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If you took the Mount Rushmore of country music and said it was five people: The Carter family — that’s more people, anyway, but say the three people in the Carter family represent one head. And Jimmie Rogers and Hank Williams. And Bill Monroe, because he invents, like Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker, a whole new musical form. They did bebop; he did bluegrass. And Johnny Cash.
A.P. Carter travels around Appalachia with a Black man named Lesley Riddle catching songs. Jimmie Rogers, who is the Saturday night to the Carter family Sunday morning — the great musical divide, it populates jazz and rhythm and blues and rock, as well as country — he’s gotten all of his musical influences from working with the Mississippi railroad gangs, which are nearly entirely Black, so he’s steeped in the blues.
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Hank Williams, the hillbilly Shakespeare, has Rufus Payne. He said: “Everything I know about music, I learned from Rufus,” and Rufus was a Black man. Bill Monroe, father of bluegrass, his uncle Pen, he cites as a big influence. But he also cites a guy named Arnold Shultz, who was a Black man helping him.
And Johnny Cash bumps into this guy named Gus Cannon on a stoop in Memphis, who’s been a bluesman singing with moderate success since the ’20s. And he gives Cash his chops.
There you have Mount Rushmore, entirely supported by people who went from this level to superstardom level because they had been fully steeped in their mentors’ music, Black people’s music.
“Cowboy Carter” is like the [Beatles’] double “White Album,” right? Yeah. Everything’s there and there are these little experimental riffs.
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The riff on “Good Vibrations” in “Ya Ya.”
Listen to these songs. I mean, “American Requiem.” I really love “Texas Hold ’Em” and “Daughter.” And she’s covering “Blackbird” from the “White Album,” and she’s sampling “Jolene” and she’s inviting Dolly [Parton] and she’s inviting Willie [Nelson], who are, both of them, the two master reconcilers. They kept country music from splintering off into its factions. Willie’s Fourth of July picnics in Austin would have redneck truck drivers, and hippies smoking marijuana. And somehow, that all works. This is a person at the height of their artistic powers.
I want to ask you about the relationship between country music and popular music, because there’s been a historical business tension there. But it seems like we’re at an interesting moment of potential synthesis. There has been this long narrative pitting Beyoncé and Taylor Swift against one another that the two of them have really worked hard in recent years to reject. And this is a moment when Taylor Swift, who has morphed into one of the biggest mainstream pop stars on the planet, has been able to move away from country and Beyoncé has been able to go back to it.
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And Beyoncé, let’s start with her, is in a trio of gals doing R&B and manages to get beyond that, like Dolly. Dolly’s there because she also left Nashville, and everybody accused her of abandoning country. She said, “I’m not abandoning country. I’m taking it with me.”
You set up the question as a kind of thing between Taylor and Beyoncé. This is manufactured by somebody else, and they then spend good efforts trying to remind people that that’s not what they’re about.
I’m not trying to belabor the false perception of an antagonistic relationship between them. But I wonder whether their very public support for one another offers a different way to think about genre. It’s not anyone’s preserve. It’s a wellspring that everyone can visit whenever they need it.
It’s Whitmanesque in a way, for these two women to basically plumb the depths of their personal experience and then cover all the American bases. Because, if you don’t believe in these silos and the distinctions between the genres, in the necessity to sort of get permission or to have a passport to pass between one and the other, you then begin to realize that all you’re waiting for is just great art.
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Art aside, gatekeeping in music is real, because it’s a business. I am curious how you see the role of the Nashville business epicenter of country music, both to wider regional variations and to artists who want to work in the genre but are treated with suspicion.
There was a controversial time when country musicians were sounding more pop-like in the late ’50s and early ’60s. It was called the Nashville Sound. And somebody asked, I think it was Chet Atkins, what the Nashville sound was. And he just jingled the change in his pocket, right? It’s always been about that.
You cannot exclude the dynamics of commerce from it. But you can say that just because there’s the Billboard chart doesn’t mean there’s separation between the forms. If you just study the Beatles, which I’ve done all my life, you understand how much each one of them owes to country music. They take [country star] Buck Owens’s song “Act Naturally.” They give it to Ringo to sing. It’s just such a beautiful thing. And then Buck embraces them and his band starts wearing Beatle wigs.
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In your illustrated history of country music, you mentioned that there’s never been a musical genre you looked at that created such space for women to be assertive and raw. What is it about the form and traditions that creates that permission?
It is a stunning, stunning phenomenon. This thing that presents itself as, ultimately, conservatism has been way ahead on so many values. You know, when people say [Loretta Lynn’s] a proto-feminist, she would reject that in one nanosecond if she was around. But they tried to suppress her singing “The Pill,” she goes, no, I’m going to sing this. And it is just joyous celebration of “I don’t want any more kidsOr the lyrics to “I Will Always Love You.” Everybody’s raised on Whitney Houston’s [version], which used to raise the hairs on the back of my neck. But when you find out the circumstances of [Dolly Parton] trying to gain independence from [duet partner] Porter Wagoner, it suddenly becomes just a spectacular anthem of liberation and, in this case, a woman’s liberation.
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Before she released her new record, “Cowboy Carter,” Beyoncé declared, “This ain’t a Country album. This is a ‘Beyoncé’ album.” But what exactly does “country” mean? To discuss the new album, the conventions of one of the great American musical traditions and the folly of trying to define country as just one thing, I called documentarian Ken Burns, whose 2019 miniseries, “Country Music,” explored the origins and development of the genre. We spoke on the phone about the essential Black influences on country music, why “Cowboy Carter” is like the Beatles’ “White Album” and the insanity of pitting Beyoncé and Taylor Swift against one another. Our conversation has been edited for clarity and length.
Alyssa Rosenberg: There’s this great moment on “Cowboy Carter” when the singer Linda Martell says, “Genres are a funny little concept, aren’t they? In theory, they have a simple definition that’s easy to understand. But in practice, well, some may feel confined.” So I wanted to start by asking: What makes country music country music?
Ken Burns: I’d rather respond to Linda by saying she’s absolutely right. There are no such things as genres. These are constructs of commerce and convenience, that Billboard can have an R&B chart and can have a Country and Western chart — it was called hillbilly music first, so that’ll give you an idea of where it came from. Three chords and the truth, it was said about country music, meaning simple songs. But what you got out of that distillation was a kind of American haiku.
It’s not divorced from race. It is listening to jazz. It’s listening to the blues. It’s listening to rhythm and blues. It’s listening to soul. It’s listening to rock. It’s one of the parents of rock-and-roll, along with rhythm and blues. And so, if you need to label this stuff, it’s a formative power in American music. We’re still mired in needing to label these things one thing or the other, when you don’t need any passport to listen to it.
If you took the Mount Rushmore of country music and said it was five people: The Carter family — that’s more people, anyway, but say the three people in the Carter family represent one head. And Jimmie Rogers and Hank Williams. And Bill Monroe, because he invents, like Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker, a whole new musical form. They did bebop; he did bluegrass. And Johnny Cash.
A.P. Carter travels around Appalachia with a Black man named Lesley Riddle catching songs. Jimmie Rogers, who is the Saturday night to the Carter family Sunday morning — the great musical divide, it populates jazz and rhythm and blues and rock, as well as country — he’s gotten all of his musical influences from working with the Mississippi railroad gangs, which are nearly entirely Black, so he’s steeped in the blues.
Hank Williams, the hillbilly Shakespeare, has Rufus Payne. He said: “Everything I know about music, I learned from Rufus,” and Rufus was a Black man. Bill Monroe, father of bluegrass, his uncle Pen, he cites as a big influence. But he also cites a guy named Arnold Shultz, who was a Black man helping him.
And Johnny Cash bumps into this guy named Gus Cannon on a stoop in Memphis, who’s been a bluesman singing with moderate success since the ’20s. And he gives Cash his chops.
There you have Mount Rushmore, entirely supported by people who went from this level to superstardom level because they had been fully steeped in their mentors’ music, Black people’s music.
“Cowboy Carter” is like the [Beatles’] double “White Album,” right? Yeah. Everything’s there and there are these little experimental riffs.
The riff on “Good Vibrations” in “Ya Ya.”
Listen to these songs. I mean, “American Requiem.” I really love “Texas Hold ’Em” and “Daughter.” And she’s covering “Blackbird” from the “White Album,” and she’s sampling “Jolene” and she’s inviting Dolly [Parton] and she’s inviting Willie [Nelson], who are, both of them, the two master reconcilers. They kept country music from splintering off into its factions. Willie’s Fourth of July picnics in Austin would have redneck truck drivers, and hippies smoking marijuana. And somehow, that all works. This is a person at the height of their artistic powers.
I want to ask you about the relationship between country music and popular music, because there’s been a historical business tension there. But it seems like we’re at an interesting moment of potential synthesis. There has been this long narrative pitting Beyoncé and Taylor Swift against one another that the two of them have really worked hard in recent years to reject. And this is a moment when Taylor Swift, who has morphed into one of the biggest mainstream pop stars on the planet, has been able to move away from country and Beyoncé has been able to go back to it.
And Beyoncé, let’s start with her, is in a trio of gals doing R&B and manages to get beyond that, like Dolly. Dolly’s there because she also left Nashville, and everybody accused her of abandoning country. She said, “I’m not abandoning country. I’m taking it with me.”
You set up the question as a kind of thing between Taylor and Beyoncé. This is manufactured by somebody else, and they then spend good efforts trying to remind people that that’s not what they’re about.
I’m not trying to belabor the false perception of an antagonistic relationship between them. But I wonder whether their very public support for one another offers a different way to think about genre. It’s not anyone’s preserve. It’s a wellspring that everyone can visit whenever they need it.
It’s Whitmanesque in a way, for these two women to basically plumb the depths of their personal experience and then cover all the American bases. Because, if you don’t believe in these silos and the distinctions between the genres, in the necessity to sort of get permission or to have a passport to pass between one and the other, you then begin to realize that all you’re waiting for is just great art.
Art aside, gatekeeping in music is real, because it’s a business. I am curious how you see the role of the Nashville business epicenter of country music, both to wider regional variations and to artists who want to work in the genre but are treated with suspicion.
There was a controversial time when country musicians were sounding more pop-like in the late ’50s and early ’60s. It was called the Nashville Sound. And somebody asked, I think it was Chet Atkins, what the Nashville sound was. And he just jingled the change in his pocket, right? It’s always been about that.
You cannot exclude the dynamics of commerce from it. But you can say that just because there’s the Billboard chart doesn’t mean there’s separation between the forms. If you just study the Beatles, which I’ve done all my life, you understand how much each one of them owes to country music. They take [country star] Buck Owens’s song “Act Naturally.” They give it to Ringo to sing. It’s just such a beautiful thing. And then Buck embraces them and his band starts wearing Beatle wigs.
In your illustrated history of country music, you mentioned that there’s never been a musical genre you looked at that created such space for women to be assertive and raw. What is it about the form and traditions that creates that permission?
It is a stunning, stunning phenomenon. This thing that presents itself as, ultimately, conservatism has been way ahead on so many values. You know, when people say [Loretta Lynn’s] a proto-feminist, she would reject that in one nanosecond if she was around. But they tried to suppress her singing “The Pill,” she goes, no, I’m going to sing this. And it is just joyous celebration of “I don’t want any more kidsOr the lyrics to “I Will Always Love You.” Everybody’s raised on Whitney Houston’s [version], which used to raise the hairs on the back of my neck. But when you find out the circumstances of [Dolly Parton] trying to gain independence from [duet partner] Porter Wagoner, it suddenly becomes just a spectacular anthem of liberation and, in this case, a woman’s liberation.
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