By Mike Haynes
Music can
be powerful, and if you watched Ken Burns’ latest documentary, “Country Music,”
on PBS the past two weeks, you saw – or more important, heard – several
examples.
The fun
songs – Bob Wills’ “Take Me Back to Tulsa” – and the fast songs – Flatt and
Scruggs’ “Foggy Mountain Breakdown” – certainly can raise spirits. But musician
Emmylou Harris said this: “For me, the sad songs are the best, because they
make you feel better, because somehow, they connect you to the world, like
we’re all in the same boat.”
Country
music has plenty of sorrowful songs, many dealing with heartache, cheatin’ and
alcohol. But some of the most moving moments in the Burns film series come in
segments on lives that ended too soon and the hopeful music that followed.
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| Jimmie Rodgers |
Jimmie
Rodgers, “the Father of Country Music” was 35 years old when he died in 1933 of
tuberculosis. His music on the radio and on records had heartened many during
the Depression, and crowds lined the railroad tracks as he was taken from New
York City to his hometown of Meridian, Mississippi, for burial. Rodgers had
just recorded a tune with the lyrics, “yodeling my way back home.”
He hadn’t
been forgotten 20 years later, when 30,000 people attended a memorial in
Meridian, including A.P., Maybelle and Sarah Carter of what could be called “the
Founding Family of Country Music.” The
Carters’ song, “Will the Circle Be Unbroken,” still is a standby at memorial
services with its ending:
“There’s a
better home a-waiting, in the sky, Lord, in the sky.”
The
documentary recalls that at Rodgers’ 1953 memorial, it had been said that the country music mantle had been handed
over to Hank Williams – who had died a few months earlier at age 29.
Much of
Williams’ music reflected his life, made difficult by alcohol, two divorces and
the drugs that apparently killed him. “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry” is one
example of why he was
 |
| Hank Williams |
Williams wrote that song after he
and his mother had been in a car approaching Montgomery, Alabama. Lilly
Williams had remarked that she saw the light of the airport, indicating they
were almost home. Son Hank turned it into:
“I wandered so aimless, life
filled with sin, I wouldn’t let my dear savior in.
“Then Jesus came like a stranger
in the night, Praise the Lord, I saw the light.”
After Williams died in the back
seat of another car, country stars Roy Acuff, Red Foley, Carl Smith, Webb
Pierce and others sang those lyrics at his funeral in Montgomery to 2,750
people while another 20,000 waited outside.
 |
| Patsy Cline |
No secular music genre is more
spiritual than country music. Maybe that’s because its roots are in the South,
considered the Bible Belt, and in the hope that many songs offered during hard
times. Burns’ series narrator said that “according to a song by the Carter
family, the only place the Depression hadn’t reached was heaven.”
Of course, country music always
has had another side. “In its infancy, country music came from the church with
the Carter family and from beer joints with Jimmie Rodgers,” said bluegrass
musician Vince Gill.
Patsy Cline’s melodic voice gave
life mostly to jukebox, heartbreak songs such as “Walkin’ After Midnight,” “I
Fall to Pieces” and Willie Nelson’s “Crazy.” Her fame wasn’t on the “church
side” of country, but the Virginia native who crossed successfully over to the
pop charts fit well into the tight-knit country “congregation” that was at home
with faith. Her first singing experience had been in a Baptist choir, and she
and her mother had sung at church socials.
Cline’s death at age 30 in a 1963
plane crash, along with singers Hawkshaw Hawkins, Cowboy Copas and her manager,
Randy Hughes, again brought the country music family together, as shown in
Burns’ series. Roger Miller, a native of Erick, Oklahoma, and later a recording
star, was one of her friends who searched for the plane wreckage in Tennessee.
The Grand Ole Opry hosted a memorial service in which many of the stars of the
day participated.
The Opry venue itself, the Ryman
Auditorium, was a fitting venue for such a service. It had been built in 1892
by Thomas Ryman, a riverboat owner who, according to Burns’ series, “had
undergone a religious conversion and wanted a place he called ‘purely an
outpost to catch sinners.’” As the Opry’s home from 1943 to 1974, the Ryman became
known as “The Mother Church of Country Music.”
The 16 hours of PBS’ “Country
Music” cover much more than sad songs and faith in God. But throughout, the
series shows how this home-grown genre “reflects experiences of everyday
Americans.”
And it shows that many can
identify with these words from Roy Acuff’s 1936 “The Great Speckled Bird,” seen
as a reference to the church:
“She is spreading her wings for a
journey, She’s going to leave by and by,
“When the trumpet shall sound in
the morning, She’ll rise and go up in the sky.”
