Throughline - Three Chords And The Truth

Episode Date: September 12, 2019

When Lil Nas X released his viral hit "Old Town Road" last year, he sparked a conversation about what country music is and who is welcome in the genre. To better understand the deep and often misunderstood history of country music, we sat down with renowned filmmaker Ken Burns to talk about his new documentary series Country Music and his process as a storyteller.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

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We have something special for you all today. It's not a typical Dueline episode. It's a conversation with one of our favorite storytellers. Ken Burns. You might have heard of him. He's made dozens of historical documentaries over the years about everything from the Civil War to jazz to cancer to the Vietnam War. And now he's back with a new documentary about country music. And I have

to be honest, I don't really care about country music. In fact, I don't like it. Growing up, I associated country music with artists like Toby Keith, whose songs were, you know, aggressively patriotic and really weren't for someone like me. But when I heard Ken Burns was making a documentary about country music, I was like, okay, let's see what this is about. And that, my friends, is what makes Ken Burns so good at what he does. He takes something that you think you have zero interest in and makes it interesting, which is what we try to do every week on this show. So we were super excited to sit down with him and talk about his approach to storytelling, why history matters, and country music.

That conversation, when we come back. Hi, this is Zaito Amon from East Brunswick, New Jersey, and you're listening to ThruLine from NPR. Okay, so naturally, the first question we had for would I do rock and roll? And I'm a child of rock and roll and R&B. That was my music. And yet when the country music idea came, a friend of mine said, hey, have you ever thought about country music? And it'd been mentally on some lists, but it just sort of entered in my heart. It was like this wholehearted yes. Whatever it was we were thinking about doing next together, that's disappeared. And for the next eight years, we really plowed towards this.

I knew some stuff. My granddaddy and my daddy sang me songs. But I knew that it was connected to all American music, that what we tend to do in everything, particularly now where there seems to be a tsunami of information breaking over us, is that just out of desperation, we ensilo everything into its own category. But when you listen to country music and you learn a little bit about it, you find out from the very beginning, it was never one thing. I was standing by the window on one cold and cloudy day. The Big Bang took place in the summer of 1927 in Bristol, Tennessee,

when Ralph Peer, an entrepreneur, recorded in almost succeeding sessions The Carter Family and Jimmy Rogers. Once I had a sweetheart and Jimmy Rogers. So you have this music that's growing up that's then adding all sorts of stuff, western swing, cowboy music, there's bluegrass. And the Bakersfield sound.

And a kind of more smooth Nashville sound. And later an even smoother country-politan sound. And later an even smoother country-politan sound. I mean, it defies category like all the other genres. In your documentary, you explore, at least in the beginning, the kind of sharing

of culture. Even the Carter family used basically old gospel songs. Will the Silk Road be unbroken, the biggest country song, maybe the most influential ever. Given that, I know what people are going to say when they see this documentary, given what happened recently with the Old Town Road. I'm sure you're aware of it with Lil Nas X. I think what that brought up is for a lot of African Americans, they thought, well, we have a history in this music too. That country music is our music too. So it's in every episode of ours.

Yeah. And that dynamic is there. And if you made a Mount Rushmore of the top five people, the Carter family, Jimmy Rogers, Hank Williams, Bill Monroe, who invented bluegrass, and Johnny Cash, all of those five had an African-American mentor who took their chops from here and put it way up here so that they deserved a place in the Mount Rushmore. So all of a sudden you realize this is not some back 40 acres of some hick thing, but in fact, one manifestation of American music that's going to also manifest itself in the blues, in jazz, in folk, in rock ability, and later rock and R&B and soul. And let's remember, it's a complicated story. The two main instruments of country music, the fiddle, which comes from Europe and the British Isles, and the banjo, which comes from Africa, tells you

about a dynamic. And so our first episode is called The Rub. And normally when we think about races coming together in the American South, the rub, the friction produced is a negative one. In this case, while the negativity is still there, all of the horrors of slavery and of Jim Crow and of segregation and of minstrelsy, they're there. But one of the byproducts is extraordinarily positive, which is creating a set of music, jazz and blues and country, that is America's music. But you know, something you mentioned that I'd love to dig into a little more is the tension at the beginning of country music that produced something great, yes, but also

complicated. Yes. Because you mentioned these Mount Rushmore sort of figures of country music, all were inspired, borrowed from African-American music and culture. Can you talk a little bit about that sort of tension, how it informed the rise of country music? I think that tension is sort of present almost everywhere in American life, in every subject that we've done, and I think no more so than here. And that's where creativity takes place, not in these sort of perfect moments, but in just the complication of life. I don't see this in terms of appropriation, because of course, African Americans

are listening and borrowing from. And so what you see are people who are a huge variety of mixtures. It is, hey mama, I'm gonna leave your town. There is a sadness to me that we don't know Gus Cannon, Johnny Cash's mentor, as well as we know Johnny Cash. That's not Johnny Cash's fault. Johnny Cash would, to the end of his dying day, would tell you the significance of Gus Cannon to who he was and the kind of person he began. Same with Elvis. There's lots of argument about Elvis, but Elvis knew where he came from. He was listening to country music. He was listening to gospel, black and white. He was listening to the blues. He was listening to everything. And he reflected it. And that's who we are. You can't celebrate a melting pot on the

other side and then say, it's not good to melt. There's presumptions in commerce that people are only listening to this music that are white or that they're only listening to R&B that are black, and this just isn't the case. You promised me love That would never die When Ray Charles had a chance to have creative control over an album for the first time and released modern sounds in country and western music, and the great hit was I Can't Stop Loving You.

I mean, just a phenomenal crossover in the other way that you would imagine. You know, the culture is going to resist that. The culture often will default to the lowest common denominator, us against them. And what I think art reminds us is that you can neutralize that conflict with something that sees a little bit bigger than that. And good art always does it. You're going to meet Dee Ford Bailey, who's a harmonica player and early African-American member of the Grand Ole Opry, who's unceremoniously sort of kicked out at a moment of sort of resurgent Jim Crow and, for excuses, brought back.

You have Charlie Pryde. You have Ray Charles doing this spectacular thing. And throughout our film is Rhiannon Giddens, who's an African-American woman who is one of the great, most driving country sounds you'll ever hear and tearing the cover off almost every song she attempts to sing. I'm crazy for loving you. I watched her a few weeks ago at the Ryman Auditorium, the home for decades of the Grand Ole Opry,

sing Patsy Cline's Crazy and Bring 3,000 People to their feet in thunderous applause. So it's there right in front of us. The recipe is there. I mean, is that what drew you to it at the beginning? I mean, it seems like this was a learning process, you know, as you were spending eight years on it. Is this something you knew at the outset,

that there was this deep, intricate American story at the heart of country music? You know, it's so easy to back and fill and lie to you, you know. I'm looking in all these things for subjects that reflect us back to us. And I don't want to do stuff that I know about. And what's so great about country is that it's elemental. Three chords and the truth, the songwriter Harlan Howard said. And that means it doesn't have the elegance and sophistication of say classical music or even jazz. What it has are really clear lyrics and very simple music that is telling you elemental things about human life. The joy of birth.

The sadness at death. Falling in love. Trying to stay in love. Falling out of love. Being lonely. Seeking redemption. There's nobody within the sound of my voice that hasn't experienced at least one, if not two, if not all of those things. And what we found as we were working on the film is our developing sense that we were sitting on a kind of a volcano of emotional

power. And people would come in and they would be, you know, I love country music, but I had no idea that it was this. Or I'm not really sure I don't like country music. Once you get rid of the dead wood and get the brush out, this is an extraordinary set of tunes that the series is introducing you to. And for those that said, I don't like country music, they suddenly realize how kind of superficial and blind that might be, that good music is just good music wherever it is. Is there bad jazz? Yes. Is there bad blues? Yes. Is there bad rock? Oh my God. So is there bad country? Of course. But if you can tell the kind of story, multi-generational, huge Russian novel of a story that we told across

eight episodes and 16 and a half hours, you have a chance to see this American family story that at its heart is as American as it gets. You know, one of the things that struck me in the film was the number of women who played, you know, such a big role in the development of country music. This is a surprisingly feminist film. From the very beginning, Sarah Carter and Mother Maybel Carter are two super strong women, and they're followed by Rose Maddox. Donkey, donkey, donkey, donkey, donkey, donkey, donkey, donkey, donkey, donkey, donkey, donkey, donkey, donkey, donkey, donkey, donkey, donkey, donkey, donkey, donkey, donkey, donkey, donkey, donkey, donkey, donkey, donkey, donkey, donkey, donkey, donkey, donkey, donkey, donkey, donkey, donkey, donkey, donkey, donkey, donkey, donkey, donkey, donkey, donkey, donkey, donkey, donkey, donkey, donkey, donkey, donkey, donkey, donkey, donkey, donkey, donkey, donkey, donkey, donkey, donkey, donkey, donkey, donkey, donkey, donkey, donkey, donkey, donkey, donkey, donkey, donkey, donkey, donkey, donkey, donkey, donkey, donkey, donkey, donkey, donkey, donkey, donkey, donkey, donkey, donkey, donkey, donkey, donkey, donkey, donkey, donkey, donkey, donkey, donkey, donkey, donkey, donkey, donkey, donkey, donkey, donkey, donkey, donkey, donkey, donkey, donkey, donkey, donkey, donkey, donkey, donkey, donkey, donkey, donkey, donkey, donkey, donkey, donkey, donkey, donkey, donkey, donkey, donkey, donkey, donkey, donkey, donkey, donkey, donkey, donkey, donkey, donkey, donkey, donkey, donkey, donkey, donkey, donkey, donkey, donkey, donkey, donkey, donkey, donkey, donkey, donkey, donkey, donkey, donkey, donkey, donkey, donkey, donkey, donkey, donkey, donkey, donkey, donkey, donkey, donkey, donkey, donkey, donkey, donkey, donkey, donkey, donkey, donkey, donkey, donkey, donkey, donkey, donkey, donkey, donkey, donkey, donkey, donkey, donkey, donkey, donkey, donkey, donkey, donkey, donkey, donkey, donkey, donkey, donkey, donkey, donkey, donkey, donkey, donkey, donkey, donkey, Donkey, Donkey, Donkey, Donkey, Donkey, Donkey, Donkey, Donkey, Donkey, Donkey, Donkey, Donkey, Donkey, Donkey, Donkey, Donkey, Donkey, Donkey, Donkey, Donkey, Donkey, Donkey, Donkey, Donkey, Donkey, And Loretta Lynn. So in the mid-60s, Loretta Lynn is dealing with themes

that nobody in folk has touched, nobody in rock has touched. Don't come home a-drinking with lovin' on your mind or any of the you're not woman enough to take my man. So what you have is this kind of surprisingly proto-feminist film. When that tune comes out, Don't Come Home a-Drinking, it's the year that women's liberation is used. And Loretta's not going to use that term. She's not joining any movement, and neither are her fans.

But they are imbibing of these fundamental human aspirations. Well, you thought I'd be waiting up when you came home last night. You'd been out with all the boys and you ended up half-tired. And let's just stop and talk about the unspoken thing, which is rock and roll. Every single one of the Beatles, their initial impulse was country. You know, a quarter of the songs that the Beatles gave Ringo to sing were country songs. They're gonna put me in the movies. They're gonna make the big star out of me.

We'll make a film about a man that's had no need. And in fact, his first big one, Act Naturally, is a Buck Owens tune, which suddenly revitalized and made Buck Owens cool. When Bob Dylan felt after these just iconic albums like Free Reel and Bob Dylan felt after these just iconic albums like Free Reel and Bob Dylan, Highway 61, Reba. Where does he do? Is it rolling, Bob? He goes to Nashville, and he does Blonde on Blonde and John Wesley Harding and Nashville Skyline.

He's using the Nashville Session musician, the A-Team, they were called, to get the best sound out. The country music station plays soft, but there's nothing, really nothing to turn off. I mean, you just tell me what's not country about the birds. After having explored Psychedelica, they are going to Nashville to record an album, Sweetheart of the Rodeo. No, nothing was delivered

I can't say I survived. I mean, you have Honky Tonk Woman by the Rolling Stones. You know, if you're going to put up barriers, then you've forgotten that everything's on a kind of continuum. And I would suggest, because of the Carter family's Will the Circle Be Unbroken, that it's not a linear one. It comes around. It's full circle. How exactly do you boil down the 20th century into a 16-hour documentary?

Ken Burns tells us when we come back. This is Danny from Seattle, Washington, and you're listening to ThruLine from NPR. All right, so after talking about country music for a while, the conversation moved to music and Ken Burns' films more generally. And Ramtin, who as you probably know scores ThruLine, had a lot of questions. I want to ask you about music, because I've seen all of your movies, and I think that if you look at the Civil War and the way music was used and then vietnam what is your decision making from film to film about

how you use music how much music you use because in vietnam i thought trent resnick and atticus russ's score was incredible unbelievable it's so good what was the decision to like get them involved in that? And it's so much different than some of the other ones. So actually, the music is always the same for us. Even in the two films that it's been about music, jazz and country music, it's not just background,

but it's sort of middle ground and foreground and sometimes a kind of hyperspace as you're deconstructing a piece of music. We record our music before we begin editing. We have most of our music in place. Most people, it's the exact opposite. It's scored, which is a mathematical term. And they're sitting there to the picture and they want to hit this at this. We never do that. We'll cut the picture to the music. Music is such a powerful form. And we might shorten a sentence in order to fit a phrase of music or lengthen it just to fit a phrase of music or just shut up for a second.

It's hard for us to do because we have written films too, and we celebrate that. We don't think the image and the word are at odds, and music is the great reconciler of that. So we're recording our music. In the Civil War, I just sat with a person who played on a piano, all of these hymns, all of these popular music of the day, all this military stuff. And I picked maybe 40 tunes. And then we went into the studio and recorded each of those tunes 40 different ways. And so we'd have all of these choices going in. So each subject requires that you want to have the contemporary music. That's no different than Vietnam. So Lynn Novick, my co-director on Vietnam, was watching the social network. And she went, this music is unbelievable,

and came back and said, we should get them. And it was like, yes, what a great idea. So we went to Trend Anaticus, and they said, yes, we'd love to do that. And they said to us, so they never let us in on the process, that this was one of the most satisfying creative things they'd had working on the stuff and delivered us three hours of material that is mind-blowing. And we went to Yo-Yo Ma and the Silk Road Ensemble, and they took Vietnamese tunes and lullabies and folk tunes that anyone North and South would know and bent them in their unique and completely original fashion. And then we go out and we collect 120 pieces of music. And the first thing we did is we went to the Beatles and said, we can't afford this. We need you to help us. And they said, fine. And then we went to Bob Dylan. He said, fine. And then

we just walked our way through the rest of the 120 pieces. We would have been able to afford 12 had they not said, look, we understand what you're trying to do. And we promised never to play a piece of music that wasn't out. That is to say, you couldn't hear it on armed forces radio or you couldn't hear it in your transistor radio or in your car radio on the way to a demonstration against the war. And that we'd use it honorably. And that has to do with the fact that for us, music is central. It's not like the afterthought.

It's not the icing that you hope is going to amplify emotions you hope you hope are there, but in fact, baked into the process from the beginning. Music is so powerful. I mean, all we're talking about today is music and its power. That's the power of history, right? I think one of the things that on our show we try to do is use history to kind of better understand the world we live in today.

This is exactly the power of history, and this is why I'm there. Because we like to say that we're condemned to repeat what we don't remember. It just doesn't happen. Human nature never changes. The Ecclesiastes says, what has been will be again. What has been done will be done again. There's nothing new under the sun. That suggests that human nature doesn't change.

And so when we think history repeats itself, we're only looking at these habits, these cycles, these motifs, these themes that constantly recur, and it gives the possibility to history to be our best teacher. Mark Twain said, history doesn't repeat itself, but it rhymes. And I can't tell you, there hasn't been a single film, it's almost 40 films I think, some an hour in length, some 18 hours in length, where I haven't finished the film and looked up and gone, my God, it's about the present moment. And I can't convince anybody that this film was essentially editorially locked before the Me Too movement came.

Because you would swear to God, in every episode, we're like, oh, there's a nice little reference to me. I never put in any reference to the present in any of the films. It's just that everything rhymes. But the great tyranny, the great arrogance of the present is that we somehow think that because we're alive and they're not, that we know more than them. And we do not. We experience everything the way they did. And there were conversations 10,000 years ago that were as complex as I hope this is.

When we come back, more on listening to Crewline from NPR. I mean, I'm starting to get a sense of sort of your approach to telling history and all of these stories because it seems like with all of your documentaries, you're bringing together things. It's just, it's way more complicated than you go in maybe thinking it is. You know, it's funny. I think I've grown as a filmmaker, but my very first film for public

broadcasting is one called Brooklyn Bridge. And I was raising money. I looked about 12 years old, and everybody was turning me down. Ha ha, this kid's trying to sell me the Brooklyn Bridge. No. And I used to have binders filled with the rejection letters just to remind me of how complicated it is, particularly in public broadcasting, to get anything done. But I was writing a letter and I added that I was uninterested in excavating dry dates and facts and events of history, that I was interested in an emotional archaeology. I wrote that in like 77 when I was trying to raise money or 78. And I don't know of any better way to put it than that, that if we want to use history as a weapon, then you're only speaking to the choir.

You're only speaking to the converted. You can't possibly change minds. The novelist Richard Powers said that the best arguments in the world won't change a single person's mind. The only thing that can do that is a good story. And a good story, I think we'd all agree, is the one that has that complication, one that has that undertow, one that has a thing in the opposite of a thing being true at the same time. And our ability to tell each other stories and to remind us that we are obligated as human beings, not as Democrats or Republicans or white people or black people or gay or straight people or male or female people or West Coast people or East Coast people or North

people or South people, but just people, is that we're going to have to negotiate these things for ourselves first and to reconcile these seemingly irreconcilable opposites. And when you have the possibility to do that, and art and storytelling are all part of the infrastructure of helping us get through that stuff, then you have the possibility of what everybody wants to be, what everyone wants to be, which is a better person, a better everyone. Yeah. And you said emotional archaeology, which is really interesting because one of the things we struggle with, I think, is the balance between story and timeline, right? Like on the one hand, when you're telling history, you want people to get a sense of what happened over the course of history.

But I completely agree with you that narrative and story is what makes someone. It's the only thing. First of all, there's lots of things to say. First of all, let me explain. Emotional archaeology, this is not sentimentality. This is not nostalgia. Those are the enemies of good anything. The other thing is that quite often we go through

our own fashions in historiography. You drop an atomic bomb after you've murdered 60 million people. And I don't mean us, I mean the human race does this in the Second World War, and everything is questioned and narrative is the first thing to go. So and then and then and then seems hopelessly bankrupt and inadequate to the situation. And so we begin to have Freudian approaches. We begin to have Marxist or economic determinist approaches to things. We have later on symbolism and semiotics and deconstruction and Afrocentrism and all sorts of ways of saying that this is the way in. And what we have come back to understand is that a much more informed, we would say today,

woke narrative allows for all of those possible things. I've just watched with great satisfaction that often there was a knee-jerk criticism to the work that I had done in the 90s because it didn't fit into an academic definition because it's subscribed to this old bankrupt thing called narrative. Now, there are some narratives that are bankrupt. If you think a top-down story of great men is only the story of American history, then yeah, it doesn't work. But if you're engaging a bottom-down story of great men is only the story of American history, then yeah, it doesn't work. But if you're engaging a bottom-up as well as a top-down, you begin to realize that to tell that complicated story, you have to bring in all of these other things.

These are the tools of narrative, not the sole new way to do history. And so I think we've come back. And I've found the Academy back to this idea that, yep, it's narrative. And then, and then, and then we just have to be a little bit more conscious. We have to be a little bit more expansive and generous. We have to be a little bit more inclusive if we're going to call it, if we're going to do our jobs. I think the thing that we struggle with and that I think you do well is when you're telling a story, you mentioned that you've told the story of 20th century America however many times,

and each time is sort of a slightly different story. How do you know what to leave in, what to leave out? How do you make those choices? So that is actually my, our job. We're amassing a vast body of information, stuff that's in the script, stuff that's in the interviews, stuff that's in the photographs, stuff that's in the footage and the live cinematography, whatever it is, it's at least 40, sometimes 50, 60, 70 times what we're going to end up using. And then it's cutting it away. The key for us, we found is time. We're not doing these things in a couple of years. We're doing them over a decade, in the case of Vietnam, 10 and a half years, or we're doing them in eight years. And that's because we want to wrestle with this material. We don't want to disqualify something.

We want to learn. We want to throw stuff out. Our cutting room floor is not filled with bad stuff. It's filled with really, really good stuff that if we picked it up and showed you to go, my God, why isn't that in it? Go, yeah, we're still hurting about that, but it didn't fit. We edit human experience down. Do you ever worry that you leave something out that- All the time. We do. Nothing is definitive. You do what you can do. And I imagine that if I worked on, say, the Civil War now, it would be 35 hours, right? And it may not be as good a film. It was just who I was at that time and just struggling and waking up at four in the morning, which I still do, going, and sometimes it hurts so bad that I'll say, okay, let's put it back in. And then you'll see. And then maybe two months later, three months later, you go, okay, can we take it out? You see how that's destabilized? As great as that scene is, it's now made something an hour later seem kind of boring. And you can watch people look at their watch or shift their chair. And it's

because you've just in that moment lost them. And I make really long films. This is a huge demand on our audience in a time when people are supposed to be butterflies flitting, and we go, no, we need you to stay for 10 episodes and 18 hours of Vietnam or 8 episodes and 16 and a half hours of this. But then I'm obligated to make sure that if you've sat down, there are going to be no interruptions for two hours

and that it's my obligation that if you bring your attention, I will not squander that great gift that you've given me. And if they're curious, we want to reward that attention. And that's the compact of storytelling. Wow.

Thank you so much for this. And we really appreciate it. It's been my pleasure. That's Ken Burns. His new eight-part documentary, Country Music, begins airing on your local PBS station on September 15th. And that's it for this week's show. I'm Rondab Nifata.

I'm Ramtin Adablui, and you've been listening to Throughline from NPR. This show was produced by me. And me and Jamie York. Jordana Hochman. Lawrence Wu. Lane Kaplan-Levinson. Okay, smizing the summer.

Nigery Eaton. Greta Pittinger fact-checked this episode. Original music was produced for this episode by Ramtin and his band, Drop Electric. Thanks also to Anya Grunman. And of course, Ken Burns and PBS. If you liked this episode or you have an idea, please write us at ThruLine at NPR.org. Or find us on Twitter at ThruLineNPR. Thanks for listening. This message comes from Grammarly.

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