by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2019 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Last night’s episode of the Ken Burns mega-documentary Country
Music — which, interestingly, I’ve liked
considerably better than his Jazz
documentary, probably because though I like a lot of country music it isn’t as
important to me as jazz and therefore I’m not as invested in its history — was
called “Will the Circle Be Unbroken?” and covered the years 1968 to 1972, the
years of Viet Nam, Richard Nixon’s first Presidential term and the political
ferment in the country that is still
dividing it (Donald Trump’s appeal is largely to people who want to repeal the
1960’s and reverse the sweeping social changes that advanced the rights of
people of color, women and Queers). Burns and his writer, Dayton Duncan, struck
a good balance between depicting how the political ferment of the time affected
country music and straightforwardly presenting the music’s history. They began
with a performance of Leon Russell, of all people, leading an all-star studio
band in a performance of the Carter Family’s song “Will the Circle Be
Unbroken?” that provided their episode title. Much of the episode centered
around how country music, I think more than any other pop-music genre, reveres its past — so many of its artists
consciously reach back to the forefathers and foremothers, like the Carter
Family, Jimmie Rodgers and Hank Williams, for inspiration — and the show ended
with “Will the Circle Be Unbroken?” as performed by the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band
for their 1972 three-LP album of that title, for which they recruited country
stars of the past like Roy Acuff, Maybelle Carter and Earl Scruggs and
accompanied them in new versions of their old songs to show that even though
they might have come from the long-haired hippie-folk scene, they still revered
the country tradition. The main artists profiled included the bluegrass
revivalists — Scruggs and Lester Flatt in particular, who had smash hits with
the theme song from The Beverly Hillbillies and a revival of the instrumental “Foggy Mountain
Breakdown” when it was used as the theme song for the film Bonnie and
Clyde before the politics of the 1960’s
broke them up as a team. Flatt took his side with the pro-war Right while
Scruggs performed at the Viet Nam Moratorium march and rally in Washington,
D.C. on October 15, 1969 and formed a new band with his long-haired kids.
The
show also did a long segment on George Jones and Tammy Wynette, jointly and
severally, praising Jones as a singer with a great sense of phrasing (he’s one
more country artist who could take a song full of melodramatic content about
lost love and drowning his sorrows in drink, and perform it in such an
understated fashion he made it seem real instead of bathetic) and arguing that
he inherited his long-time alcoholism from his father, who drank himself into
an early grave when Jones was just nine. I’ve just been listening to the CD The
Essential Tammy Wynette, and while her most
famous song was “Stand by Your Man,” for the most part she recorded songs about
families desperately clinging together or going through bitter divorces. The
song “D-I-V-O-R-C-E,” in which she and the husband she’s about to get rid of
spell out the traumatic words so their kids won’t realize what’s going on,
wasn’t the only one in which Wynette played a woman about to part from her
husband and wondering how she could ease the trauma for their children. Both
Jones and Wynette had been married twice before when they got together, and
there’s a description of an insane scene that itself sounds like the subject of
a country song in which Jones and Wynette’s second husband, a songwriter one of
whose songs Jones had just recorded, had a drunken confrontation at Wynette’s
home one night in which Wynette’s husband accused Jones of being in love with
her — and Jones said, “I am.” One woman interviewed on the show noted the irony
that Loretta Lynn wrote and recorded songs about confronting cheating spouses
and being ready to dump them, but she stood by her man whereas Wynette, whose trademark song (and the
title of her autobiography) was “Stand by Your Man,” was married five times. I
remember seeing Wynette herself on a talk show years ago when she told a story
about one of her futile attempts to stop Jones from drinking: she hid the keys
to all their cars so he couldn’t go out to a bar or a store to buy booze. But
she forgot that they owned a tractor-style lawn mower — and Jones fired it up
and drove it down the streets to get his liquor fix. No one who followed their
lives in the tabloids then could have guessed that Jones would survive Wynette
by 15 years (she died in 1998 and he in 2013).
The show also continued the
story of Johnny Cash, who followed his triumphant comeback with the Live
at Folsom Prison album by recording an even
bigger album at San Quentin, which generated the biggest hit of his career, “A
Boy Named Sue”; his TV series on ABC, in which he defied the network and put on
controversial stars like Pete Seeger as well as singing the word “stoned” in
his cover of Kris Kristofferson’s “Sunday Morning Coming Down” in defiance of
the network censors. The most powerful clip shown here from the Cash program is
his appearance with Louis Armstrong performing Jimmie Rodgers’ “Blue Yodel No.
9,” reproducing Armstrong’s original playing on Rodgers’ record in 1930 — in
1970, a year before Armstrong’s own death, he was playing superbly and the
occasion was clearly emotional for him. It also depicted Cash’s performance at
the White House in April 1970, for which Richard Nixon had asked him to play
two Right-wing songs, Merle Haggard’s “Okie from Muskogee” (which at least is a
great song) and Guy Drake’s “Welfare Cadillac” (which isn’t), and instead Cash
performed “What Is Truth?,” a radical song which took the side of the young
anti-war protesters and directly compared Nixon to Pontius Pilate, and which
Cash had written intentionally as an “answer record” to “Okie from Muskogee.”
In those highly fraught political times this had led we young Leftists to write
off Merle Haggard as “their” country singer and embrace Johnny Cash as “our”
country singer — which was more than a bit simplistic. In the early 2000’s
Haggard would record songs criticizing the war in Iraq and calling for a more
aggressive social response to AIDS. In his interview with Stephen Colbert
country singer Tim McGraw, promoting the book Songs of America he co-wrote with historian Jon Meacham, would
proclaim Cash’s “Ragged Old Flag” as his favorite American political song
because it could be read either way — a Right-wing listener could read it as a
patriotic anthem while a Left-wing listener could hear in its lyrics a
celebration of what the late Michael Harrington, who wrote in his autobiography
Fragments of the Century that “if
the Left wants to change America because it hates it, the people will reject it
and the people will be right,” called “the seed beneath the snow,” the
righteous beauty of the ideals on which America was founded even though we’ve
all too often fallen far short of them in our actual reality.
The Burns
documentary covered country music’s response to Viet Nam largely through songs
like Loretta Lynn’s “Dear Uncle Sam,” Mel Tillis’ “Ruby, Don’t Take Your Love
to Town” (a plea from a servicemember to his girlfriend back home to remain
chaste until he returned) and Jan Howard’s “My Son,” an ode to the oldest of
her three sons, who was serving in Viet Nam when she made the record. In one of
those macabre twists a fiction writer wouldn’t dare make up, her son heard the
record — she sent him a demo while he was “in country” — but didn’t live to see
its release because the day after he got the demo, his military vehicle was
blown up by a land mine. Later her youngest son, broken up by the death of his oldest brother
and anxious about his other brother, who was also serving in Viet Nam,
committed suicide. An anti-war organizer made the mistake of coming to Howard’s
home and asking her if she’d perform as an anti-war benefit, and as she
recalled it in her interview on this show, she politely told him that her son
had given his life for the man’s freedom to express himself politically, but
she still supported the war and wouldn’t be playing at an anti-war event — and
then she got angry and added, “And if anyone from your group ever comes to my
home again, I’m going to blow them away with a .357 Magnum.”
Among the other
people profiled on this show was Kris Kristofferson — one interviewee actually
cited him as the greatest and most poetic lyric writer in the history of
American song (which seems a bit much to me) — who came from an unusual
background: he was from a military family, went to West Point, actually
volunteered for Viet Nam but instead was assigned as an instructor stateside,
then suddenly resigned from the military (and was disowned by his family) to
pursue a career as a songwriter, got a job as a janitor at Columbia Records’
Nashville studio to earn a living and meet the stars, made the rounds of music
publishers and finally got himself a publishing contract as a songwriter. But
to his astonishment the publisher made his songwriter’s contract with
Kristofferson dependent on Kristofferson also signing with his record company
and making an album himself — despite Kristofferson’s protests that he really
wasn’t a singer. Interestingly, the first song Kristofferson and his publisher
“placed” with another artist wasn’t one of the breakthrough hits everybody
remembers (“Sunday Morning Coming Down” with Johnny Cash and “Me and Bobby
McGee” with Janis Joplin) but Sammi Smith’s version of “Help Me Make It Through
the Night.” The show leaves out some of the more interesting Kristofferson
anecdotes, like him renting a helicopter to fly out to Johnny Cash’s home
during a party to offer him “Sunday Morning Coming Down” (though it does mention Kristofferson had learned to fly a
helicopter in the military) or the legend (which, given what we know about
Janis could well be true) that he and Janis Joplin were having a brief affair
and she recorded “Me and Bobby McGee” as a favor to her new boyfriend to boost
his career (though by the time her record was released Kristofferson’s career
was already launched and Janis was dead).
The show closes with a segment on
Willie Nelson and his frustration that, despite writing songs that had become
hits for others (“Hello, Walls” for Faron Young, “Pretty Paper” for Roy
Orbison, and the mega-hit “Crazy” for Patsy Cline), he hadn’t been able to get
his own career as an artist going in Nashville, and it claims that at one point
he just laid down across one of Nashville’s busiest streets before (a story
which will undoubtedly be expanded on in the next episode) moving back to his
home state of Texas and making Austin a center of alt-country for artists like
himself and Waylon Jennings (who so far has been barely mentioned in this show
even though he was discovered by Buddy Holly in 1958 and had a best-selling career
as an artist before Nelson did) who didn’t really fit into the Nashville mold.
