You are my sunshine?

Roy Don Plectrum was born on a cotton farm in Ringworm, Oklahoma, the sixth of eleven children.  Daddy was a mean drunk, Mama was in the church.  At three he picked up a banjo and taught himself Horowitz's Carmen Variations, which he had heard from a black street performer.  At seven he dropped out of school and went on the road with a mariachi band, Jorge and the Heartbreakers.  One night in Grover's Mill, New Jersey, Hank Williams's manager's uncle heard Plectrum and arranged a tryout with the Chesapeake Cheesemakers of Tidewater, Virginia, whose radio show reached four million listeners every Saturday night.  Before he turned eighteen, Plectrum had recorded Sandpaper In My Shoes, which sold three hundred thousand albums and won a Peabody Award.  By then, however, Plectrum had been married and divorced twice, and had developed a taste for Percocet.

Well, you get the idea.  Throw in the voice of Peter Coyote, who always seems to be delivering bad news, and you have Country Music, Ken Burns's latest attempt to Explain America.  Come to think of it, Coyote is perfect.  Alcoholism, spousal abuse, drugs, poverty, depression, really bad costumes -- these folks make the musicians in Jazz look like Up With People.  You wouldn't want to hear about them from Al Roker.

Well, for several reasons.  This is the whitest genre outside of Gregorian chant, the NASCAR of music.  Burns does his best, dwelling on Charley Pride; noting that the Grand Ole Opry fired its only black star, DeFord Bailey, for no particular reason; bringing in Wynton Marsalis also for no particular reason.  But when it comes to race -- the subtext of his previous documentaries Baseball, Jazz, and of course The Civil War -- Burns loses his nerve.  He has time to re-cycle (from The Vietnam War) a clip of Jan Howard threatening to shoot antiwar demonstrators, who thought she would be more sympathetic after two of her sons were killed.  But he never tries to explain country music's appeal for the alt-right, the way their adoration of Taylor Swift turned to death threats when she said she had voted for Obama.  (It is kind of amusing that the Klan, ancestors of the Proud Boys, attacked Johnny Cash because his first wife was Italian-American.)  Most unforgivably, Burns features commentary and some banjo playing by Rhiannon Giddens but never lets her sing a note.  An operatically trained country singer, black or white, wouldn't fit his narrative.

Basically, he buys into the self-serving description of the music as "three chords and the truth."  That is simplistic about its musical sophistication and a refusal to face its frequent hypocrisy.  "I walk the line," Johnny Cash sang, while doing no such thing.  Ex-con Merle Haggard praised Nixon's Silent Majority as folks who "don't smoke marijuana" in "Okie From Muscogee," which must have caused much hilarity on Music Row ("Step into my bus," said Willie Nelson).  As with any popular music, people heard what they wanted to hear, that they were the real Americans, "left out and looked down upon."  Country music may well have progressive-populist connections, but that ain't what earns gold records.  And Burns is obsessed with how many records each performer sells.

The real problem for someone like me, largely unfamiliar with the music, is the standard Ken Burns formula -- a little music, a lot of talking over it, buy the CD.  All the Roys and Merles and Jimmys run together after a while.  It doesn't help that three episodes end with performers dying young (Jimmy Rodgers, Hank Williams, Patsy Cline), and the series concludes with a memorial service for Johnny Cash, who was only 71.  Country is even more doom-haunted than the blues, it seems.  Please tell me Burns isn't tackling that next.