The Joy of Country

Howdy, friends, welcome to the Grand Ole Opry,

the capital of country music throughout the world!

Let her go!

# I hear the train a-comin'

# It's rollin' round the bend

# And I ain't seen the sunshine since I don't know when

# I'm stuck in Folsom Prison

# And time keeps draggin' on... #

They used to call it hillbilly music.

It was the sound of the working class in forgotten corners of the southern states of America,

as they tried to scratch a living off the land.

We were those people back in the mountains, and we lived so hard. Every day was a struggle.

One of the fundamental ingredients of country music is the sense of home.

So you hear a lot of wonderful songs about Texas, Tennessee, the Carolinas.

When you put people on the land trying to make a living in a harsh environment

at that time, and you get white blues, which is country music.

The songs and the musical instruments were from a distant time and place,

but the people who made this music would take it all with them

on a thrilling and dangerous ride through the 20th century.

In no time at all, this strange hillbilly sound

would be transformed into country music that would speak to the world.

Country music was by, and for, and about adults.

It's not teenage music and its niche was the white working class.

I want to hear songs about broken hearts and destroyed lives

and redemption - you know, melodrama.

It would be a dramatic journey, with country music forever torn

between the past and the future, and always walking a tightrope between authenticity and showbusiness.

It's a longing for place and home and history, that we all have,

just living in the modern world.

I know how people like us write these godawful sad songs

and really mean 'em, because we feel that,

and I feel everything, to the depths of my soul.

# Oh, the men I meet

# They ain't warm and friendly

# Like the one in old Virginny... #

'Country music is the cry of the heart.'

To me, a great country singer comes from somebody that's got it,

and it's just got to come out.

As the way of life it came from slowly disappeared

country music would have to reinvent itself over and over again.

This constant fight for survival produces a different kind of star.

There's an iron in the soul of Hank Williams, Dolly Parton and Johnny Cash.

And their music would define America for the rest of the world.

The roots of country music go deep,

and the deeper you go, the nearer you get to the core of the sound -

an attitude in the blood that's known as Twang.

What is that "Twang"? That's a weird thing.

But people use that all the time to talk about country music.

-You know it when you hear it.

-You know it when you hear it!

Twang!

MIMICS TWANGING GUITAR

MIMICS TWANGING GUITAR

Twang is a kind of musical swagger, I think.

It's an emotion, it's a gesture.

Twang is unapologetic - it's not, "I hope you'll like this."

"I don't care whether you like this or not."

I'm a hillbilly -

shove it up your ass.

HE CHUCKLES

Twang is hillbilly soul, that's what it is.

It's soul music, made by country music people. That's twang.

# T for Texas

# T for Tennessee... #

The Godfather of Twang was Jimmie Rodgers.

Born and raised in Mississippi, he was musically right where he needed to be.

He took blues, gospel and mountain music, mixed it all up and added yodelling.

HE YODELS

Jimmie Rodgers was THE father of country music,

he was one of the first artists

to really get the following of, say, a pop star of the day.

'He was doing country music,

'or hillbilly music as it was called then, and he created the blue yodel.'

Jimmie Rodgers rose to fame in the 1920s,

when America was an industrial and economic powerhouse.

New York was already like a city from the future,

and many people from the rural backwaters of the South

could see a completely different way of life coming down the tracks.

This was exciting, and scary.

The entertainment on offer at this time was glitzy and aspirational,

just like the USA itself.

But Jimmie Rodgers was from the South,

which didn't move quite so fast.

In an era of fabulous wealth,

Jimmie Rodgers represented the guy at the bottom of the heap,

with no chance of sipping champagne in Manhattan.

His act, in effect, was being poor,

and country music has been living off this idea ever since.

He needed a character and a costume that would tell his audience he was just like them.

His first job had been on the railways,

so he chose to become Jimmie Rodgers, the singing brakeman.

What you have to remember about country music, it became commercially popular

and country radio happened right as vaudeville was dying,

and so the live performance in the United States

in the '20s, 30s and even into the '40s,

was very much influenced by vaudeville.

So when you see Jimmie Rodgers stepping out in the early '30s

in a brakeman's uniform on stage, you're seeing him

clearly take on the character, because this is what you did when you entertained people.

People didn't give a good idea what their singing stars looked like before that, very often.

You saw them in vaudeville once a year, maybe, so you didn't know what these people looked like.

It was kind of a new subject.

What do I seem like when you look at me?

In many ways, Jimmie Rodgers wrote the rule book for country music.

Wear the right thing, do the right thing and never forget the train song.

Anybody who's any good in country music likes trains.

# Hey look a-yonder comin'

# Comin' down that railroad track... #

The rhythm of the train, the sound that it makes,

what it can bring out of you, I mean, it's very intense.

# Bringin' my baby back, woo! #

It's very musical, when you get right down to it.

You start playing the guitar along with that "Ch-ch-ch..."

And pretty soon, you're singing that...

# Big eight-wheeler rollin' down the track... #

It's just part of it!

It's the vehicle that takes everybody from home,

brings the mail, and it takes everyone away.

The train symbolised progress and opportunity.

It was the iron horse that was building America,

transporting people from the isolation of the country to the alienation of the city.

There was an element of cool in singing about trains,

they were fast, they connected places.

They were modern transportation, and they got you there.

The first wave of country music stars, like The Carter Family and Jimmie Rodgers

had arrived in the economic boom of the '20s,

but the Wall Street Crash of 1929 changed everything.

Say goodbye to the Singing Brakeman and howdy to the Singing Cowboy.

I think the Singing Cowboy came along at just the right time,

just a couple of years after the Depression.

It was a very hard time throughout the country,

and here suddenly, you had this handsome guy, lovely voice,

he doesn't answer to any boss, he's not out of work, doesn't care,

he's got his horse, his guitar,

yodels a tune and he's got a beautiful girl.

It's just a great fantasy.

Solves the problems of right and wrong with his fists

and his six-guns, and everybody ends up happy.

It was just what a nation in the grip of an economic depression needed

and every singer in town wanted to be a cowboy with a guitar.

And Orvon Grover Autry became the most famous singing cowboy of them all - Gene Autry.

The Singing Cowboy was a Hollywood invention,

but Gene Autry brought a glamour to country music that would inspire the next generation.

The whole cowboy, Western thing really presented this fantasy

to people that were having very hard lives.

Johnny Cash and Willie Nelson spoke about living in pretty impoverished conditions,

kind of expected to have to pick cotton as a child,

grow up, be a farmer, it's a really, really hard life.

All of a sudden they saw the Singing Cowboy saving the day,

playing his guitar, singing songs, winning the girl through music.

They didn't want to learn how to ride a horse, they wanted the guitar.

They wanted to sing. They saw that as a way out.

Cowboy hats and boots would soon spread through country music,

but back in Nashville, they still did things the hillbilly way.

Welcome to the Grand Ole Opry, the capital of country music throughout the world!

The Grand Ole Opry was a radio show which featured old-time music

in an idealised rural setting, designed to be comforting to an audience

who needed a break from the Depression, the dust bowl and the speed of the modern world.

Nashville was the industrial centre of country music, the recording centre,

and with the Grand Ole Opry, had the most powerful radio programme.

There was still an urge to kind of present something familiar,

and present it in a way that invited people into this sort of ideal

of what rural life was, and into a shared common experience of it.

So in a way, the hay bales which we look at now, and they look so hokey,

but those were signifiers to an audience that, "Hey, we're from the farm, we're simple people,

"we're not going to scare you away with our rhetoric and anything high-minded here,

"we're just gathering together to have a good time."

Some of the promoters really wanted them to dress the part of the hayseed, the country bumpkin,

so the guys would be wearing overalls and patched clothing,

beat-up chequered shirts, straw hats.

The gals would wear, maybe the gingham square dance dresses, and things like that.

So all of a sudden, there are bands called the Fruit Jar Drinkers,

which the people themselves might have thought was corny. It was show business.

It was absolutely vaudeville. Those were costumes.

From the early '40s, the show was broadcast across the South from the Ryman Auditorium in Nashville.

There were no cowboys here because this wasn't the Wild West.

The Grand Ole Opry was nostalgic about farmers and family,

and singing brothers were a symbol of everything it stood for.

Men in checked shirts who made their mothers proud,

like the Delmore Brothers.

# I know a fella from that Alabama way

# He plays the blues in a different sort of way

# He got no piano for the A to the bar

# But he picks out the boogie on his old guitar

# He plays the Hillbilly Boogie

# In a lowdown way

# He can play the Boogie

# Play it for me any ole day... #

The Monroe Brothers Bill and Charlie just didn't get on well enough to stay together as a brother act.

They had left the mountains in search of factory work,

but the further away they went from home, the more it pulled them back.

# Oh you oughta been uptown and seen the train come down

# And hear the whistle blowin' 100 times

# Oh I thought I heard that train comin' round the bend

# She blows like she'll never blow no more... #

In 1939, Bill Monroe's yearning for the lost world of his Kentucky childhood

led him to invent a new form of music

that came to be known as Bluegrass.

Named after his new band, The Bluegrass Boys.

# If the train runs right, see my woman Saturday night

# I'm tired of living this a-way... #

Bluegrass was new, but it sounded as old as the hills.

His childhood was fading away, but Bill Monroe came up with rules

to ensure the music, at least, would never change.

No electric instruments and strictly no drums.

It's the high lonesome. It's the sound of mountains.

I love it, you know.

Somebody up on a mountain, it's the sound of on top of Old Smokie,

it's the sound of somebody all alone, singing into the hills.

The harmonies in bluegrass and the style they have

is what I think defines bluegrass music

from country music, mountain music,

and then there was little mixes, flavours in between.

Because there's just that "yep n'", how they stop the note,

and I do a lot of that, cos I feel that stuff, too.

Meanwhile, down in Texas, change was embraced.

The oil boom had brought people from far and near to fuel America's economic recovery.

This was the industrialisation that bluegrass was running away from,

but Bob Wills and the Texas Playboys thrived on this energy.

Texas was the spiritual home of the cowboy and cattle,

but it was also building big cities, like Houston and Dallas.

This melting pot of new ideas would inspire Bob Wills to create Western Swing.

What's interesting about Bob Wills is he kind of absorbed all these different styles of music.

There's country, there's blues, there's mariachi, there's jazz,

all this stuff piled in together,

it's a real kind of hybrid border music,

music that takes a bit of whatever's useful

and turns it into something completely new.

They were modernising, which is a big part of all the country music story.

They were really interested in jazz, they wanted to be hip guys, they often were,

and they started to mix what they knew with what they loved,

so a steel guitar takes the place of a trombone,

and the next thing, you have these jazz bands,

which cut back and forth between breakdown, hoedown country music and jazz.

Bob Wills and the Texas Playboys had a sound that was from everywhere and nowhere.

It was a mould-breaking cocktail of swing jazz and hillbilly.

What they needed was a look to tie it all together,

so the Playboys became Cowboys.

Then they broke out of Texas to hit the big time on the West Coast.

Here's those boys again!

They were so popular in California, especially during the war years,

so many migrants from Texas, Oklahoma and Kansas who had come to Los Angeles,

because their farms were just blowing away, and there was the work.

Especially during the war,

they needed all the...those factories were building bombs and planes full-time,

and these people would get off work, they wanted to blow off some steam,

have some fun, let's go dance to Bob Wills!

Out west in California, where the movie stars who were the Singing Cowboys were based,

more and more of the artists out there studied wearing the fancy western outfits.

So gradually, as this look became popular in Nashville,

more and more of the male singers started wearing the fancy cowboy boots, fancy cowboy shirts,

because what's more dashing, a cowboy outfit that accentuates your broad shoulders and gives you height,

or the hayseed bumpkin look, with the overalls and that kind of thing?

There's no question about it.

Cowboy clothes were the secret showbiz ingredient that changed the whole perception of hillbilly music.

From now on, country musicians would dress like film stars.

Hillbilly had gone Hollywood, and a new sound was born - Honky Tonk.

The Second World War was now over,

but the lives of so many people had changed for ever.

There were new rules for the game of love and relationships in the 1940s and '50s,

and Honky Tonk was the soundtrack from the southern states that played through it all.

Honky Tonk music took its name from the bars and beer joints

where young men and women could now get drunk together and dance the night away.

Think of how it must have felt, sitting in these places

and having had a few drinks, and the beginning of inebriation,

and then hearing this music that had this beat, it was very compelling.

It drove people to the dancefloor, drove them to have another drink.

The acts of the 1930s sang of the little cabin home on the hill,

and the wild wood flower,

and the more innocent, country living kind of topics,

and after the war, those topics went away,

to be replaced by drinking, adultery, dancing...

The war broke down a lot of social mores,

and the experiences in the honky tonk very much reflect that.

Honky tonks were places where alcohol was sold,

they'd have music, a live band or a jukebox,

there'd be space to dance. But they weren't fancy places,

this is a working-class environment

where people who'd moved from all over the country to new places to find work

were going to socialise, and let off steam on a Friday and Saturday night.

Some of the guys were kind of rawhide, you might say,

and it would get... sometimes cause some fights.

And of course at that time, everybody drank a lot in the beer joints.

And sometimes they'd chuck beer bottles,

they had screen wire put up in front of some of the stages,

in case they chucked beer bottles at you.

# Hey good lookin'

# What you got cookin'

# How's about cookin' somethin' up with me? #

In 1947, with the USA still high on victory in the war,

Hank Williams burst onto the scene like a firework.

He was the embodiment of the spirit of Honky Tonk -

young, careless and living in the moment.

# So if you wanna have fun, come along with me... #

He was eating it, living it, breathing it.

It was about...really singing about the heart pain.

...a tune called Cold, Cold Heart.

# I tried so hard my dear to show

# That you're my every dream

# Yet you're afraid each thing I do

# Is just some evil scheme... #

Hank Williams made country music modern by singing about his own life.

His songs were heartbreaking, and all true.

After a difficult childhood in Alabama, he married Audrey Mae Shepherd when he was 21,

and the conflict in their relationship would inspire his greatest songs.

# And melt your cold, cold heart... #

It was through a rough time when they weren't seeing eye to eye,

and it was...

..revenge, in a little different kind of way, for him.

He was having a lot of trouble when we was living together. He was going through a divorce.

And it was working on him pretty bad.

The angst and sense of doom in Hank Williams' songs

was a reworking of the traditional lonesome blues of earlier country music

but turned inward on his own life.

Cowboy clothes were a suit of armour

at a time when masculinity was being redefined by industrialisation.

Nobody looked better in cowboy gear than Hank Williams,

but in truth, he was a frail kid, who ended up an alcoholic, to cope with chronic back pain.

He was pretty thin, and what most people would consider weak, most of his life,

so those two combinations were definitely pretty hard on him.

I would say it would be physical pain, and the heartache,

the pain of a childhood,

of not having that very strong of a family,

but I would definitely say that the heartbreak had a lot to do with it,

because you never hear him complaining much about his physical pain that much.

It was more singing about the love pain.

# You're lookin' at a mad that's gettin' kinda mad

# I had lots of luck but it's all been bad

# No matter how I struggle and strive

# I'll never get out of this world alive... #

If he did know anything,

I think he knew that he wasn't going to be around that long,

and that he had to do as much as he could, while he could.

When the divorce happened, and he left, he got alcoholic,

he got to drinking, and people let him go, he went back to Louisiana.

And that's... Right after that, he didn't last long.

On New Year's Day 1953, Hank Williams died in the back of a car.

Drink and prescription drugs had killed him at just 29.

Country music had lost an icon, but discovered the power of stars.

Country music's lament for the lost paradise of the old southern way of life

had been turned into the lovesick blues of Hank Williams.

By singing about the life he was living,

he redefined what country music could be.

This wasn't hillbilly any more - this was the future.

The legacy of Hank Williams was the true grit of authenticity

which country music would now have to live up to.

Honky Tonk music hit the peak of its popularity

as the songs became the battleground of the sexes,

with accusations flying around like empty beer bottles.

# As I sit here tonight

# The jukebox playing... #

Kitty Wells was the first woman to have her say about relationships in the honky tonks

when she recorded It Wasn't God Who Made Honky Tonk Angels.

# It wasn't God who made

# Honky Tonk angels... #

Her protest at the portrayal of women in the songs of the era

was a statement of intent that struck a chord with women everywhere.

From now on, things were going to be very different.

I think in the late '40s, early '50s,

country music was representing some social changes that were happening in the country post-war,

a big jump in the divorce rate, more broken homes than previously,

and a sort of attitude amongst couples

that if it didn't work out, you could always start over again.

And also a rise in this culture

of country music being played in bars and establishments where they had dancing,

and women being a little bit more free in those environments.

The commercial success of Honky Tonk turned country music into an industry.

Suddenly, country boys like Webb Pierce had money to dress up and show off.

# I'm walkin' the dog

# And I'm never blue

# I'm walkin' the dog

# I ain't thinkin' 'bout you... #

Webb drove around Nashville in a white Pontiac convertible

with silver pistols for handles and steer horns on the grille.

He also had the first guitar-shaped swimming pool in Nashville,

and he wore clothes that made your eyes water.

Well, it's strange, when you think about it, because that music's all about being humble and poor

and being from nowhere. But it's a bit like rappers and bling, I think.

Those guys went out there, and they wanted to sparkle.

And they were stars.

And they looked like stars, because they shone.

The clothes and the cars were the work of the legendary rodeo tailor,

who went by the name of Nudie.

Nudie Cohn was known by one name, and that was Nudie.

His original name was Nuta Kotlyarenko, and he came from Kiev, Russia, as a young boy,

to New York, in the early part of the 20th century,

and he would go on to pretty much invent the Rhinestone Cowboy.

And Lefty Frizzell was one of his clients who wanted something

a little different, and Nudie gave it to him, with some rhinestones,

with a big L, and a big F, and rhinestones on his shirt.

And people just went nuts over it.

And the first singer to wear a rhinestone Nudie suit at the Grand Ole Opry was Little Jimmy Dickens.

Well, I am a different guy when I get on stage! My wife said

she married to a man she loved at home,

then when I got the rhinestones on, I became a different person!

HE CHUCKLES

That's what a star is supposed to look like. It's bigger than life.

They sparkle. They don't look like you and me.

They look like glittering stars.

Just at the point when country music was the undisputed king of the jukebox,

a singer from within its own ranks got up on stage

and completely changed the game.

# Well that's all right mama

# That's all right for you

# That's all right mama

# Just any way you do... #

The next thing that happened in Nashville

and country music's history was the onslaught of rock'n'roll in the mid-'50s

kicked the stuffing out of country music.

Elvis Presley thought he was a country singer.

He appeared on the Grand Ole Opry,

they called him the Hillbilly Cat and the B-side of his first record

was Bill Monroe's Blue Moon Of Kentucky.

But this wasn't country.

This was rock'n'roll.

All the radio stations wanted to programme for this new group of consumers called teenagers,

so they all stampeded in the wake of Elvis to this new format - rock'n'roll.

At that time, a lot of kids were listening to country music

and Elvis came along and they just left the building.

There were nights when the Grand Ole Opry, the Ryman Auditorium, was only a third full.

Rock 'n' roll was music for teenagers, with a teenage take on life.

It was fast, sexy and urban.

Country music, with its cowboy hats and shiny suits,

suddenly looked very square, indeed.

Nashville fought back by developing something called the Nashville Sound

and that sweetened country music.

It made it more palatable to pop listeners.

They put background vocalists on, like the Anita Kerr Singers and the Jordanaires.

They downplayed the banjo and downplayed the steel guitar and brought in strings.

They kept the heart in the country song and the heart in the country singer,

but they put them on a little cushion of sound

and the great beneficiaries of that were Skeeter Davis and Patsy Cline.

# Crazy

# I'm crazy

# For feeling so lonely

# I'm crazy

# Crazy for feeling so blue... #

The Nashville sound of Patsy Cline's records was lush and dramatic.

The beginnings of countrypolitan - the cross-over pop

where country's high lonesome got the metropolitan treatment.

# And then some day

# You'd leave me for somebody new... #

That's the beauty of those songs. She picked those songs because they moved her.

And, er, yeah, she could cry.

And she had a tempestuous personal life with a husband and it all hit her right there,

and you can hear it in the music.

# I'm crazy for trying

# And crazy for crying

# And I'm crazy for loving you... #

Patsy Cline had shifted the focus on from Kitty Wells and her honky-tonk nightlife

and into the suburban home.

Women had found their voice and the era of the female country-music icon had begun.

# I'm crazy for trying

# And crazy for crying

# And I'm crazy for loving

# You. #

-MAN:

-Oh, yes!

-APPLAUSE

As the 1960s unfolded, prosperity, urbanisation

and even the pill gave women more independence than ever before.

Into this changing world came Loretta Lynn, the coalminer's daughter,

with the songs that made sense of the times.

# You thought that I'd be waiting up

# When you came home last night

# You'd been out with all the boys

# And you ended up half tight

# Liquor and love They just don't mix

# Leave the bottle or me behind

# And don't come home a-drinking with lovin' on your mind. #

Loretta Lynn had married at 13 and had four children by the time she was 18.

Like her audience, she had made the journey from the backwoods to the town

looking to change her life. She became a country-music legend.

She wrote about who she was and about who her women in her audience were.

She was telling it like the women lived it.

# I don't want to play house... #

The rise in the divorce rate at the end of the '60s

was the clearest sign that the old rural notions of morality were changing.

Women were on the move, making their own decisions.

Tammy Wynette, like so many others, came in from the cotton fields to taste this new freedom,

only to find a different kind of trouble.

# I've watched mommy and daddy

# And if that's the way it's done

# I don't want to play house... #

Tammy Wynette's life and music was so close, it was hard to tell them apart.

Her songs were confessional, drawn from real experience,

which echoed the lives of millions of other women.

# My daddy said goodbye. #

I think she was

not scared or afraid to sing about anything

that was important to her,

which meant as a single mom,

or as getting remarried, all those things happening in her life,

that, maybe back in the '60s and '70s, weren't always the thing to talk about, or to sing about.

# Our little boy is four years old

# And quite a little man

# So we spell out the words we don't

# Want him to understand

# Like T-O-Y

# Or maybe S-U-R-P-R-I-S-E... #

The audience for country music

were no longer living in fear of crop failures, floods and hurricanes.

Many of them had moved to the suburbs.

There were still disasters, but of a different kind.

# Our D-I-V-O-R-C-E

# Becomes final today. #

She had an ability to convey emotion so greatly within her songs.

You really believed she was the mother of the little boy

and she's spelling out the songs to shield them

from the knowledge that the parents are getting divorced.

This was not a put-on or a character, this could be her real experience.

She was the first person in our family who had been divorced.

Singing the song D-I-V-O-R-C-E was an expression of,

"Look, this is a painful thing.

"There's children involved, a man and a woman who love each other but it's not working out."

There's people all over the world who go through this every day

and they relate to the same pain that she felt.

# Oh, I wish that we could stop this

# D-I-V-O-R-C-E. #

APPLAUSE

The thin line between Tammy's art and her life was apparent

when she married the country singer George Jones in 1969.

# In a pawn shop in Chicago on a sunny summer day

# A couple gazes at the wedding rings there on display

# She smiles and nods at him as he says, "Honey that's for you"

# "It's not much, but it's the best that I can do". #

Their duet albums appeared to track the real-life ups and downs of their marriage, at a time

when the whole idea of family life and suburbia was under fire.

Tammy had come to represent the typical long-suffering, married woman

and now it was George Jones' turn to represent the men.

Their music was the soap opera which told the story of their audience,

as they also struggled to hold on.

George and Tammy lived out their entire relationship in their duets.

They had The Ceremony, which was about getting married,

The Golden Ring was about getting divorced.

Everything in those duets was playing out in real time while they were married.

That added an extra vibrancy to them, too.

They are the number one husband and wife team in country music.

George Jones and Tammy Wynette.

APPLAUSE

# Oh, we're gonna ho-o-o-o-ld on

# We're gonna ho-o-o-o-ld on... #

They had real strife with one another and real feeling and love.

But beyond that, they were artists and they were making show again

of their feelings and using their abilities

to stand in for the broken-hearted man and the broken-hearted woman,

the woman wronged and the man who wronged her and are able to put that in a song, on a record.

It's a really amazing feat.

# We're gonna hold, hold Ho-o-o-o-ld on

# To each other

# We're gonna ho-o-o-o-ld on... #

Sadly, they couldn't hold on.

George and Tammy got a D-I-V-O-R-C-E in 1975,

sending George back to his honky tonking lifestyle of alcohol and cocaine.

# The bars are all closed

# It's four in the morning

# I must have shut 'em all down by the shape that I'm in

# I lay my head on the wheel

# That old horn begins honking.

# The whole neighbourhood knows Jones is home drunk again... #

His generation had aspired to be freewheeling cowboys,

but the truth was they were riding lawnmowers instead of horses

and the Honky Tonk Angel was now the ex-wife.

# He stopped loving her today... #

Bobby Braddock wrote the song which confirmed the George Jones image

as the country singer crying in his beer, taking self pity

and turning it into tragic high art.

# He stopped loving her today... #

I think at the time I wasn't in that good a shape

to record yet. And I was still trying to

get my life straightened out.

So when I started getting my life straightened out,

that's when I went in and...

But it stayed on my mind every day.

Every day I was trying to sing the song.

And I said, well, that's got to be something to it.

I thought it was just a song, until I heard George's version of it.

I didn't realise how good it was.

# He stopped loving her today

# They placed a wreath upon his door

# Soon they'll carry him away

# But he stopped loving her today... #

It's the full experience of life. Life is always bittersweet.

So when you get a pop song that's just about happiness and fun, it's a lie.

Because nobody's ever 100% happy. We're all ticking timebombs. None of us get out alive.

That doesn't mean life isn't beautiful and full of moments of incredible joy.

So George Jones, he could sing about it that way.

He could make you feel like life is huge and full of great, joyful moments but it's always tragic.

# And soon they'll carry him away

# He stopped loving her today. #

Country music had survived the earthquake that was rock'n'roll

by relocating from country to town.

And that town was Nashville.

A huge industry had been built on songs which addressed the adult themes of life's disappointments.

But many thought the music was losing touch with its roots.

Enter The Man In Black, Johnny Cash.

# Hey, get rhythm When you get the blues

# Come on, get rhythm When you get the blues. #

If anyone in country music still believed in the self-sufficient cowboy

as the ultimate American hero, it was Johnny Cash.

He was a preacher with a message of hope and redemption,

and he wrapped himself in Bible black.

Pretty early on, he realised he really looked good in a black suit.

He started saying that he was going to wear his black as kind of a symbol of protest

against the wrongs in the world.

Again, another person who was very, very influenced, as a child,

from the Western movies, and another huge Gene Autry fan.

And even though he loved that, kind of, fancy look that Gene Autry wore,

he knew, for himself - a great big tall guy, big broad-shouldered man -

that the black was a better look for him.

Johnny Cash had found the right costume.

And to make his message clear,

he also stripped his music of any unnecessary adornment.

There was no steel guitar, no fiddle and no banjo -

just three chords and the truth.

Cash used Luther Perkins on guitar

and he was a guy of limited technical ability,

to the point that it would frustrate Cash sometimes,

but Cash's producer at Sun Records, Sam Phillips, loved it.

He would take Luther's guitar away after a recording session,

so that he could NOT practise. He wanted him to be able to go,

da-da-daw-daw-baw.

# Because you're mine

# I walk the line. #

It's got that raw, lean rhythm.

It's a guitar and an acoustic and an upright bass

and a snare drum. There's nothing on the record

and that's what makes it intense.

If any of the guards are still speaking to me, could I have a glass of water?

LAUGHTER

The live albums recorded at Folsom Prison in 1968 and San Quentin

State Prison in 1969 came to symbolise everything he stood for.

Cash took country music back where he thought it belonged -

to the common man who had fallen from grace.

The Man in Black, with his stripped-back sound,

within the bare walls of a prison

was a stark reminder of country's dirt poor roots.

# San Quentin You've been living hell to me... #

CHEERING

# You've blistered me since 1963. #

We've always loved the underdog, the outsider, the bad boy.

That's who we all want to identify with. Nobody wants to be part of...

Nobody wants to identify with the prison guard, the warden.

Those are the people that are oppressors, so the everyman

is the guy behind the bars.

# San Quentin I hate every inch of you. #

CHEERING

He had a connection with those prisoners.

A lot of people assume that Cash himself had been to prison.

He never had. He'd been to jail, but not to prison.

There are points, particularly during the San Quentin concert,

when, if he had just gone,

"OK, break!", it could have started a riot,

with that gravitas and that trembling voice of his.

Merle Haggard was a prisoner in San Quentin

the day Johnny Cash came to perform.

It gave him the idea that singing for the common man

could be a career.

There was a guard,

a prison guard, that was standing over at the side of the stage,

chewing gum,

and Cash looked over at this guard and started...

..mocking that guard.

And immediately, this put the whole prison in the palm of his hand,

when he done that. Every convict there loved him,

because he was...he was able to smart off to a guard

and get away with it. And I thought, "Man, this guy

"has got more stage presence than anybody I've ever seen".

Cash could only imagine life in a Californian prison,

but Merle Haggard was the real deal.

# The warden led a prisoner

# Down the hallway to his doom

# I stood up to say goodbye like all the rest

# And I heard him tell the warden

# Just before he reached my cell

# "Let my guitar-playing friend do my request". #

This experience gave credibility to his songs.

Merle Haggard had the authenticity

that sometimes Nashville only pretended to have.

# It's a big job just getting by with nine kids and a wife

# Yeah, but I been a working man dang near all my life

# And I'll keep on working. #

It's certainly something that, in many cases, has given voice

to the commoner, you know, to the common man.

People have called Merle Haggard "a poet of the common man"

and, certainly, he is...an incredible country singer-songwriter.

# We don't smoke marijuana in Muskogee

# We don't take our trips on LSD. #

In the 1960s, as Merle rose to fame,

America was being torn apart by the Vietnam War.

# We like livin' right and being free. #

It had become anti-war long hairs versus the patriotic silent majority.

The voice of the common man,

the core audience of country music,

wasn't being heard at all,

until Merle Haggard sang Okie From Muskogee.

He has told different stories about his relation to that song

at different parts of his life.

The original version, which the country audience wanted to buy into,

is that it was absolutely serious. This is a song for all the people

in Muskogee, USA, who hate hippies and people protesting the war.

# We don't let our hair grow long and shaggy, nasty, filthy

# Like the hippies out in San Francisco do. #

Okie From Muskogee teased the liberals

about their long hair and LSD.

It was a song of the moment which viewed the radical hippies of San Francisco

through the disapproving eyes of small-town America.

# ..even squares can have a ball. #

It may have cost me a lot of fans, actually. I know it is something

that represented a lot of people - the downtrodden, the underdog,

the guy that don't bitch about everything,

the guy that is still proud and didn't need to be cool.

I think that is what it said -

you don't have to be cool to be great, you know.

# In Muskogee, Oklahoma, USA. #

The blue collar world view of country music

makes it an easy target for those at the cutting edge of new political thinking,

but sometimes, by following its heart,

it comes out ahead of the game.

# For years to wait. #

# You've got to kiss an angel good morning

# Let her know you think about her when you go

# Kiss an angel good morning

# And love her like the devil when you get back home. #

What's wrong with that?

As the civil rights movement began to change attitudes in the southern states,

an African-American called Charley Pride took to the stage of the Grand Ole Opry

to sing what had always been called "white man's blues".

# Sweetheart, I'll give you all my love in every way I can

# But make sure that's what you want while you're still free. #

The most obvious thing about Charley Pride - and it's not always the thing

that Charley would want to have talked about first,

but you can't help but notice that he is the most successful African-American country singer

in the history of the genre.

It was, in some ways, a new thing to happen. There were country songs sung by black people,

there was various sorts of black music that worked their way into country,

but somebody who was singing outright honky tonk music

with the same kind of back-up as every other country singer,

whose vocal mannerisms were born of the Grand Ole Opry and Hank Williams and not of Memphis -

"But I like country songs" - was a new thing to succeed.

It wasn't easy, but he made it work. When people heard him sing it worked,

because he sounds like a classic country singer.

# Is anybody going to San Antone?

# Or Phoenix, Arizona?

# Any place is all right as long as I

# Can forget I've ever known her. #

My oldest sister used to say, "Why are you singing THEIR songs?"

My oldest sister - same mother. "Why are you singing THEIR songs?"

I said, "Well, no, it's MY songs, too."

If I want to sing them, I would sing what I heard on the Grand Ole Opry,

like Ernest Tubb and Eddy Arnold, all those guys,

and so I emulated them.

# Is anybody going to San Antone?

# or Phoenix, Arizona?

# Any place is all right as long as I

# Can forget I've ever known her. #

The fact that he wanted to sing Hank Williams songs

and the songs about crystal chandeliers.

He sang songs about class, in a, kind of, you know,

"You're going to go off to your rich friend with the crystal chandeliers."

He transcended race because it was really great country music.

# Forget I've ever known her. #

Despite the breakthrough of Charley Pride,

country music couldn't shake off its redneck reputation.

By the '70s, long hair and drugs were everywhere -

except the Grand Ole Opry.

Merle Haggard's Okie From Muskogee had suggested there was no place

for hippies in country music, but soon,

the barbarians would be at the gates of Nashville itself.

# Whisky river don't run dry

# You're all I've got Take care of me. #

Under the influence of the times, Waylon Jennings and Willie Nelson

started playing a different sort of country music.

'Every generation probably wants to say'

their music is the real one. I think, in a way, that outlaw music

was just a representation of what was going on in the world,

that people were now, instead of drinking whisky, smoking pot.

So they needed country music that went along with that.

It appealed to everybody. It appealed to the rednecks, to hippies,

rock and rollers - everybody.

# Where does it go? Lord only knows

# Seems like it was just the other day. #

The movement became known as The Outlaws,

after the 1976 album that sold a million copies.

It looked like a wanted poster from the Wild West

and established the straggly beard as the must-have accessory

of modern country music.

# All them lovable losers

# And no account boozers

# And honky tonk heroes like me. #

In the end, it all comes back to the singing cowboy films,

but Waylon and Willie didn't want to be on the side of law and order.

Their heroes were the outsiders, not the sheriff.

Sometimes, the bad guys were the most interesting ones in the movies.

So it is fun, I think, to look at the rock and roll guys and also

people like Johnny Cash and Waylon Jennings,

who migrated towards the black hat, the black clothes and, you know,

people like Keith Richards and Ringo Starr have talked about

how they were really influenced by the cowboys and the westerns.

But they definitely went for that outlaw look.

All the outlaws were just doing it their way and then the business

or the system caught on, "Oh, wow! This is... They look a little rough, but, wow,

"they are actually drawing in country people and hippies

"and bikers and business people, all in the same roof."

So, it opened up a lot of doors, that's for sure.

# Oh, all them lovable losers

# And no account boozers

# And honky tonk heroes like me. #

Have a good time!

CHEERING

The Outlaws broadened the audience for country music

and helped it lose its uptight image,

but that was nothing compared to the impact

of a woman from the Smoky Mountains of Tennessee,

who set her sights on global domination.

Dolly Parton struck gold,

with a formula that still endures to this day.

She was more hillbilly than ever,

but she wrapped it up in bright new packaging.

She brought joy back to the music,

disarming the critics with her dumb blonde exterior,

and became a superstar.

# Do-do-dooo!

# You look at me that way

# I know what your eyes say

# Your eyes reflect love and desire

# I see that you need me I need you to please me

# You touch me and set me on fire. #

Dolly was keenly aware of showbusiness.

She was performing from a young age and I think even in her early days,

she knew how to handle the spotlight and how to maximise it for herself.

But it was her way of creating a character that was very memorable

and again, going back to being showbiz, to becoming an icon.

# Back through the years I go wandering once again

# Back to the seasons of my youth. #

She had the necessary tough childhood, to give her authenticity,

but it was far from tragic.

She brought a showbiz glamour to her hillbilly roots

and took country music into a whole new era.

# Rags of many colours

# But every piece was small and I didn't have a coat

# And it was way down... #

We lived so hard. I mean, every day was a struggle.

If you've got a house full of kids, like we did, Mom and Daddy had 12,

and we lived in these old, cold houses. We had no electricity

and we didn't have enough firewood to keep the whole house warm.

We had to get dressed up to go to bed.

We had to bundle up in clothes to get in the bed, where the snow

would come through cracks in the walls.

Well, why wouldn't you feel...? You know, you lived that, you feel it.

# Jolene, Jolene, Jolene, Jolene

# I'm begging of you Please don't take my man. #

Before Dolly, women in country songs were forever trapped

in destructive relationships with men.

Dolly was too independent for that.

Even Jolene is actually a dialogue between women.

# Your beauty is beyond compare

# With flaming locks of auburn hair

# With ivory skin and eyes of emerald green. #

Above all things that I do, I consider myself a songwriter.

And in order to be a true artist, you have to be so open,

you have to be so vulnerable.

# There's nothing I can do to keep from crying

# When he called your name, Jolene. #

You give that feeling a voice, you give that emotion.

# ..could easily take my man

# But you don't know what he means to me, Jolene. #

And I know how people like us write these God-awful sad songs

and really mean them, because we feel that.

And I feel everything, to the depths of my soul.

By the 1990's,

it seemed like the best days of country music were over.

Garth Brooks turned country into arena spectacle

and sold millions of albums,

but it didn't resonate across the world.

More recently, Taylor Swift has made country music for a teen audience,

but the era of the great country music icons may well be over.

# And I'm so lonesome I could cry. #

The extreme hardships of rural life, that produced many

of the country music legends has, thankfully, gone away,

but this may have cut the music off from its roots.

Without the authentic background of community and pain,

country music may struggle to connect with the hearts

of a worldwide audience, the way it used to.

Dolly Parton may be the last country music legend.

Even with all the glamour and all the other businesses

and all the stuff I do,

you'd be shocked to know how little I still am,

how small and how vulnerable and how country, and how I am still

so that little girl, cos I hang onto that,

cos that's who I really am.

# I hurt myself today

# To see if I still feel. #

When Johnny Cash recorded Hurt in 2002,

it was a rage against the dying of his own light,

as a man and a country music icon,

but it could also be seen as a requiem for the lost world

that originally gave us the joy of country music.

# My sweetest friend

# Everyone I know

# Goes away, in the end

# And you could have it all

# My empire of dirt

# I will let you down

# I will make you hurt. #

Everybody can identify with... not feeling too good.

You can put on your country music and try and get away

from all your problems.

# You are someone else. #

Country music is, kind of, the place that anyone who has lived life

goes to, if they have a heart. Those songs speak to everybody.

It's like, it's funny, it's sad,

but...I love it.

# My sweetest friend. #

People like country music because it's real. It's country!

It makes you tingle, makes you feel so alive.

It makes your heart beat faster, it makes you sweat.

# And you could have it all. #

You don't always cry alone.

When you laugh, you don't always laugh alone.

'Even though it is painful, it's a joy for everybody.'

It's like, "Wow! That really hit home" or, "Jesus!" You have an effect, you have a power.

# If I could start again

# A million miles away

# I would keep myself

# I would find a way. #

# Yeah, I caught you honky-tonking with my best friend

# The thing to do was leave you but I should have left then

# Now I'm too old to leave you but I still get sore

# When you come home a-feelin' for the knob on the door

# Tell me why, baby, why, baby Why, baby, why

# You make me cry, baby, cry, baby # Cry, baby, cry?

# I can't help but love you till the day that I die

# So tell me why, baby, why, baby Why, baby, why? #