Although I'm not much of a documentary watcher, I did intend to see this series when it was on a while back, for it'd been well reviewed and promised to be interesting; however, I ended up missing every single episode due to some combination of always being out, forgetting to set the vcr, and just plain forgetting (the usual things which ensure that I rarely watch tv). Happily, though, Kevin recorded three out of the four instalments and I was able to get them off him.
The series begins by examining the usual roll call of early mountain music types - Bill Monroe, the Carter Family, Ralph Stanley, and so on - with the usual archival photos and other material, tracing their voyages from front porches to recording studios and providing some interesting insights into the way in which the style became popular and began to sell. The second episode concerns the Nashville scene and the commercialisation of country - this is the one that I didn't get to see (and, fortuitously, the one that I would've been least interested in seeing anyway). Episode three turns to what came after Nashville - Johnny Cash and the outlaw movement, Gram and Emmylou, the 'new traditionalists' (haven't heard much of the stuff from this stream, but I don't think it'd be much my bag), and then two contrasting contemporary developments in the 'alt-country' thing and the massive pop crossovers of Garth Brooks and Shania Twain. And the final episode considers the history of women in country, providing the highlight of the series as far as I'm concerned by devoting a generous amount of time to Gillian Welch in the closing minutes, including interview and concert footage.
'Generous', though, is a relative concept in the context of, I suppose, any documentary series such as this one; each episode's about 50 minutes in length, meaning that the whole stretches out to only 3 and a bit hours, which is not enough to give more than the most cursory overview of a whole set of musical genres from go to (present day) whoa. The makers do a good job within those constraints, and the mix of interviews with older and more contemporary musicians, industry types, and historians/archivists, along with voiceover, historical material and a couple of unobtrusive re-enactments, works well. I didn't learn much from it, but still enjoyed watching to see how things were presented and arranged (and also for the implicit reinforcements of canon that it enacts), and suspect that it'd make a good primer for a complete country music neophyte.
