that. Oh, I didn't realize they played together. They met together. all the chance encounters that people had back in the day were unbelievable. Sun Records, Johnny Cash, Elvis Presley, Memphis, you know, and if you'd ever heard, you know, North Country Fair, which is one of the greatest songs, in my opinion, of all time,

it's Johnny Cash and it's Bob Dylan, and you didn't know that the two, if you're just a casual fan of either, you wouldn't know that they played together. They had this close friendship. And Johnny Cash's guy from Dias, Arkansas. Grew up with nothing and was quintessentially country. And Bob Dylan, who's, you know, one of these new like hipsters from New York strike up this friendship because they were both poets. You know?

All the cross-pollinization, all the cool relationships that can uncover. during this, all the chance meetings, that Bristol Big Bang thing, think about that. A genre is born out of a small city on the border of Virginia and Tennessee in what was in 1929. And on the same day, the two explosive forces that ignited an entire, like many genres of music with much instrumentation and variance in instrumentation and experimentation. that was ignited from one day, one fucking day. Like people walked to Bristol to try their hand at this thing.

And you had people just rolling up the same day who would become legends that don't even know who each other are before that day. And of course, I'm talking about the Carter family and Rogers. It's wild. So, you know, a lot of those moments. one thing for me, and we touched on Johnny Cash. I love Johnny Cash, okay? My appreciation for Johnny Cash grows as I get older. I don't know what that is,

and I don't know if somebody out there is listening to the same way. I feel the same way, but if you asked me to rank my highway men, you know, 10 years ago, surprisingly, Johnny wasn't maybe one or two for me. And again, I said earlier, I'm not ranking the highway men. I will not fucking do it. But when it comes to like a dude, and I really wish I'd ask Ken this question I'd gotten to, if you could bring one person back to interview them from this documentary, if I could have one person at the dinner table to ask him whatever I wanted and just see what they were like,

it would be Johnny Cash. And as I mentioned, I thought for me, he was the threat. He nearly touches both ends. You've got the redemption part. You've got the rebellious part, you know, the conviction part. and then you had the community part. And I love the duality of the fact that this is a guy who would flip you the fucking bird, but would fight for the downtrodden and, you know, would do work on Native American reservations.

He would, you know, visit prisoners and play for the forgotten because he felt like it easily could be him. The humility in that, the awareness in that, is powerful. powerful, you know, telling Nixon to fuck off. Where's that energy anymore in country music? Johnny Cash is just, he wasn't perfect either, and he didn't profess to be perfect. You watched this documentary, he was flawed as anybody, but he was authentic. You knew who he was, and there was always a redemptive story. Down to the end of his life, you know, when he's dropped from his label,

you know, in the twilight of his career, it's the weirdest thing ever. It's like cutting a guy who made a franchise what it is. And they kick him to the curb and he gets back up again. You know, I said to Ken Burns, it's like you couldn't kill him. And he was just, I love the guy. You know, he was unbelievable in watching this documentary and having seen the Nixon thing and, you know, I'm a big Googler. So I read, I'm like, yeah, do I?

Do I read a lot? Yeah. Do I read a lot of books? No. Google. I know a lot about Johnny Cash, but every time I see stuff on him, although he wasn't perfect,

he's somebody that for me takes the cake. And he embodied all those things, these themes, the redemptive theme, including going back to the Grand Ole Opry when they kicked them out, making amends with his daughters for not being around as much because of music.

a whole host of redemptive anecdotes for Johnny Cash were there. And then, you know, as we mentioned, the rebelliousness. I love that about him. I mean, he just stood by what he believed. And then the community part, he helped so many people, help so many people. You know, he helped Chris. When Chris got Christofferson, when he got that letter from his mom, that was just cruel. I mean, you're talking about Chris Christofferson.

In my opinion, if you ask me who the greatest songwriter of all times, time is, I'm ducking as I say this. Maybe it's because of ignorance. Maybe it's because I'm just partial, but it's Chris for me. And if you ask me what, like, when you think about a country song, the one that's most representative to me of what that means, and it's right in the middle, chronologically, of when it came out of all this country music, quote unquote, from the beginning of the end, is Sunday morning coming down, which a lot of people like Johnny's version better. I like Chris's version better. Chris Christopherson is a lot of a legend. Silver Tung Devil is one of my favorite songs to belly up to a bar and just by myself

and just slam a, you know, eight silver bullets or whatever you're drinking. I love Chris Christopherson. You talk about a man crush, okay? I got a man crush on all the highway, man. These guys are fucking legends. Chris Christopherson was a Rhodes Scholar, okay, from California and also in the military. flew helicopters, studied, you know, Shakespeare, the classics, moves to Nashville, because he goes and sees when he's in the Army, he's an instructor, he doesn't actually get deployed,

and Ken Burns includes this. I should start calling him Ken now, on a first name basis. He's supposed to get deployed. He's called back to be an instructor, and he goes off base to go see Johnny Cash and decides right then, fuck it, I'm out of here. I'm going to go be a country star.

Another guy that didn't follow the rules, but somebody that seems to be a good, good man. Another don't box me in guy. I am not, I can't be labeled. He moves to Nashville on a whim because of Johnny Cash. And he gets a job as a janitor at a record company intentionally to hover around and ask people questions. Like asking people questions about, hey, how do you write a song? That sort of thing. and at one point his mother disowns him, writes him a really cruel letter,

something in effect of never come home, never write like you're a disappointment because he was supposed to be all these things his parents wanted to be. And he rebelled against that. And he shows, I guess, you know, one of his buddies there, that letter. And he says, I'm going to go show this to Johnny Cash. And Johnny Cash, who never lets anybody sit in his sessions, says, hey, Chris, guy I don't know, janitor at the record company. come watch my sessions.

You know what that would be like? That would be like if some kid was getting teased on Twitter because they had a bad football player, I don't know what the parallel would be. And a pro athlete without seeking the attention of a camera or posting it on Instagram, quietly takes that kid under his wing and goes and does drills with him. and just imagine how big that makes that person feel and how important that person feels because of it.

Johnny Cash did stuff like that all the time. Maybe if Johnny Cash doesn't do that, we don't have a Chris Christopherson. But the theme of taking care of each other and looking out for the little man was like very prominent in this doc. You know, you had tons of instances of that. And he did it for so many people. you know he brought um bob dillon onto his show which was as we talked about unheard of he stood up for ira hayes i mean he he just at every turn would look out for people but he wasn't perfect i'm sure you know if you asked his first wife if he was perfect she'd probably say no

i mean relationships are complicated who knows um and there were things that he wanted to lose ends he wanted to tie up with with his daughters but this guy was a guy looked out for other people. And that was kind of, that was kind of interestingly enough what country music seemed to be about. It was more of a community. And maybe that was just older music period,

but people looked out for each other. So I love the Johnny Cash constant. And as I said, I mean, guest-wise, there were so, in guests, narrator-wise, or interview-wise, there were so many guys and girls that just really shine. I mean, Dolly Parton is, she's just so self-assured without being arrogant or off-putting

and so strong in her convictions, it seems like. And it's not like, you know, like the way to describe Patsy Klein was like, you know, she was hellfire in a great way. It was like Patsy Klein was just, she was going to let you know and she was going to let you know, like bluntly what she thought. And actually all the leading ladies on this thing were amazing. but Dolly Parton was she could do it with a smile on her face and not raise her voice

and you know exactly what she was saying is the idea I got like she was going to make her her stance known without being aggressive or abrasive but you knew I'm saying what I'm saying and if you got a problem with it fuck off in a nice way and she was a trailblazer it was crazy to hear about from Dolly you know to any of these. artists, the humble beginnings, like the poverty, and you go through the Great Depression, World War II, these artists were not, they were not immune to every man problems. Now, relative to their notoriety, nowadays, you're shielded from a lot of this stuff. A lot of these artists who people knew across America household names on the radio had to go back to work during the Great Depression.

It's crazy. World War II came. And Bob Will's and Gene Autry go over and fight. And Bob Will's, of course, is like, disciplined a bunch in the army because he was too drunk. But like, these were stars that had to live regular lives. And that's what blew me away. They were not. Dolly Parton, what made me think of it was she was dirt poor, no running water, no electricity, you know, born in a holler, just, you know, a one-room cabin, basically.

when they show pictures of folks' houses that they grew up in, it's just, it's sobering. It seemed like everybody in that era was poor. And Dolly Parton, she got a gig, I guess, in Knoxville on a TV show when she was a teenager, and her parents couldn't even watch it, didn't have a TV. She was making money. She was coming and going, but they couldn't watch her on TV. So it's wild. just wild. And another thing that was really interesting to me was the grand old

opera stuff. Okay. That building was an organism, a living organism, not a building. And it was so interesting to hear about the origins, like how that stemmed from, and we didn't get to with Ken, how it stemmed from radio, basically radio wars, where there are these hubs that an artist would go play and you try to get the biggest, baddest radios that reached the most people. Some of them were so powerful. that farmers could hear their music off their barbed wire fences. I don't know if that's safe. Just imagine like these hubs in Chicago and, you know, Los Angeles or Texas somewhere. And, you know, these are your choices. This is what you're going to listen to if you can get signal.

And, you know, it was people came up and played and they became hubs for different artists. And the way that the Granul Opry started out was, I think, you know, this was a conduit to selling like insurance. a lot of these radio stations, these hubs. I mean, that was what country music was founded on as far as the radio was concerned. And I could be wrong. But this was one of the more confusing parts. Because for me, it's just such a paradigm shift for somebody who understands radio the way they understand it today. It's advertisement.

It's the same thing. But just it was so primitive. And that's what eventually, you know, made Nashville a hub was these, these radio shows turned into what they call them barn dances and hayrides and whatever you want to call these parties that they put on and everybody would turn on their radio on like a Saturday night and Nashville became the biggest hub and then it evolved into having the grand old opera. So in the late 20s, when this kind of old Nashville was rebelling against this kind of hillbilly sound as they called it, which was almost a derogatory term, they were doing these barn dances and this dude said,

I guess his name was, let me look at my notes here. George Hay. I was freestalling to this. George Hay, he introduced the program. For the past hour, we have been listening to music taken largely from the grand opera. From now on, we will present the grand old opera. So basically, he was like,

we'll dress it up a little bit for you. And that's the name of our program. And he kicked it off, I believe, with D4 Bailey, who is a black dude with a harmonica. I mean, the roots of country music are just way different than you would imagine if you didn't watch this stuff. And of course, that venue, which was such a living, breathing organism that could tell you so many stories of it could talk, ended up changing venues eventually when people realized the AC was just terrible. It would cost $2 million to refurbish the air system. It was 120 degrees in there. There's no dressing rooms. And it kind of, you know, like a family outgrows a house. That's what the country music family did with the Granul Opry. So they moved it to Opry land. They did a water park, all that stuff.

This is like the 80s. This building was the center of the universe for quite a while. And it was also the center of this tug of war between what the identity of country music was. Was it the Bakersfield sound? Was it Texas? Was it the cleaner Nashville sound that was coming to prominence in the middle of century, there was a push and a pull and there's always a push and a pull. And I would hope that there's going to be a push and a pull with the way the genre is now, but I don't know, maybe the money's

too good. But I say that to say, I don't know too many buildings that have more history when it comes to music in our country than the grand old opera. And that would have been something else to sit in that hot, cramped place and hear Johnny Cash sing. And one guy that really struggled to be comfortable there as we talked about it was was willy nelson uh willy nelson again i'm just i when it comes to the highway men and outlaw country it's my favorite so and willy nelson to me is he's he's he's a god uh willy nelson struggled to find his way for a while we talked about that i mean when you watch this documentary if you don't know willy nelson's story you don't like his old music or you haven't perused it which i got into this thing yesterday i don't know if you can peruse

music or peruse a podcast. It's perusing involves reading. But, you know, Willie Nelson for a long time was a guy who was struggling as a songwriter and struggling to find, I mean, he was never, he was a great songwriter.

It just didn't pop for him. And it popped more as a songwriter than as an artist. That was the part that he was really struggling to find his way on was if I'm going to play music and perform, like who am I? I mean, he was a guy without a beard. He was a guy that was up there in a suit. He didn't look comfortable. He looked

like he wanted to be somewhere else a little bit. Willie Nelson made a hard right turn at some point and said, I'm not doing this Nashville stuff. I'm spinning my wheels. I'm out. I'm going down in Texas. He left and had to go find where he was comfortable on his own, but they did a great job of telling his story because most people don't think of one of the most famous artists in our lifetime as being a late bloomer or having to change his look entirely, change his whole image. His life was a fucking movie. I mean, it's like anybody else tells these stories. I think they're lying. He's living out of a converted garage in Nashville struggling and it burns down.

And that's like the last straw. And all he finds is a guitar and a guitar case full of weed. It's a movie. You know, from laying in the street in Nashville hoping to get run over. pissed drunk after after the bar I would presume and waking up and not being run over it's a movie but my favorite story in the whole maybe the whole thing

and there were multiple moments where I got chills I mean there were moments where I got a little bit emotional maybe but this was one where Poncho and Lefty was discovered as we know it like Merle Haggard and Willie Nelson

made that a banger but poncho and lefty is a towns van zant song and that and there's another forgotten relatively forgotten to people who are mainstream fans you know singer-songwriter who who was unorthodox when he came to the country scene he came from like an affluent family and that sort of thing family of lawyers a tortured existence heavy drinker but beautiful beautiful a lot of them i was talking to my producer John. And so Dead Flowers is on the end of Big Lobowski, which John, my producer, pointed out to me. And also, there's a lot of people that think, you know, Dead Flowers is a Towns Van Zant song. It's actually the Rolling Stones. Again, another example of cross-pollination

and respect and imitation and that sort of thing. It's country artists and artists back in that day. They just passed songs around. But Towns Van Zant wrote Poncho and Lefty years back. and then Emmy Lou Harris put it on an album, and Willie and Merle are just hanging out at Willie's house. Willie's daughter plays him the record. He's never heard Ponchuan Lefty. And until then, and then goes and wakes Merle Haggard up,

who, of course, is sleeping outside in his bus. And my favorite part of the story is that Merle's like, well, I'd just gone to bed. It's 4 a.m. I'm like, okay, you guys were, you guys rolled hard, man. And Willie goes out and wakes him up at four in the morning and says, you got to hear this. And Merle's like, I want to go back to bed.

Like, I'm tired. Can we listen in the morning? I'll listen in the morning. And he's like, come inside. So they hear it. Man, what a song. Let's record it. Let's just take a stab at it.

Probably five in the morning. And I'm assuming if you're up till four in the morning, you weren't up reading a book. I mean, they were having a good time. So you're waking up, presumably half, half drunk. Maybe God knows what. else. And you record this song.

And Merle's thinking in the morning, I'll get another stab at it. This is just the first run. Wakes up and says, Willie, let's try it again. And Poncho and Lefty is already on its way to New York. And just these moments behind the music

are so illuminating and add even more meaning to the songs you already love. And that's what everybody loves finding out what a song about who they wrote it about. And in country, it wasn't like a big secret sometimes. And a lot of times these really personal relationships were front and center, like Tammy Wynette and George Jones. Gosh, I did not, I mean, I knew it was a dysfunctional relationship. I know those those guys both did three divorces, a piece. Tammy Wynette's fourth divorce

happened in 44 days. And George and Tamifaxe. Sammy continued to, you know, record together. But the duet thing was so interesting. You're talking about women in country. I wish I'd ask Ken, like how important the duet scene in country was for women artists across genres. I don't know. There were so many great female artists that were really swimming upstream in that era and just did it so boldly. And then the George Jones thing, which I just touched on.

him and Hank Williams and Ken mentioned this. Hank damn near had his own episode, Hillbilly Shakespeare. You knew who was about. Hank and George Jones, to me, were so interested because they were parallels in a sense that they seemed like they both lived burdened lives. They both were kind of tortured, but they weren't tortured and substance abuse of music seemed to go hand in hand sometimes. And it doesn't have to. I know when you talk to musicians. They're like, you don't have to be tortured. You don't have to be strong on drugs, strong on drugs to make great music, but or,

or booze or whatever. Both these guys had parallels with dads that, you know, were around, but made life imperfect. The really heartbreaking one was George Jones and his dad. I mean, you're talking about a dad who was a violin drinker, would come home, wake his kid up when he got home from the bar, make him sing. the middle of the night. And if he didn't sing, he would whip him with his belt. That is so damaging to a kid. And it's not the same thing with Hank who predated George Jones, but Hank had a

dad who came back from the war and was shell shocked and eventually admitted. Like imagine going through that. You know, Merle's dad died early, but he's gone. These two had really tough upbringings. I mean, a lot of these characters did. You know, a lot of these people did. But they seem like people who went down a road of substance abuse and kind of a tortured private existence that spilled over into the public a good bit more than you'd like it to, if you were them, that were from their roots. They weren't, you know, a lot of these people got hooked on drugs.

A lot of musicians get hooked on drugs because of the scene. Hank Williams died at 29. Everything Hank Williams did, he did it before 29. Hank Williams died at 29 years old. And by that time, had cemented himself as one of the foremost figures in American music and country music. And he died in the back of a car on the way to a show. Booze, maybe pills. I don't know.

But it's so sad. And George Jones, you know, hit the bottle hard. And Johnny Cash was one that, you know, he averted that fate. and Johnny had a rough upbringing. Johnny Cash watched his brother die in an accident right in front of him. It's terribly sad. And if you know anything about Johnny Cash, that really affected him. And his dad made a really cutting remark at one point about it should have been you.

He was disappointed in his son. These are tough things, the father figure thing that a lot of these guys shared. And then it would manifest in different ways. And thank God Johnny Cash escaped that fate because June Carter gave him an ultimatum. And I often wonder, especially wondering, and I didn't get to ask Ken this again, wish I had him for three hours. What happens if June doesn't give him that ultimatum? I would assume Ken doesn't like doing, you know, guessing game history stuff. But, you know, maybe he's got a famous grave site that, you know, people visit for decades.

And he's one of those artists that, you know, never saw the full scope of his fame. Thank goodness Johnny Cash averted that fate and lived a long, redemptive life and was kind of one of the protagonists of this whole thing. One thing that was hard to reconcile, and it's still hard to reconcile, even though Ken put this together so, so in such a self-aware way, in such a way that included and acknowledged so many of the forces I'm talking about and the influences and I thought was fair. Charlie Pride, who was the first black country star, like truly big star. Hearing Charlie Pride, and by the way, Charlie Pride was terrific as an interview. You know, you can tell somebody's trying to be, you know, charismatic in an interview and trying to make it about them.

I always think about those shows where they list things on MTV when there's nothing else on TV or like the funniest videos and half of it is just these bad comedians talking about, you know, like a home video that went wrong or a viral video. I don't know if they even still do that anymore. You can really feel people trying to be the star and like, you know, trying to. Charlie Pride was a star without being the star. Okay, I mentioned Merle Hagger was the guy you lean into. Charlie Pride is the guy you just smile. Like, as soon as Charlie Pride started talking, I was just fucking smiling ear to ear.

But breaking into that scene was not easy for him. And I talked about him playing a song where he couldn't even sing it because it, you know, it talked about a relationship with a presumably white woman, blonde hair. There was a time period where he was so good. everybody knew who's so good, but his identity was hid from the public. They decide to release records without sharing who he really was from an ethnicity standpoint. Hiding his identity, there's a story that's really great, and Charlie Pride tells it, it's not great in a sense.

I'm glad it was like this. He's a great storyteller. He talks about going out and doing his first big show, and he's like, third. up and they give him this introduction and people are very aware of who he is because they buy his records and they hear him on the radio. But back then, you could be a radio star and people not know what you look like if they tried to hide you. They knew it would be interesting when he walked out on stage and it was. People were cheering like crazy. He walked out on stage and it looked like, you know, people had something in their throat. Like they stopped cheering. They didn't boo.

They just were like shocked. It reminds me of one of the greatest Chappelle show skits of all time. It reminds me of Clayton Bigsby the moment when people realized that Clayton Bigsby was black. I mean, like people's heads exploded. The guy in the front row's head exploded. I imagine that people in that auditorium were like, holy shit. My whole world just, the world just shifted for me. The artists, most of them, uh, seemed to be, you know, uh, helpful when it came to Charlie and, and folks trying to break in like Charlie. Because a lot of these artists, before they were country stars, they had black blues influencers and people they learned to play with

that didn't look like them and didn't grow up with them. So it wasn't anything new for an artist. A lot of these artists were very progressive. And I don't think you need a medal even in the 1960s for believing in equality and respecting somebody's humanity. But these artists seem to get it. It was the money machine that. didn't seem to get it, the fans that didn't seem to get it, you know, the very segregated

region that didn't seem to get it. And it seemed like Charlie was the perfect guy to break in. But you talk about Farron Young's relationship with him, it was a different time. And the ironic part is Charlie Pride and, you know, Farron Young became tight and went into the country Music Hall of Fame together. And according to Charlie Pride, out of his own mouth, it became great friends. So one of the most curious things to me is how do you reconcile with some of the racial elements of, I'm not even talking about influence. I mean, you know, black blues, black musicians, jazz, all that influence. I'm so thankful that musically, the center of the world, musically, so much is owed to that population that didn't have a say in being here a lot of times

in the United States. It didn't have equality that didn't have, fair shot at it. Charlie Pride and people like Charlie Pride were so necessary in breaking down those barriers. Not for the artists so much in a case of like Farron Young. I'm sure there were a number of racist artists. But a lot of the main characters in this documentary come out pretty good as far as how accepting they are and that sort of thing. How do you reconcile with the fact that maybe a Paren Young can change. I don't know. The fact that, you know, when they first meet, he has some really racist preconceived notion about Charlie Pride. And then 50 years later or 40 years later, whatever it is. They go into the country music Hall of Fame together and they're good friends.

You know, is that hopeful? Does that mean people can change? You know, I blame Feren Young because people had choice. They have agency. You know, I don't care how much, you know, your parents taught you bad stuff about people that didn't look like you or you live somewhere where you didn't grow up around people that didn't look like you. Everybody has agency. Throughout history, there are good actors. And it's no different in the country music scene. I wonder how you reconcile with somebody changing.

It made me a little bit weirded out. And then it just, you know, they talk about Hank Williams and where he grew up. There hadn't been a gathering in his city like that before his memorial service since Jefferson Davis. won the Confederate election. That's the reality of this region that some of this country music came up in. And I think sometimes the artist understood way better than the fans.

And the reason Charlie Pride had to release records without people knowing what he looked like was because the fans weren't ready for it. The artists were ready for it. Black and white artists played together all the time. And I'm not saying all artists, I'm not being naive and saying there were no racist artists.

You know, there are guys like David Allen Coe who didn't show up in this documentary. And I'm not upset that he didn't. David Allen Coe certainly has a role in country history, but, you know, if you're trying to sell country to somebody who doesn't know country, you're not really wanting to make David Allen Coe the spokesperson. And I guess to tie a bow on it, you know, with race and all these real discussions about activism and an artist taking, you know, taking a role, having a voice off the stage and standing up for things they believe in. Where are the Johnny Cash's? You know, where are, you know,

the Willie Nelson's anymore? I guess where are the Loretta Lins? Holy shit. That was powerful when they said, because you have to consider the time that we're talking about here, when Charlie Pride wins his first award, and they instruct Loretta Lynn, who's a rising star in country, but certainly not immune to being blackballed in that era as a woman, as a white woman in Nashville, is instructed to, as Charlie Pride receives the award to back up, that she gives him, she doesn't back up, she steps towards him and gives him a big hug. Maybe I'm missing it, but, But we live in a pretty turbulent time right now. We need, like, influencers to be leaders.

And not everybody has to be an activist or anything like that, but call shit out when it's wrong, it's wrong. Maybe the money's too good now. I don't know. Listen, when Johnny Cash was the man, I wasn't around, but I missed Johnny Cash. You know, and this, this journey that Ken took you down was just awesome. And, you know, Johnny and guys like him and girls like Loretta Lynn and Patsy Klein and Dolly Parton and Tammy Wynette and I mean and people like Charlie Pride, D4 Bailey and

you know, the fact that Jimmy Rogers played with Louis Armstrong, Lewis Armstrong. It's just there's so much more, it's so much more of a melting pot than the industry wanted it to be. and it sucks that we are always pushed to be separate rather than get together and work together. And this is just an interesting conversation, I thought, based on watching this and realizing the historical context and the activism. And when it came to Vietnam and the way that Merle Haggard song, Okie from Muskogee was kind of used as a, rally and cry for pro-Vietnam people when the people that knew Merle were like,

those lyrics don't know, it sounds sarcastic. It was almost like a joke. You know, because he said, we don't burn our draft cards on Main Street. You know, we don't smoke marijuana and Moscow.

Like, everybody knew Merle smoked pot. Like, what do you? And he was, he was tight with, with all the guys that were anti-establishment. Yeah, that was it. There were better times as far as, yeah, I think the character of, of artists were concerned.

You know, maybe the money is too big now. So anyways, rant over. Go, go watch this shit, man. You're going to need a long time, but you can get it done. It's great having Ken Burns on. I'm going to be like, here's what I'm going to do. I'm a binge like all his other stuff, just so I have an excuse to have him back for like everything. And I'll go Joe Rogan on Ken Burns's ass.

I'll be like, hey, Ken, I need you for three hours. We'll see how that goes. But anyways, be back next week. Again, Ken Burns, country music, a lot of fun. Thanks for hanging in there if you listen this far. Have a great weekend.