Whoever wrote the ad copy for Ken Burns’ new documentary - “Nothing unites the country like country.” - shouldn't have been so modest. The summer I worked on a farm in France I learned that my boss loved Jennings and Cash almost as much as he loved Brassens and Brel.
That was 1976. It took me much longer to come to an appreciation of one of the fundamental genres of my musical homeland. It was not until 2004, in fact, when I participated in the Southern Festival of Books in Nashville. One night a local, driving a group of us around in his car, put on a CD of Cash and his wife June Carter singing “Will the Circle Be Unbroken” and, instantly, my ears (and mind and heart) were opened to the beauty and the honesty of the sound. And it seemed to me, riding through the Nashville night, that that old reworked hymn about family and eternal reward was just as legitimately about country music and the people who make it.
