Country is a weird genre. It’s like folk or R&B in the sense that genre purity makes a little more sense than it does in other genres. Every so often in country and folk, there is a return to something (mostly) more traditional. And there always seems to be a need for it. But, unlike …
Tag: Bakersfield Sound
Country Music (2019)
This is an engrossing, thorough, occasionally moving and, for its first six episodes, authoritative history of country music. It follows the usual rhythms of a Ken Burns’ documentary, which is something I thoroughly enjoy, and has the usual strengths and weaknesses of his approach to storytelling.
Sing Me Back Home (1968) by Merle Haggard and the Strangers
The way I think about music is dominated by the idea of artistic progression: did this artist improve or change from the last album. But country music poses a challenge to this outlook (just like soul does) because, for much of the genre’s history if not all of it, stasis or consistency has been deemed …