I just finished watching the Ken Burns film Country Music on PBS. His best one yet. If you haven't been watching you should know there's a lot more to it than you may think, so don't let the title cause you to ignore an incredible documentary because you may not like country music. Do you like history? Do you like folk music? Or rock? Drama, comedy, action or adventure? It's all in there. If you have been watching you know what I mean.
This blog post is about one part near the end of Episode 7 that I believe is the most profound and exquisite comment ever written about a particular piece of music since the Lester Bangs review of Astral Weeks in Rolling Stone Magazine. It is where the narrator (Peter Coyote) says this about the wildly successful Willie Nelson / Merle Haggard recording of the album and song Poncho and Lefty -
"The song was Poncho and Lefty. The album would shoot to number one on the country charts, cross over to pop and sell more than a million records. To get there, the song had traveled a long, meandering road. Two of country music's legendary songwriters...the musical outlaw from Texas and the poet of the common man from the hardscrabble streets of Bakersfield...had listened to an album recorded by a former hippie folk singer who had been converted to country music by a cosmic cowboy and in doing so stumbled upon a song written by an eccentric vagabond who spent his days trying to write the perfect song and some of his nights crashing with friends at a home where the focus was on art, not commercial success."
The musical outlaw and the poet of the common man were, of course, Willie Nelson and Merle Haggard. The former hippie folk singer was Emmylou Harris. The cosmic cowboy was Gram Parsons. The eccentric vagabond...Townes Van Zandt. And the home was that of Guy and Susanna Clark. That paragraph could be a movie itself!
The entire series that makes up the film is 16 hours long. I don't watch that much TV in a week. But I could have watched this show in one sitting if that's how it was presented, rather than over several nights. I still might. I'd like to see it again. It's streaming online now. I want to see that Poncho and Lefty part one more time. And the part about when Marty Stuart was 13 years old he rode a bus from his hometown in Mississippi to Nashville at the request of Lester Flat to play mandolin in his band.
I thought I knew a lot about country music, but I learned so much more by watching this show. For example - I learned that a now famous country star was in a Bluegrass band hired to be the opening act for KISS at a concert in the 70s. They were booed off the stage after three songs. I could tell you his name...but I won't. You'll have to watch to find out. Hey ... if you can binge watch all 62 episodes of Breaking Bad or all 7 seasons of the Gilmore Girls you should be able to catch all 8 episodes of Country Music. But if you only have time for one - make it Episode 7. You'll be better off for it.
Roger O'Dea 9/26/2019
