Sanders was right: Kelly’s comments could have come straight out of Burns’s documentary, which gave a sympathetic hearing to the notion of the ‘Lost Cause’. ‘Basically,’ Foote said at the start, ‘it was a failure on our part to find a way not to fight that war. It was because we failed to do the thing we really have a genius for, which is compromise. Americans like to think of themselves as uncompromising. Our true genius is for compromising. Our whole government’s founded on it. And it failed.’
Foote was right, too, in a way: the history of federal compromise with the slave states went all the way back to America’s founding: Southern colonies refused to ratify the Declaration of Independence until Thomas Jefferson struck out a clause attacking the slave trade; the constitution counted each slave as three-fifths of a person in the Federal census, granting slave owners disproportionate representation in Congress; the Missouri Compromise admitted Missouri and Maine into the US as a slave and a free state, respectively; the Kansas-Nebraska Act allowed settlers to decide whether or not slavery would be allowed in their territories; and so on. But what Foote – a novelist and popular historian who never held a position at a university – didn’t say was that slavery lay at the heart of every one of these compromises, that all of them favoured the status quo, and that, when the process finally broke down, it did so despite Lincoln’s best efforts to preserve slavery in the South, on condition that it not be allowed to expand into new territories. By this reckoning (which most historians outside the neo-Confederate fringe agree on) the North didn’t fail to compromise; it compromised all the way to the edge of a cliff.
To his credit, Burns was quick to respond to Kelly’s statements. ‘Many factors contributed to the Civil War,’ he said on Twitter. ‘One caused it: slavery.’ By and large, his documentary had made the same point. But Americans who watched The Civil War (39 million of them when the series first aired, and many more since) could have been forgiven for drawing other conclusions – in part, because the avuncular Foote was given so much time to make the opposite case. It left the impression that reasonable people on both sides could have reasonable disagreements about the war’s causes.
None of this went unnoticed when The Civil War was released in 1990. Historians wrote papers. Symposiums were held. In 1996, Oxford published Ken Burns’s ‘The Civil War’: Historians Respond. Two of the essays, by Eric Foner and Leon Litwack, were scathing, but, for the most part, the book’s tone was measured; Burns and Geoffrey Ward, who had written the film’s script, contributed replies. But a funny thing happened as Burns made more documentaries: instead of making more of the views of historians, he shunted them to the sidelines. For all its faults, The Civil War featured 24 historians. Burns’s 2007 film on the Second World War, The War, had 15. The Vietnam War (2017) included two in its chorus of 79 talking heads, and Country Music – which premiered in the States last September and aired, in edited form, on BBC 4 two months later – has only one: Bill Malone, whose book Country Music USA: A Fifty-Year History (1968) provided the template for Burns’s documentary.
‘Going to a dance was sort of like going back home to mama’s, or to grandma’s, for Thanksgiving,’ Malone says, eight minutes in.
Country music is full of songs about little old log cabins that people had never lived in, the old country church that people have never attended. But it spoke for a lot of people who were being forgotten – or felt they were being forgotten. Country music’s staple, above all, is nostalgia. Just a harkening back to the old way of life, either real or imagined.Burns’s producers interviewed Malone in 2014. Two years later, a lot of Americans who were being forgotten, or felt they were being forgotten, voted for Trump, who promised to return them to the ‘old way of life, either real or imagined’. They were the people country songs spoke to; the people Burns’s new film seems to speak for. ‘It depicts our entire history,’ the singer-songwriter Vince Gill said when he appeared with Burns at the 92nd Street Y in New York last September. ‘And what’s beautiful about the way it’s been depicted is that it’s finally given the respect that it’s never had. As someone that’s kind of given their life to it, to finally see our story told with that is – it’s amazing.’ The filmmakers ‘weren’t part of the culture’, Gill said. ‘They weren’t part of the fibre. They weren’t part of the history. But they told it in such a profound and honest way that it’s light years more compelling than if we could have told it ourselves. I think we would have lied.’
For the most part, they do tell it themselves: Bobby Bare, Garth Brooks, Roseanne Cash, Charlie Daniels, Little Jimmy Dickens, Merle Haggard, Emmylou Harris, Rhiannon Giddens, Kris Kristofferson, Loretta Lynn, Willie Nelson, Dolly Parton, Charley Pride, Randy Scruggs, Connie Smith, Marty Stuart, Dwight Yoakam – a who’s who of Nashville, Austin and Bakersfield turned out for Burns’s camera, 85 strong. They’re a pleasure to watch, and if they’re dishonest, they’re disarming about it. ‘Truth-telling,’ Ketch Secor says in the first episode, ‘which country music at its best is. Truth-telling, even when it’s a big fat lie.’ It’s the stuff in between interviews that’s a drag, because it’s dishonest, too, but in more insidious ways. (...)
There’s a lot more Burns gets wrong, or sweeps under the carpet, and that may be unavoidable, given the scale of his projects. (He tends to work on several at a time.) This one took six years to make, whittling six hundred hours of footage down to sixteen. The credits are 174 names long, not counting the interviewees. Surely, any mistakes must pale next to the effort and service that these films provide. (‘More Americans get their history from Ken Burns than from any other source,’ Stephen Ambrose is supposed to have said, and for better or worse, I believe him.) But you notice, after a while, that the errors all face in a certain direction, and serve to make the same points, while all the things that are supposed to stay under the carpet keep reappearing. That may be unavoidable, too, when you try to make apolitical films about highly charged subjects. But country music is about as politically charged as an American cultural subject could be because, in a sense, it’s the Lost Cause set to a I-IV-V chord progression: the broken heart longing for simpler times, mother and home, and some sense of stability (stand-ins for the old Southern manse, where the log cabins were also slave shacks); the lip-service paid to Christian values (coupled with belligerence, blood-lust, knee-jerk patriotism, and a native distrust of authority); the lingering persistence of minstrel-show stereotypes, melodies and songs.
