[78-L] PBS Ken Burns Country Music

[David Sanderson]

On 9/16/2019 7:25 PM, Cary Ginell wrote:
> 
> It seemed to be particularly geared toward aggrandizing Raph Peer at the expense of everybody else. 
> 
> 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

Typical Burns, a moviemaker with none of the historian's instincts. I 
skipped through the first segment, found nothing remarkable, including 
the visuals, many of which we've all seen over the years. Superficial 
stuff, wouldn't matter if it weren't so misleading.

And if you want to know where Ralph Peer fits, go to "A&R Pioneers", by 
Brian Ward and Patrick Huber, a hugely informative and well researched 
history of Peer and his fellows. I'd call it required reading if you're 
at all interested in the history of traditional and traditionally 
derived recorded music.



-- 
David Sanderson
East Waterford Maine
dwsanderson685 at roadrunner.com
http://www.dwsanderson.me