“Nobody within the sound of my voice and nobody anywhere, regardless of those distinctions that we impose on them, haven’t felt these things.”īurns and his team, which includes West Virginia native and country musician Kathy Mattea, will debut select portions of the series in Morgantown this week, at a Tuesday showing at the WVU Creative Arts Center. “The great thing about country music is that it is all about elemental human emotions and feelings and stories that all of us experience - the joy of birth, the sadness of death, falling in love, trying to stay in love, losing love, being lonely, seeking redemption,” Burns said in an interview on MetroNews “Talkline” with Hoppy Kercheval.

A flower in a field of manure, the universal expression of shared experiences, a family of musicians and fans alike those are just a few of the ways the creators of Country Music describe the soon-to-be-released eight-part miniseries from American historian Ken Burns and his team. Rife with rare photographs and endlessly fascinating anecdotes, the stories in this sweeping yet intimate history will captivate longtime country fans and introduce new listeners to an extraordinary body of music that lies at the very center of the american experience.MORGANTOWN, W.Va. Here too are interviews with the genre's biggest stars, including the likes of merle haggard to garth brooks to rosanne cash. Here is hank williams's tragic honky tonk life, dolly parton rising to fame from a dirt-poor childhood, and loretta lynn turning her experiences into songs that spoke to women everywhere. With the birth of radio in the 1920s, the songs moved from small towns, mountain hollers, and the wide-open west to become the music of an entire nation-a diverse range of sounds and styles from honky tonk to gospel to bluegrass to rockabilly, leading up through the decades to the music's massive commercial success today.īut above all, country music is the story of the musicians. This gorgeously illustrated and hugely entertaining history begins where country music itself emerged: the american south, where people sang to themselves and to their families at home and in church, and where they danced to fiddle tunes on saturday nights.

Country music dayton duncan