Eight and a half years ago, the most famous documentarian of the modern era got down, metaphorically, on his knees and, as he likens it, "proposed to country music." It's the second genre that Ken Burns has directed his camera lens towards in his career—Jazz debuted in 2001 to wide acclaim—and, as he recalls, it felt inevitable. "I’m looking for stories that are firing on all cylinders," he explains, "and [Country Music] is an American story firing on all cylinders."

Across 16 hours and eight episodes, Burns traces the banjo's path from Africa to America to the "Big Bang" of country music when Jimmie Rodgers and the Carter Family (the genre's first stars as it became an industry) recorded their initial records within the same week at the same studio as each other. He continues all the way through Garth Brooks finding a new stratosphere of stardom in the Nineties and it ends with Roseanne Cash—as the daughter of June Carter, a descendant of country music's First Family—talking about the death of her father, Johnny Cash. The first installment premieres tonight on PBS.

As was the case in Jazz, Burns invited a wide swath of musical pioneers for interview: Marty Stuart, the late, great Merle Haggard, Willie Nelson, an incandescent Rhiannon Giddens, not to mention Dolly Parton, Vince Gill, Garth Brooks, Dierks Bentley, Wynton Marsalis, Ketch Secor, Jack White, and so many more. (He filmed 101 interviews for the project.) And in doing so, he illuminates not just how many names the genre has made household staples, but also much the history of each artist is a part of the American story.

Photograph, Snapshot, Photography, Musical instrument, Vintage clothing, Plucked string instruments,
Courtesy of PBS.
Johnny Cash and June Carter, New York City, 1975.

Below, Esquire caught up with the filmmaker for a wide-ranging conversation about class, race, country music, and yes, Lil Nas X. The conversation has been edited for clarity and length.

ESQ: Earlier this year, Lil Nas X released “Old Town Road” and it pretty quickly got pulled from Billboard’s Country charts. In the time since, it’s been remixed with Billy Ray Cyrus and become one of the biggest songs in Hot 100 History. The scope of Country Music ends more than a decade before 2019, but I’m curious how you took that, given the research you did for this project.

Ken Burns: My mic drop moment is Lil Nas X. Every episode of our eight-episode series is dealing with race, right? And you just go, “It’s the most popular single of all time, and it’s country, and, oh by the way, it’s by a black gay rapper.” Thank you very much, done.

African-Americans have been central to this story. Jimmie Rodgers got all his chops from listening to the black railroad crews in Southern Mississippi—and then you take the next four people who deserve to be on Mount Rushmore: AP Carter, representing the Carter family, Hank William, Bill Monroe, and Johnny Cash. All of them have an African-American mentor, and they acknowledge it. Hank Williams said all the musical training [he] needed was from Rufus “Tee Tot” Payne. AP Carter was going around song-collecting with Lesley Riddle. Bill Monroe's influences with his Uncle Pen and Arnold Schultz. Gus Cannon, an old guy who'd been recording since the '20s in Memphis, is the great mentor of Johnny.

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Courtesy of PBS
Bill Monroe on the Grand Ole Opry in Nashville, around 1958.

Country music has never been one thing. It has always been many things. If you think about the “Big Bang” being the Carter Family and Jimmie Rodgers [the two acts recorded their first records within the same week in 1927], and they don’t sound anything alike. And then country music goes and gets cowboy and gets Western Swing and gets Bakersfield and gets the Nashville Sound and has all varieties of string music and then bluegrass and then countrypolitan … my God, and it intersects. It's not a separate silo. It's abutting jazz and the blues and rhythm and blues, and folk, and rock, and classical, and pop. It is with rhythm and blues, the parents of rock and roll. There are just no borders.

That’s what much of the beginning of the documentary focuses on—“the Rub”—or how country music progressed via borrowing sounds and stylings from other communities. If that’s what leads to progress, is it necessarily good? The conversation around appropriation can get very heated.

If you call it appropriation, then its bad. If you call it what people do, which is exchange things, then it’s really good. A mutt lives longer than a purebred. And that's what we are, that's the American story. We're an alloy, we are made up of constituent metals and elements, right? If you think that you can convince somebody that by taking out and isolating one of those things, you're stronger, you are in fact more brittle and weaker. That's what Country Music's message is; that's what my message has always been, without it being didactic. I'm not trying to impose it. I'm just saying that the American experience shows us that this mixture is what gives us our strength.

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And, if you're saying, "Oh well, the, you know, he wouldn't have been Hank Williams," or, "He wouldn't have been Jimmie Rodgers," or, "He wouldn't have been Johnny Cash, if he hadn't have taken this music,” you’re forgetting that it’s a two-way street. You wouldn't wouldn't have jazz, you wouldn't have R&B, if that wasn't the case. It’s incredibly telling that when Ray Charles got creative control of an album for the very first time in his distinguished professional life, what does he do but blow the minds of all of his fellow musicians in his R&B world, his soul world, and records Modern Sounds in Country and Western Music.

This is more philosophical than it's specific to country, but I've had the great privilege of working in this space, all of my professional life—that means now, way more than 40 years—between the lowercase two-letter plural pronoun “us” and its capitalized counterpart, “U.S.” That is all the intimacy, and emotion of us along with we, and our, and then all of the majesty and the complexity and the complication and the controversy and contradiction of the United States. And what I've understood [from] working and talking about Country Music now that it's done is that there's only us. There's no them. It doesn't exist, it's only us. And you could say that us is just everybody in the United States, or everybody in the world, it doesn't really matter to me.

Merle Haggard On Stage
Paul Natkin
Merle Haggard, Fresno, California, April 19, 1986.

Merle Haggard is one of your most prominent guests. It was wonderful to see him in conversation again.

Let’s make a bet. I'll buy you lunch if this doesn't happen: After this series comes out, Hollywood will put, at least into development, a bio pic of Merle Haggard. And we got him just before he passed away. How lucky are we? You realize what Emmylou says, "You want to know about country music, you get a Merle Haggard record.”

“I like everything except country music,” is a pretty common rejoinder for people when describing their music tastes. Why do you think they feel the need to disassociate from the genre?

It took me a long while to realize, as a filmmaker, that my interest in American history has mainly been about race … But I think class is also a hugely important thing. You’ve got a lot of people who don’t want to slip down to the level that they think is the gutter, right? So what you have in country music is a story of people in abject poverty lifting themselves up. But as they’re trying to get up, [they’re] experiencing, as everyone else of their class or region of origins is also experiencing, unbelievable discrimination—like the Okies, or the hillbillies when they first came to Nashville. I think that’s important to tell.

And the major dismissiveness of country is that it’s simple and it “doesn’t mean anything.” [That] shows a kind of snobbishness. And when people ask me who I made this film for, I say everybody, but especially those who think they don’t like country music. These are complicated stories that are intersecting with class and poverty and race and geography and art and creativity. It's American history firing on all cylinders, and another way for us to see the complicated 20th century.

Is it also that the stereotype of what “country” music is—pick-up trucks and cold ones—is actually quite from far from what country music is and does?

People just presume a kind of one dimensionality to it. It’s been imprisoned by [the idea] that it’s only one thing—that it’s just white and conservative—when, in fact, the astounding things that we learned about race, about class, about poverty, about women, about all sorts of things. As Wynton Marsalis says in this film, “Music is the art of the invisible.” [In country music], you combine it with the most elemental poetry, and you’ve got a combination that’s sort of a mainline of real emotion. So when Harlan Howard says that country music is “three chords and the truth,” he’s acknowledging that it doesn’t have the sophistication and the complexity of classical music and some forms of jazz, but boy does it deliver on the other half, the truth.

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Courtesy of PBS.
Johnny Cash at home.

As we see time and time again in this film, the genre was founded by, and then carried on by, outspoken artists willing to make controversial material. I’m thinking about Kitty Wells’ pro-female anthem “It Wasn’t God Who Made Honky Tonk Angels,” or Loretta Lynn’s songs for the sexual revolution, or Johnny Cash’s musical protests in support of the Native Americans. That’s not really the case when you consider who staffs the A-list of Music City in 2019. Many people seem to say that in the wake of the Dixie Chicks’ fallout from speaking against George W. Bush in 2003, musicians are now too afraid to say much at all. Did you find that to be the turning point?

I don’t think so. I think it's more our era now. Everything has become so hyperpartisan and so hyperpolarized that it's really hard to remember when it was possible for a well, you know, uh, Charlie Daniels to go to the anti-war March in November of '69 with Earl Scruggs and his son Randy. I’m sure he doesn’t want that out there, but it doesn’t matter, because that art transcends [that conversation].

I just go back to that, that in some ways, your profession and to some degree in my profession, though I've tried so hard to escape it, is about conflict of that kind of binary political [division]. And that if you go and say, "This is what I learned from this," then there's only us, there's no them. Then we could be talking about Hank [Williams’], The silence of a falling star/Lights up a purple sky/And as I wonder where you are/I'm so lonesome I could cry… I'm not asking you if you're Jewish, or Muslim, or Christian—this is what Wynton is saying when he says, "We all have an ethnic heritage, but we have a human heritage that's much more important, and art tells the tale of us coming together."

One of the main arguments that have been made in recent years in the genre is that women are being excluded from the country music narrative; that they are being unfairly underplayed on radio and under-represented on the top half of festival billings. That really feels in stark opposition to the early generations of the genre in this film, where women were so clearly integral in the founding and building of the industry.

The women’s story is important. And we can lose sight in our contemporary complaints of women’s exclusion—though they’re not excluded from Americana and roots stuff, though that’s a discussion for another time—but we’re just historians. So I don’t want to have a binary argument about the exclusion of women, but I can say that it is potentially ironic for you to note that from the beginning, women have been central to this story.

Musical instrument, String instrument, Classic, Sitting, Musician, Vintage clothing,
Courtesy of PBS
The Original Carter Family. From left: AP, Maybelle and Sara Carter, around 1930

There’s Maybelle Carter, right? She’s the original American guitarist. And who is the original voice? It isn't just Jimmie Rodgers, it's also Sarah Carter. You add to that Rose Maddox of the Maddox Brothers and you also have Kitty Wells, and I have to hold my breath now because then there's Patsy Cline, then there's Loretta Lynn, who's singing “You're Not Woman Enough to Take My Man,” and, more importantly, “Don't Come Home a Drinkin' With Lovin' on Your Mind” and “The Pill.” And I haven’t even mentioned Dolly Parton or Reba McEntire…all of these incredible women that dominate [the genre]. Now, whatever’s going on, you assume that everything will change, and something will happen. [Kacey] Musgraves is helping to suggest that that might be true.

Country Music was almost a decade in the making. What’s next?

I have seven films going. One's on Ernest Hemingway, one's a biography of Muhammad Ali, a big extensive one. We're doing the next war, if I can be so crass, on the American Revolution, and we're also doing another biography of Benjamin Franklin. We're doing a history of the Buffalo; a kind of portrait, a parable of de-extinction. We're working on the history of the United States and the Holocaust, what we knew and when we knew it, what we did and what we've been doing—what we should have done. And we're doing a history of the Great Society. All of them have film shot, except for the Buffalo, which is, is in early pre-production. And there's three or four other films beyond that, that I'm not even going to mention, because it seems like I'm piling on.

Reba McEntire in Concert  - Mountain View CA
Tim Mosenfelder
Reba McEntire, Mountain View California, April 13, 1993.

When you began to dig back into America’s relationship with the Holocaust, you probably couldn’t have predicted how many current headlines would be dominated by Nazism in America.

We don't look at it in the present. Just know, as Mark Twain said, “No matter what we do, history doesn't repeat itself, but it rhymes." He's supposed to have said, but it's a difficult story, because the National Socialist Party came to the United States to study Jim Crow exclusionary laws, and then they stuck around for Eugenics, and then perfected it in the worst possible sense of that word. And that's part of the story, too. It isn't just, Why didn't we do this? And it’s all about immigration and who's an American and who's not an American. Who should be let here, and how do we keep people away? Or do we let them in? And it’s also, What do you do when you find out one of the worst atrocities—if not the worst atrocity in human history—is taking place? What do you do? What don't you do? If your hands are tied, what can you do? It's very complex, and very few people are draped in glory in this story, except the heroic survivors and the even more heroic people who didn’t survive.

Country Music will air on PBS Sunday, September 15 at 8 p.m. EST. Spotify has also launched an enhanced playlist for the project featuring archival musical works as well as commentary from Burns. An accompanying soundtrack is also being released. The five-CD collection is currently available for purchase.