
They’ll allow that occasionally the music drifts too far in one direction or another, but it always cycles back around. Unless it’s about making bank: Half the yarns here feature artists being nearly laughed out of Nashville till they land a hit and everyone is their oldest, bestest friend. That country music comes from the working people and is ultimately about simple sincere storytelling, or in songwriter Harlan Howard’s well-worn phrase, “three chords and the truth” (“even,” adds Rodney Crowell, “when it’s a big fat lie”). Plus, as a side note, couldn’t Burns have turned up a slightly more country-sounding narrator than his standby, the stentorian Peter Coyote?Ĭountry is arguably still more in need of Burns’ public-broadcasting respectability bump than jazz was.Ĭountry Music’s force is in its thousands of pictures and clips and details, but narratively it serves up only a slightly more thoughtful retread of the standard Nashville party line: that country musicians and fans are like one big family-and yet country is also open to everyone, and it’s regrettable if anyone ever gave you a contrary impression. Malone is a welcome presence, and it helps to have the black banjo player Rhiannon Giddens, who has worked to reclaim that instrument’s African American roots, but they ought to have more varied company. There are barely any scholars or critics offering more distanced analysis, the way they might in a Burns war doc.

But they’re all, by definition, industry insiders. That’s often a delight: Who wouldn’t want to hear Dolly Parton, Willie Nelson, the late Merle Haggard, and many others recount their own tales? Several also speak to the genre as a whole-singer-songwriter Rosanne Cash (daughter of Johnny) and mandolin virtuoso Marty Stuart (former child prodigy) could moonlight as music historians. The commentators and storytellers here are nearly all famous musicians. In Country Music, it’s the more progressive end of the Nashville establishment (plus, benignly but absurdly, more Marsalis). In Jazz, that was Wynton Marsalis and the small brain trust of musicians and thinkers around him at the then-new Jazz at Lincoln Center.
#COUNTRY MUSIC KEN BURNS NARRATOR SERIES#
The series was directed by Ken Burns, Sarah Burns, and David McMahon….As a generalist, Burns is prone to swallowing whole the perspectives of the participants and experts he’s taken with. Muhammad Ali is a 2021 four-part documentary film series about Muhammad Ali. Eleanor RooseveltĪs a member of the Democratic Party, he won a record four presidential elections and became a central figure in world events during the first half of the 20th century. Returning to the U.S., she married her fifth cousin once removed, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, in 1905…. Ken Burns/Spouse What president married his cousin? Tom Hanks reads the voices of several characters in the film, including Congressman John F.īig stick ideology, big stick diplomacy, or big stick policy refers to President Theodore Roosevelt’s foreign policy: “speak softly and carry a big stick you will go far.” Roosevelt described his style of foreign policy as “the exercise of intelligent forethought and of decisive action sufficiently far in advance of … In addition to Peter Coyote’s narration, The National Parks: America’s Best Idea features first-person voices read by some of America’s greatest actors. Roosevelt (1933–1945), whose wife, First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt, was Theodore’s niece. Two distantly related branches of the family from Oyster Bay and Hyde Park, New York, rose to national political prominence with the presidencies of Theodore Roosevelt (1901–1909) and his fifth cousin Franklin D. Ken Burns’s seven-part documentary weaves the stories of Theodore, Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt, three members of one of… How is Teddy Roosevelt and Franklin Roosevelt related? How many parts to Ken Burns the Roosevelts?

It’s Peter Coyote, the actor and longtime Burns collaborator who first worked with the documentarian on the 1996 epic “The West.”

Yes, that voice taking you through the 16-hour journey of Ken Burns’ “Country Music” does sound familiar.
