![]() Bush was from Texas, artists have been, perhaps understandably, skittish about directly addressing politics in their music. Ever since the Dixie Chicks set off a fierce backlash in 2003 on the eve of the Iraq War when they said they were “ashamed” that George W. “You take country music, you take black music,” he said, and “you got the same goddamn thing exactly.” In the early 1960s, Ray Charles had a huge hit with his album Modern Sounds in Country and Western Music, which featured covers of country classics such as Hank Williams’ “Hey Good Lookin’,” the Everly Brothers’ “Bye Bye Love” and Don Gibson’s “I Can’t Stop Loving You.” As Willie Nelson put it, the pianist better known for rhythm and blues “did more for country music than any one artist has ever done.” Charles himself offered the longest of views. There have been moments when it appeared the doors were opening wider. The irony is thick: one of the greatest country songs in history, “Will the Circle Be Unbroken?,” began as an African-American spiritual. But pioneers like DeFord Bailey and stars like Charley Pride have long been a rarity in a field dominated by white men. Blues and African-American gospel was an essential tributary for the genre as a whole, and there were early black musicians who played important roles. To put it mildly, racial and ethnic diversity has been the rare exception in country rather than the rule. If the themes of country have been more inclusive than many realize, the makeup of those who perform it has been far too narrow. Country is not just about breaking hearts it can be about opening them too. For all of the beer-swilling “We’ll put a boot in your ass/ It’s the American way” lyrics–see Toby Keith’s post-9/11 “Courtesy of the Red, White and Blue (The Angry American)”–there’s Cash defending prisoners or Native Americans and Loretta Lynn warning her man not to “come home a-drinkin’ with lovin’ on your mind” and touting the virtues of “The Pill,” an ode to a woman’s right to her own body that became a best seller despite being banned by many top radio stations. There’s always been a strain of protest alongside the sentimental patriotism. Long considered the soundtrack of conservatism, country is in fact more complicated and more interesting than the prevailing caricature would have it. Still, the ways country has been marketed from the start have obscured its other faces. The Carters’ music was rooted in gospel, the sounds of Sunday morning Rodgers’ in the carousing world of Saturday night–thus setting up ongoing themes in a genre that touched on both redemption and sin. Before long, Peer had discovered both the Carter Family singers and Jimmie Rodgers, whom he recorded in a 24-hour period in Bristol, Tenn. ![]() Ralph Peer was a successful producer of what were called “race records” when he noticed Carson’s appeal. There it all was, even in the beginning: nostalgia and newness, sentiment and sales. Carson, for instance, benefited from the rise of radio as a mass medium: WSB in Atlanta (call letters that stood for Welcome South, Brother) put him on the air, and together with a growing market for phonographic records, the twin technologies helped fuel the creation of what became known as the music business. One songwriter defined country music as “three chords and the truth,” but the editor of Variety in 1926 called country people “illiterate and ignorant … poor white trash … with the intelligence of morons.” Burns’ film, however, shows that the music and its makers and promoters were anything but ignorant or moronic–and they certainly weren’t simple. ![]() “But it spoke for a lot of people who were being forgotten, or felt they were being forgotten.” “Country music is full of songs about little old log cabins that people have never lived in the old country church that people have never attended,” the historian Bill C. Even people who had known only city life liked to indulge in reminiscence about simpler times. In Georgia in the 1920s–the state where a new Ku Klux Klan had been founded in 1915–“Fiddlin’ John” Carson gained popularity, his music resonating in a country that was rapidly urbanizing. Country came not from the affluent and the accepted, but from the fringes of America–from the hills and hollows, from Sunday morning and Saturday night, from barrios and blues clubs. ![]()
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