Ken Burns turns focus to country music

Chronically Overrated: The Ken Burns Effect
What a funny piece. As usual, these things reveal far more about the writer than the subject. This writer, an unpopular documentary producer, has issues with a guy who struck success producing documentaries people enjoy watching...sometimes a great many people. Jealousy and envy drip from his pen with almost every sentence. Apparently the author can't grasp that fact that success often has positive consequences -including getting requested grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities. The author's shock to find his own works that include serious, but more "niche" or controversial subject matter, like American anarchists, ignored by the NEH seems a bit naïve.

 

It was only centric on the Yankees and Dodgers during the years where the Yankees and Dodgers were in the World Series ever flippin year. Like it or not, (and I’m FAR from a Yankees apologist). The Yankees were the center of the baseball universe from the 20s-60’s. Over a 44 year span, they were in the World Series 29 times and won it 20 times. It was justified in being Yankee centric.

 

One thing's for sure: Ken Burns is long overdue for an appointment with a proper hairstylist. That Beatle-esque bowl cut may be his trademark in a way, but come on.

 

Agree to disagree. Read more clear-eyed analysis than "grant-envy" coming through in that article.

 

I hope be never gets around to doing a bleedin' Beatles doc! Ron Howard's was bad enough.

 

We must have been reading different articles.

 

No, I just imagine that you are a Burns fan to some degree and I have nothing invested in him or his work.

 

One great offshoot of Jazz was a host of cds, in various forms, of featured artists in the series, kind of music samplers for The Great Unwashed™, like myself.

 

a couple of trailers here:
First look: Ken Burns' 'Country Music' documentary

 

Wonder if it will be released on Blu-ray and box set or individual releases of artists like KB Jazz did?

 

Karate Kid comes to 4K, plus Flicker Alley 4k, new Shout!/Kino, Ken Burns’ Country Music & Monty Python remastered

PBS has announced that the latest Ken Burns documentary, Country Music, will debut on PBS on 9/15. This is a 16-hour, 8-part documentary series. It will be release on Blu-ray and DVD in September (street date, TBA).



I am interested up until Garth Brooks ruins country music forever.

 

This will be interesting, but while I was on the Outlaw Country Cruise last week, I saw an episode of an upcoming twelve hour series They Called Us Outlaws. We saw episode #3 titled Bob Wills is Still King after the Waylon Jennings song. The director was there to present it and said that all of the episodes will interlock, but the gist of this one was about Austin and two music venues, the hippie Armadillo World Headquarters and the authentic cowboy Broken Spoke, and how Willie managed to draw both crowds together.

As the project is still in production, information is still a little limited. But I found a thing from 2014 about it:

THEY CALLED US OUTLAWS: COSMIC COWBOYS, HONKY TONK HEROES AND THE RISE OF REDNECK ROCK

Presented by the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum, this eight-hour documentary event comes from the award-winning and critically acclaimed filmmaker Eric Geadelmann (“Dave” and “The Dance”), best-selling biographer Joe Nick Patoski (“Willie Nelson – An Epic Life”) and Emmy, Golden Globe and Academy Award-winning producer Mark Johnson (“Breaking Bad,” “Rain Man,” respectively.) What happened in Nashville and in Austin in the late 1960s and early 1970s was nothing less than a tectonic shift in country music. From Tennessee to Texas, musicians were breaking all the rules, pushing aside long-established traditions and doing things their own way. THEY CALLED US OUTLAWS tells this story in four feature-length documentary films. It is an in-depth never-before-seen look at the pickers, the players, and the writers who altered the course of country music forever. THEY CALLED US OUTLAWS is “Willie, Waylon & the Boys,” and a few irreverent girls, at the height of their rule-breaking days; featuring over 20 American music icons including Willie Nelson, Kris Kristofferson, Bobby Bare, Jerry Jeff Walker, Guy Clark, Billy Joe Shaver, Joe Ely, Ray Benson & Asleep at the Wheel, Rodney Crowell, The Flatlanders, Jessi Colter, Marcia Ball and Emmylou Harris. THEY CALLED US OUTLAWS is produced by Crowfly Pictures Entertainment and Filament Productions and was written, directed and produced by Eric Geadelmann, Kelly Magelsky and Ken Levitan, and executive produced by Mark Johnson, Joe Nick Patoski, Cal Turner, Margaret Turner, Craig Eiland, Randy Paul, Ray Benson & Mickey Raphael.
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Since then, it has expanded to six two hour parts, and based on the one part I saw, it's going to be amazing. Sadly, the weather turned bad, and shows originally planned for the stage on the pool deck had to be moved to the indoor venues, and this one had to be shown in an improvised theater with a rippled screen:



Note: Those are NOT my legs.

 

Happy to read it’s coming to BR!

 

Times never change. Folks said the same thing about Chet Atkins.

 

One of the things that I have found to be true is that musicians care a whole lot less about genres than listeners do.

 

And he only mentioned Cab Calloway once, and then only to make him look like a jerk. Did Burns have some kind of grudge against Cab?

 

Country Music? But he can't accuse White people of stealing it! Or can he?