Ken Burns latest documentary “Country Music” debuted with episode one last night on PBS. The series will run for eight episodes of nearly 16 hours. I wasn’t going to watch it. I swear I wasn’t. I did. It’s not “The Civil War”, still my favorite, but it’s pretty good.

I wasn’t going to watch this latest documentary because I hate the way my people are thought of by city folk. Although I live in Knoxville, Tennessee now, my family roots are mostly in Breathitt County (“Bloody Breathitt”) and Perry County (Hazard), Kentucky. Barefoot, ignorant, backwards, Bible-thumping, sister-marrying and racist are the words I have heard used. Burns did acknowledge that the musicians of country music were not happy with the term “hill billy”, they accepted it because of the money. As Dolly Parton notes, we can call ourselves hillbillies and red necks, outsiders cannot. It is offensive.

I stayed in Hazard for a couple weeks nearly every summer growing up. My Memow (paternal grandmother) made sure that we dressed up every afternoon. Rifle was optional.

Jeff Manuel, writing in the Washington Post, has a different worry. He worried that Burns would “whitewash” “Country Music”. From the article:

But it will do more than replay the music of cherished favorites. It will also make an argument about who and what counts as country music — a process that has, until now, privileged the genre’s connection to rural Southern white culture over a more complex but more accurate history of country music’s multiracial roots in the past century.

More than other popular music genres, country music journalists, radio and fans police the genre’s boundaries in ways that keep country music stubbornly white and focused on mass market audiences. Most recently, Lil Nas X’s smash hit “Old Town Road” was removed from Billboard’s Hot Country chart because, it claimed, the song “does not embrace enough elements of today’s country music.”

Now, Jeff Manuel is a white guy from Anoka, Minnesota, so his ignorance may be forgiven. Country music artists have always argued about purity. Just this past February, Much.com published an article castigating Lady Antebellum (ugh) and the “Taylor Swift” (Hale No) effect. It’s not all about race.

Manuel is also upset because Burns didn’t use historians. Burns used stars like Rosanne Cash, Merle Haggard and Dolly Parton in the first episode “The Rub”. “The Rub” comes from the fact that African music brought by slaves and Scots-Irish music from the poor, white mountain people rubbed against each other to create this genre. The fiddle in country music came from the Scots-Irish. The banjo came from Africa. The song “This Land Is Your Land” came from the song “When The World Is On Fire” which probably came through both an English past and Negro spiritual. Who knew?

Here is the trailer for “Country Music”:

I am still hesitant about this documentary. Ken Burns was on Fox & Friends this weekend. He was talking about how country music is considered conservative, but Loretta Lynn sang “Don’t Come Home A-drinkin’ With Lovin’ On Your Mind” and “The Pill”. Excuse me, Ken, but female empowerment is not a liberal thing. Thank you very much.

Peter Coyote’s narration is great. Seeing some of the old country stars like Merle Haggard and Charley Pride is great. I hope that Burns doesn’t use Garth Brooks too much. I consider Brooks the anti-Hank Williams. Yes, I am a purist, country music snob. I am hoping he covers the railroad and trucker music that my Papaw loved so much.

You can watch “Country Music” on your local PBS station or stream it on many other platforms.

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