[78-L] PBS Ken Burns Country Music

[Cary Ginell]

It seemed to be particularly geared toward aggrandizing Raph Peer at the expense of everybody else. The only reason they mentioned Ernest Stoneman was to get into the story that Stoneman recommended that Peer record in Bristol. There were lots of label shots, but only a few of OKeh and the rest were Victor. Columbia got no mention at all. Peer recorded F.J. Carson in Atlanta and then went to New York, but they ignored the fact that Atlanta became a hot bed of recording activity for Columbia all through the ‘20s and into the Depression with their 15000-D series. So NO mention was made of any of Columbia’s stars, like Gid Tanner, Riley Pucket Clayton McMichen, and the source of two of the biggest selling records of the ‘20s, the Leake County Revelers and Smith’s Sacred Singers. They talked about string bands and sacred white gospel groups, but only in a romantic, non-specific way, calling out names of short-lived, low selling Peer-sponsored Victor artists only. 

Similarly, there was no mention at all of other labels like Vocalion, Gennett, Paramount, etc. Brunswick was mentioned once, but only as it relates to them rejecting Jimmie Rodgers once. Charlie Poole was identified only as “the most famous banjo player in the country,” something that Harry Reser and Eddie Peabody can be heard groaning about from their graves. 

They did a great job on the Rodgers and Carter segments, but they were entirely too long because it resulted in the expulsion of just about everything else that happened in the 20s. 

The citybilly movement of the mid-20s helped establish country music’s first original repertoire - almost solely composed by Carson Robison, the first professional country music entrepreneur, who went into it as a business, publishing for the first time in 1922, serving as the genre’s first session man, an in-house guitarist and whistler for Victor, and almost single-handedly establishing Vernon Dalhart as a star. None of this was mentioned because it didn’t lead to Nashville. That’s where this mess is heading - to celebrate Nashville and the Grand Ol’ Uproar and sell gobs of reissue CDs by its stagnating artists. 

Cary Ginell

> On Sep 16, 2019, at 3:22 PM, Rodger J Holtin <rjh334578 at gmail.com.invalid> wrote:
> 
> 
> Our local PBS began showing the new Ken Burns series on Country Music.  I
> noticed that once again Vernon Dalhart was omitted, although his name and
> Carson Robison's appeared in a news story from some publication complaining
> about hillbilly music singers.  Vernon, as some of you know, grew up in
> hardscrabble conditions in east Texas, played the harmonica, had lots of
> cattle punching experience and his father was killed in a barroom knife
> fight - perfect credentials for the rendering of country music if ever there
> was such a thing.
> 
> 
> 
> Some of you saw similar glaring omissions in the jazz series 19-20 years
> ago.
> 
> 
> 
> What part of the prescribed narrative does he not fit to be included by the
> great Burns?
> 
> 
> 
> Rodger Holtin
> 
> 78-L Member Since MCMXCVIII
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