Re: Did you catch the Ken Burns Country Music series opening?
Originally Posted by
V70416
Wasn't it Artie Shaw who said,"Jazz was born in a whiskey barrel,grew up on marijuana,and is about to expire on heroin."?
Whoa. He ought to know.
Except Louis lived to a ripe old age....and so did Artie.
For me, Burns's focus on Armstrong in Jazz and on Jimmy Rogers / Carters / Nelson/ Cash in Country Music was Dead-On.
Burns isn't trying to tell the history of a music. He is trying to remind us of a history of our ourselves as shaped in music.
His docs make it clear that music emerges from rich, hybrid cultures that "rub up" against each other. Despite the segregation (and horrific--if not unique--history) of the American South, it happened to produce more vital, transcendent art forms than in other supposedly more "integrated" parts of the country.
Jazz could only have been born in one place in the Universe at one period in history. And that was New Orleans. Period. And Satch was the Fairy Godmother, if not the Midwife. Marsalis reminded us of that.
Same in their own time and place can be said about blues and country (and particularly bluegrass.) Or tango or bel canto singing....
Burns emphasizes a singular conceptual point about country music that transcends all its specific little roots and origins. Something which has been profoundly meaningful to us all: That, at its best, it is about Redemption: in the church pew, in the living room, in the fields, in the honky tonk.
In "Country Music" Burns made a case that Johnny Cash embodied that. And if that weren't enough, review his words to "A Man in Black".
Nobody, not anyone, has had the huevos to make it so plain. Folk and protest singers at the time sang in the third person or in the voice of another character. Cash put his own voice out on the line. And walked the walk.
"I wear the black for the poor and the beaten down,
Livin' in the hopeless, hungry side of town,
I wear it for the prisoner who has long paid for his crime,
But is there because he's a victim of the times."
Jazz, blues, opera, fado, rap, all telling the same story.
Whatever your ethnicity, race, gender, residency: along with jazz and blues, country music is a singularly American gift to world culture.
I love Puccini and Mozart and Piazzolla and Louis and Hank and Waylon. And Lester and Earl. Don't get me started on Dolly or Patsy or Linda or Emmy Lou.
Why shouldn't everyone? The music's there for the taking.
Mick
Last edited by brunello97; Oct-04-2019 at 10:12pm.
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