Ken Burns: “Country Music Is About Two Four-Letter Words”

CHRISTIANE AMANPOUR: Our next guest topic can be central to our happiness, our experience of music. It does have the power to help us through tough times and to bring us closer together. Country music is a uniquely American art form and legendary documentary filmmaker, Ken Burns, has turned his lens on those tunes now. In his new series aptly named “Country Music”, he explores the remarkable stories of the people and the places behind the genre. And he sat down with our Walter Isaacson to discuss what he found the most surprising.

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WALTER ISAACSON: So 18 years ago, you do jazz and now this. Is this a country music sort of a follow on your jazz thing?

KEN BURNS, DOCUMENTARY FILMMAKER, COUNTRY MUSIC: I don’t think it’s so much a sequel or a follow up than it is my curiosity about what music tells us about who we are. And I think for the casual listener, country music must seem like light years away from jazz but they’re really right next to each other. They are mongrel American music that is to say made up of desperate parts to begin with but connected to each other. The African-American influence in country music is profound. The banjos from Africa, the early mentors of, I mean, the early heroes of country music had African-American mentors like Johnny Cash, like Hank Williams, like Bill Monroe, like AP Carter, and Jimmy Rogers was steeped in the blues of the train crews that he saw in southern Mississippi, black train crews. It’s just an amazing story of who we are. Not just race but creativity and commerce and those tensions. Women are central to this story in all of their musical forms seem to be fraternities that be grudgingly let women in. It may be the case of country music now but it wasn’t at the beginning. The original guitarist is Mother Maybelle Carter.

ISAACSON: Absolutely.

BURNS: And I mean it’s emotion too.

ISAACSON: And you know when you talk about the ingredients, there’s this wonderful clip you have. I think it’s Marty Stewart. Let me show that clip, if we may, and then we can talk about the ingredients.

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BURNS: All of his children had come to the mother church of country music. It was almost like a badge of honor that you had to bring your culture with you to the table. That’s why Bob Wills and his guys brought us western music. That’s why Hank Williams brought the south with him from Honky Tonks. Johnny Cash brought the black land dirt of Arkansas. Golden Rock brought music out of Kentucky blue jazz music. Willie nelson brought his poetry from Texas. Patsy Cline brought her heartache from Virginia. I mean, it was the most wonderful parade of sons and daughters of America that brought their hearts and their souls and their experiences and it gave us a great era of country music.

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BURNS: I think that at the rhyme and the rhyme attracted all of these people who came from different backgrounds and contributed, almost like tributaries to a massive flowing river of country music. To me, one of the stories that’s coming out of it is our strength is in them. The fact we are always, whatever musical form, whatever any other form we are, a mixture of things that alloy when you try to say no, what’s really American is a one thing and if we pull this out, you pull out a constituent medal from an alloy and you are suddenly weaker. And I think the great message of America and country music broadcasts this in every note and every song and every teardrop and heartache is that we are all in this together. That there’s only us and no them.

ISAACSON: You know that’s one of the themes you always hit in your what is America type theme in your shows, which is it’s a diversity. It’s a mix. And our strengths come from that, whether it’s jazz or baseball or Vietnam even, and now this.

BURNS: Well, you know I think that there’s a wonderful line at the end of jazz that Jeff Ward wrote in which he said this proudly mongrel American music. I think that somehow we’ve gotten this misplaced — it almost feels like we inherited it from royalty. This idea that you should be purebred. I mean, we know that that breeds hemophilia among many, many other things. Our strength is in being this mixture of things, this interwoven fabric. And in the case of country music, the two central instruments, the fiddle, the Celtic fiddle, the European British Isles fiddle with the African banjo, that’s — it’s the — our first episode is called “The Rub.” It comes together. And for a good deal of our history, that rub, that friction between black and white and the American south has produced any number of indignities. But in the case of country music, which is not immune to those indignities, nonetheless, it’s a net positive. And the positive is, is that we get stronger when we’re together. And so Johnny Cash, Bill Monroe, Hank Williams, Bob Wills. All of them are doing a variation on African-American things. Swing music, the blues, they’re all there. Hank Williams who is arguably the greatest of all country singers and song writers who nobody has ever written a better song than “I’m So Lonesome, I Could Cry.” He said that he learned everything he needed to know about music from Rufus Tee Tot Payne who’s an African-American musician that taught him his chops and took it from here to there so that he could be on with Johnny Cash and Dolly Parton and Loretta Lynn. What a wonderful thing. Instead of just, you know, defaulting to our own little, you know, the way we are today, our own particular political or social division, it’s everybody’s part of the same story.

ISAACSON: And you let the people tell their own tales sometimes which is one of your signatures.

BURNS: We thought we would have a lot of historians, and experts, and stuffs, and critics. We didn’t need them. We have one Bill Malone who I think at any point is going to break out into song and play an instrument himself or sing. And so it’s interesting in our first episode, before Willie Nelson and Merrill Haggard catch up to the story, the people who are narrating it are the youngest, the Marty Stuarts and the Rosanne Cash is the people who felt that they couldn’t legitimately have a presence in this music without learning who their grandparents were, who their great grandparents were. And that’s the marvelous thing about country music. Nothing gets left behind. You know, even if you haven’t had a hit in 30 years, you’re still part of the family.

ISAACSON: You start with the Bristol sessions, right, in 1927 or so. Explain why that’s the roots.

BURNS: So in 1923, a guy named Ralph Peter is recording for the first time country artist. But it isn’t until 40 years later that he comes back to Bristol, Tennessee near Galax, Virginia where he’s told a lot of his music is happening and if he really wants to get more people who can do this old time hill country music, that will eventually be called Hill Billy music and that will eventually be called country and western and eventually be called country, you better come there. And he sets up in Bristol, Tennessee. Its main street has Virginia on one side and Tennessee on the other. He sets up on the Tennessee side. And in the summer of ’27, he records in separate sessions the Carter family and Jimmy Rogers. Now, Jimmy Rogers is from Southern Mississippi. He’s got the rogue, the scamp in him. He represents this great tradition, which you know is in jazz and in American life of Saturday night. The Carter family represents the values of home and mother and family and church. Their Sunday morning. This is the big bang creation. And the Carter family doesn’t sound anything like Jimmy Rogers and vice versa. And even within them, there’s disparate tendencies and oppositions that are fascinating and then it goes on to embrace everything else. It’s called the big bang.

ISAACSON: Some of the great characters come very alive to me. Merle Haggard has been one of my favorites. And if you don’t mind, I would love to show a Merle Haggard clip.

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UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Haggard was only nine years old when his father died from a stroke. Something he said later went out of the world that I was never able to replace. To fill the gap, his mother encouraged his budding interest in music hoping it would keep him out of trouble. It didn’t. He ran away for a while at age 10 by hopping a freight train. Then ran away again at 14, hitchhiking all the way to Texas and back.

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ISAACSON: Tell me about the meeting between Merle Haggard and Johnny Cash.

BURNS: So the first time– Merle Haggard is doing 15 years in San Quentin. Not so much crimes but for escaping from juvenile detention centers 17 times. And he even is going to participate in the escape from San Quentin but the guy who’s organizing it says, look, you can play the guitar, you can write songs, you can sing, don’t do this. And the guy gets out but he kills a cop doing it and ends up executed at San Quentin. And Merle sees Johnny Cash play there and it’s an inspiration. Gave him a chance to sort of look beyond himself. He becomes a model prisoner and gets out in three years, becomes a ditch digger back in Bakersfield and then works his way up, and becomes this, you know, Hollywood handsome, as someone in the film says he looks like Warren Beatty, and he cannot only sing but he can write songs that are amazing. And then later on, he ends up on Johnny Cash’s show. And he’s anxious because he doesn’t think his fans know about his San Quentin days and he’s worried this will derail his career or that some newspaper or some magazine is going to find out about it. And Cash says well, let me tell them. He goes why would do you that? He says because then no one else can own it. We can own it. So he tells and of course no one cares. They can tell from the songs that he has that he’s had these experiences in life and Cash does him this double favor of not only giving a boost to his singing career but permitting him to put in his past but not out of his consciousness of his art this troubled beginning.

ISAACSON: The we can own it phenomenon seems to be central to country music in the sense that it’s about heartbreak, it’s about overcoming struggle, and if we own it, we can control it.

BURNS: Country music is so close to the bone, Walter, that we disguise it. We say it’s about good old boys and pickup trucks and six packs and hound dogs. It’s not. You know, the human condition is less. None of us get out of this alive. And so the great art is trying to negotiate that difficult truth. Most of us run from it. And country music is about two four-letter words, love and loss. Particularly loss because this is the end of this human experience. And it does it magnificently because it distills in, as Harlan Howard said, three cords, not complicated, but the truth, very complicated these things. When Hank Williams sings “Hear that lonesome whipper will, he sounds too blue to fly, the midnight train is whining low, I’m so lonesome I could cry”, there’s nobody on the planet that doesn’t know what he’s talking about. The silence of a falling star lights up a purple sky, and as I wonder where you are, I’m so lonesome I could cry. The first and the last verse of a four-verse song that is just about as elemental as you can get. And yet it’s like Dolly Parton. I will always love you. I will always love. I will always love you is the chorus of her most popular song which makes you and me think well, we can become country music stars. Nobody has the guts and the courage but a Dolly Parton or a Hank Williams to understand this is what I’m trying to say. And when you hear the story of why Dolly wrote that, and why she wrote that thing, it will elevate her version way beyond the pop version that Whitney Houston — and not to take anything away from Whitney Houston whose version still raises the hair on the back of my neck. But when you now know the story behind why Dolly wrote it, and see her sing it, not only does a hair go up but the tears come down.

ISAACSON: Women play such a crucial role in the documentary and in country music. And part of the theme is that declaration of independence.

BURNS: Yes. So I think the thing is that country music comes down as sort of white, southern, rural, and conservative therefore patriarchy. From the very beginning, women are central to the story in a way that isn’t in jazz which is a fraternity. In other places, women get barely let into jazz. Maybe Billy Holiday and Ella Fitzgerald and a few other people, that’s about it.

ISAACSON: Big exceptions by the way.

BURNS: Big exceptions, right. They prove the point of what I think country does. But Mother Maybelle Carter, the original American instrumental guitarist, she’s right there. Sara Carter, her sister-in-law, a great singer. You’ve got Rose Maddox of the Maddox Brothers and Rose, the most colorful Hill Billy band in the world. You’ve got Katy Wills. You’ve got Patsy Cline and Loretta Lynn who in the mid-60s, the same year that the National Organization for Women is founded and women’s liberation works its way into the lexicon is singing don’t come home a drinking with loving on your mind. Or the pill. When Loretta does sing don’t come home a drinking with loving on your mind which is talking about a woman’s right to her own body, spousal rape and abuse, women’s rights, period. Nobody in rock and roll or any other form of music is daring to bring up this topic.

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LORETTA LYNN, SINGER: Do you write about life and true love and what was going on that day? That’s the way I did it. It’s just life. I mean the songs are just life because I’ll sing it or I’ll leave it. And I never tell my husband who’s doing what.

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BURNS: And while she wouldn’t call herself a feminist nor would her legion of friends, fans, they’re subscribing to these issues that women have always felt. And that’s why I say when people look at this, they’re not going to believe that this was more or less editorially done before the Me Too Movement. Because the stories, the interstitial stories that we tell are about that executive, you know, who is a little bit too frisky and this person who demands this before you get that and all the women passing on the secrets. Don’t go see him alone without your agent. Don’t go do this. You know, and you begin to realize what we think is new, Black Lives Matter, say, or Me Too Movement, these are just, unfortunately, enduring human issues that we’re just struggling again and again and again.

ISAACSON: You talk about it being generally a white format. And one group that has been marginalized is African-Americans with the exception of the few people like Charlie —

BURNS: Right.

ISAACSON: You’ve got Wynton Marsalis who’s in there talking about let’s go to Wynton talking about it and then maybe you can address that issue.

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WYNTON MARSALIS: The thing about (inaudible), Ray Charles, Charlie, two or three black people who were known to be in country music, they were accepted. The musicians accepted them at a time when a culture did not accept them. There’s a truth in the music. And it’s too bad that we as a culture has not been able to address that. That’s the shame of it.

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BURNS: Well, Wynton is about as close a person to me as anybody in my life. I love him like a brother. And he says something else in the film. He said we all have an ethnic heritage, but we have a human heritage that is much bigger and art tells the tale of us coming together. There’s African-American roots in this music, which is now comes down to us as mostly white. It’s been interwoven and that’s the great beauty of country music is that it is always been not a one thing but a many thing. And I think what Wynton understands is that where we get stuck is sometimes in these ethnic or cultural or political places and that art, in fact, one of the responsibilities of art, is to show the universality of it. And I can’t think of anything that speaks more to those universal themes than we all experience than country music. And it does so directly and with great art. And, you know, there’s a wonderful story in our jazz series, in which, of course, Wynton played a large role where Charlie Parker in the 1940s is playing on 52nd Street, this new revolutionary music he’s invented called b-bop. But between sets, he’s feeding the juke box with nickels and he’s playing country music and he’s playing Hank Williams and he’s playing “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry.” And the cats are going man what are you doing playing that? And Charlie Parker says, listen to the stories.

ISAACSON: Well, history gets us through tough times.

BURNS: It does.

ISAACSON: And so does music.

BURNS: That’s the best thing.

ISAACSON: Thank you for being with us.

BURNS: My pleasure, Walter. Great to see you.