by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2019 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Last night Ken Burns’ eight-part documentary Country
Music finished with a segment called Don’t
Get Above Your Raisin’, a line from an old
Bill Monroe song covered by Ricky Skaggs at the start of his career whose basic
premise is, no matter how high you rise, don’t forget where you came from and
stay true to the values you grew up with. If the theme of the immediately
previous episode, “Are You Sure Hank Done It This Way?” (sung by Waylon
Jennings in 1975 in the persona
of an aspiring country singer who’s wondering if Hank Williams had to endure
the crap he’s going through on his way to the top), was the clash between what
the executives at the major Nashville recording companies and publishing firms think is salable and what the artists want to do — often resulting
in surprise successes like Willie Nelson’s Red-Headed Stranger, which his record label originally didn’t want to
release, finally put out thinking it would bomb and teach Willie a lesson, and
instead it stayed on the charts for over two years, broke Nelson to a pop
audience and made him a superstar — the theme of this episode was the ongoing tension between country
music’s basic identity and the desire of country record labels, publishers and the artists themselves for mass success. Oddly, the
episode’s title dated the years it covers as 1984 to 1996 — though it really
extended to 2003 and the death of Johnny Cash — and it mentions the remarkable
twilight comeback of the Man in Black. After Columbia Records dropped him in
1986 Cash got signed by Mercury in one of those contracts in which a label
tries to suck the last marrow from the bones of a once-major star’s popularity,
and while he made one great song during that affiliation (his record with U2,
“The Wanderer”), for the most part it was more attempts to fit Cash into the
prevailing commercial mold of the time. Then Cash ended up with Rick Rubin’s
American Records label and made six raw, unvarnished albums that included his
cover of Trent Reznor’s song “Hurt,” which became a surprise hit — so Cash
ended his recording career as he had begun it with Sam Phillips at Sun Records,
at an independent label working for a visionary producer who let him be himself
in all his raw glory.
The episode mentions the rise of country music as a
commercial force with the creation of Country Music Television (CMT) and the
Nashville Network cable channels in 1986 — which sparked yet another period of
ascendancy in the genre’s
popularity that, like the one in the late 1970’s, didn’t last. It mentions the
deregulation of radio during the Clinton administration and the rise of huge
radio chains, which made it harder for new artists to “break” as the decisions
about what got played on the air got concentrated into fewer and fewer hands to
the point where the way Loretta Lynn broke her first independently produced
record — she and her family drove around the country looking for transmitter
towers, visited each station and pleaded with the on-duty D.J.’s and program
directors to play it — became impossible. The show mentioned the new artists
that arose during the time it covered, including Garth Brooks — who became the
first country star to stage his concerts like rock shows (he’d grown up
listening to — and going to live appearances by — bands like Queen and Kiss,
and he got the idea of being flown over the audience on wires from Freddie
Mercury) and who would ultimately become the biggest-selling solo recording
artist of all time, surpassing Elvis Presley (though if you count all the records he’s been on, both with the Beatles and
on his own, Paul McCartney remains the biggest record-seller ever) — as well as
Skaggs, George Strait, Reba McIntire, The Judds (whose story — mom working as a
nurse in Nashville while promoting her daughter’s career and ultimately
becoming a star herself alongside her daughter), Randy Travis, Travis Tritt,
Mary Chapin Carpenter, Patty Loveless, Alan Jackson, Clint Black and Vince
Gill, who’s promoted extensively.
Gill’s segment includes the story of his
memorial song “Go Rest High on That Mountain,” which he began when his friend
Keith Whitley, whose duets with his wife Lorrie Morgan had evoked comparisons
with George Jones and Tammy Wynette, died of alcohol poisoning at 33 in 1989 —
though Gill put the song aside and didn’t finish it until his brother died,
also way too young, in 1993. The show depicts Gill singing this song with
Loveless and Skaggs at a memorial concert for George Jones in 2013 (no one who
had followed the story of Jones and Wynette in the 1970’s would have guessed
that he’d outlive her by 17 years!) and becoming so literally overcome with
emotion he couldn’t finish his own song and Loveless had to cut in and take
over the lead from him. The show also discussed another quite moving song —
“Where’ve You Been?,” written by songwriters Jon Vezner and Don Henry based on
an incident with Vezner’s grandparents; his grandmother had got age-related
dementia in her last years and had forgotten most of the people she had ever
known, but when her husband walked into her hospital room she recognized him
and said, “Where’ve you been?” Vezner played the song with aspiring country
singer Kathy Mattea, whom he started dating and later married, and it became a
huge hit and so sure-fire a tear-jerker its presentation on last night’s
program had me crying. (Incidentally
I had heard the song before in a cover by, of all people, 1950’s singer Patti
Page on her last studio album, Brand New Tennessee Waltz from 2000 — in which she also covered Tammy
Wynette’s “’Til I Get It Right” and I think outsung Wynette on her own song.
Beautifully arranged and eloquently phrased, Brand New Tennessee
Waltz remains one of the unsung
masterpieces of popular music in this century and the summit of Page’s
recording career.)
I’m not sure why Ken Burns and his writer, Dayton Duncan,
chose to cut off the story when they did and didn’t add a ninth episode dealing
with more recent artists like the Dixie Chicks (whose blacklisting by country
radio after their comments criticizing President George W. Bush in a London
concert in 2003 is a fascinating story that deserves to be retold), Miranda
Lambert (whose concept album after her breakup with Blake Shelton won the Album
of the Year Grammy Award, a rare achievement for a country singer, and was
obviously in the great tradition of country singers drawing on their personal
lives for material that speaks to all of us), Brandi Carlile, The Band Perry
and the awesome Rhiannon Giddens, who’s extensively interviewed but we’re not
given any idea who she is. As in pop music generally, over the last two decades
the artistic leadership in country music has largely been taken over by women —
as more and more male country artists have come out in cowboy hats, sports
jackets and ultra-tight blue jeans, singing pretty indistinguishable songs
drawing more on the “Southern rock” of the 1970’s than on Hank Williams and
Johnny Cash, it’s been the women who’ve pushed the artistic boundaries of the
form and created most of what I suspect will be the truly lasting music of our
time. Though the final episode of Country Music had a few glitches — including an interminable rant
by Ken Burns’ good friend Wynton Marsalis spliced into the middle of the show
for no discernible reason other than Burns has to trot out this obnoxious
person in every documentary he
does about music — for the most part it was a worthy end to the cycle even
though I would have liked to see one or two more episodes bringing the story up
to date.
