Country Music, Episode 5

The tangled and tragic relations between black and white people in America has been one of the themes of pretty well every documentary Ken Burns has ever made, whether his subject is war, music, or baseball. Burns, a good liberal, is always looking for a redemption story if he can find one, something to help us cope with the horror history too often provides. And so tonight Charley Pride gets far more attention than I think an artist this minor should warrant. But - and this is some "but" - the reason Pride is a minor artist has nothing to do with his singing and everything to do with his skin colour. His remarkable voice got him in the back door of Nashville. But his complexion severely limited the songs he was able to sing. Pride himself notes that he couldn't be singing about "Mary, hair of gold." No tom-catting songs from this fella. Pride built his career on the blandest material available. It worked - he had 30 number one hits, he's in the CMA Hall of Fame, a member of the Opry. We should never, never hold his career choices against him. You can only regret what he might have been.

The other theme running through the series is, naturally enough, the Carter-Cash dynastic line. It is indeed a remarkable thing. It runs from the first stirrings of country music right down through today. That first generation, Mother Maybelle and the original family are long gone, of course. By now the second generation, Johnny Cash and June Carter, have also passed from the scene. But Johnny and June's son John Carter Cash is one of Burns' talking  heads. So is June's daughter Carlene. Both, naturally, have gone into the family business. Johnny's daughter Rosanne is here as well, and in my wilder moments I sometimes think Rosanne is the most talented in the whole family - at the very least, she's the best singer. (Daddy's probably got her beat with the songwriting, although Rosanne's awfully good there as well.) This episode ends with Johnny finally kicking the drugs, getting June to marry him, and recording his triumphant show at Folsom Prison, that made him one of the biggest stars in the world. He's about to get his own network TV show and everything.

We're given a bit of a teaser look at an enormously talented singer and songwriter from the Tennessee mountains - Dolly Parton, of course. I expect she'll figure more heavily in upcoming episodes. The other focus of tonight's show is the incomparable Merle Haggard, as well as his Bakersfield compatriot Buck Owens. Buck tended to sneer at the Nashville establishment and didn't take any of it too seriously, which made him a lot of fun. And Merle - well god damn, it's Merle Haggard. Hag's basic life story is itself an epic of sin and redemption, and one he wrote the songs for himself. Because he happened to be one of the greatest songwriters who ever drew breath.

My only question at this point - we're five episodes in, we're up to 1968... where the hell is George Jones? Ah... he probably just didn't show up. Drunk and disorderly again.