Ken Burns Rates Mockumentaries, Psychedelics, and “Old Town Road”

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It's underrated because, as someone said,

that patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel.

I own flags, I treat them with respect.

They never touch the ground.

But what they protect, what they symbolize

is our country, whose First Amendment

to the Constitution is freedom of speech.

And so, if that's what you wanna do, I would not do it,

that is why I respect and I revere and I love that flag.

I've got a gigantic flag that's nine feet

by about 25 feet that was deaccessioned

from a Colorado Rocky Mountain Historical Society.

And I hang it from the second-story porch

of my lake house every Fourth of July

It is the symbol of our country.

It makes me feel good to look at it.

And yet, I will defend to the end anyone's use of it.

What matters are the ideas, not the false patriotism.

And I can understand, too, why somebody who

is veteran and feels that this is desecration.

It is, but I have to say to them, it is not.

The only desecration is by the people

who manipulate the Constitution.

That's the danger.

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I'm sorta neutral on it.

I like the obvious ones.

I think it's super important that documentaries

be made fun of and ridiculed in really important ways.

And my understanding of mockumentary

extends to these classic takedowns of my work,

a thousand of them on the Simpsons, on Jay Leno, on...

Being made fun of is just the best thing

'cause it keeps you from taking yourself too seriously,

which is the great danger that absolutely everyone

falls prey to.

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At a time, they were underrated for me.

I sorta think, for me personally, I've gotta say overrated.

I'm done.

Oh, I've had some wonderful times.

I remember once,

on mescaline,

I got off work, and we were heading to a park.

I got there at noon.

And I said, Man, I told my dad I'd be back by eight.

I gotta go home.

And they said, It's 12:35.

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Over, I mean, the English language

is one of the great forces on Earth,

and now it's down to abbreviations.

And that's a terrible thing to waste.

I wanted to start something

that was the answer to Twitter,

and it would be 1,400 characters

before it would actually leave,

like you actually had to craft language

before you could even press send.

It couldn't be under 1,400 characters.

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Yes, okay, it is so underrated.

I feel happy, I feel joyous, I feel like there's,

the cavalry's come over the top of the hill

to help us deal with the current trouble.

I've spent the last eight years

working on a history of country music,

and people everywhere, even people I love,

want to ensilo country music into its own narrow thing.

So, when country music is born,

the Big Bang of country music is a time

when a guy named Ralph Peer, in the summer of 1927,

in Bristol, Tennessee/Virginia,

that is to say Main Street, or the main street of it is,

one side is Virginia, one side is Tennessee.

He's on the Tennessee side.

He records, within a week, the Carter Family

and Jimmy Rogers, that's the Big Bang.

So, if you listen to the Carter Family,

they're like Sunday morning.

They're the home, family, church values, they're wonderful.

Mother Maybelle is one of the great guitarists of all times.

Sara Carter has this keening voice.

A.P. wanders around Appalachia

collecting songs with a black man.

They take an old Protestant hymn that a black minister

has reworked called When the World's On Fire.

They turn it into their big hit,

Little Darlin', Pal of Mine,

which Woody Guthrie turns into This Land Is Your Land.

'Kay, so, it's kind of folky,

and it's got this sense of Sunday morning.

Jimmy Rogers is a scamp, a rogue,

he brings the blues and also training

from African Americans on the railroad yards.

And he brings another kind of music.

They're so night and day.

He's Saturday night, they're Sunday morning,

so it's never been one thing.

To which they then appended

every other musical form at some point or another.

If, at the end of Johnny Cash's life,

he's working with a Trent Reznor tune,

then you know that country music is sort of omnivorous,

and they take cowboy stuff,

and they have their own honky-tonk versions.

They're one of the parents of rock 'n' roll.

They connected to jazz.

If you listen Willie Nelson's phrasing,

there's nothing about country in his phrasing,

it's all Django Reinhardt, it's all jazz music;

and Chester Atkins, Chet Atkins,

one of the great session guitarists

and later one of the great producers,

all jazz influence stuff.

It's never one thing.

And the fact that somebody has walked into country music

that is not of the color that people presume

that people of country music are

and just said, I'm home,

that is great, that is so underrated.

This is where we need to go.

Country music is telling stories that all of us experience,

like the joy of birth, the sadness of death,

falling in love, tryin' to stay in love,

losing love, being lonely, missing somebody,

seeking redemption, every country song is that.

We can't deal with the four-letter words

that country music is about: pain, hurt, and love.

And so, we say, oh, it's about pickup trucks,

it's about hound dogs and six-packs of beer, and it's not.

Hank Williams said, You hear that lonesome whippoorwill.

He sounds too blue to fly.

The midnight train is wailin' on.

I'm so lonesome I could cry.

Johnny Cash has a song called I Still Miss Someone.

It's second verse, so simple, it's like haiku,

I go out to a party to have a little fun,

but I find a darkened corner 'cause I still miss someone.

When Ray Charles had creative control of an album

for the first time in a distinguished,

now more than 10-year career as a superstar in R & B,

soul music, whatever you wanna call it,

when he has creative control,

do you know what the album is he releases?

Modern sounds in country and western music.

And the summer of '62, the number one hit

was I Can't Stop Loving You,

an old country music song by Don Gibson.

Everybody listens to other music.

And the idea that we would create musical borders

is just commerce's superimposition,

or maybe our desire to categorize something

so we don't have to know it.

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