Original subtitles

[country music plays]

Provided by explosiveskull https://twitter.com/kaboomskull M_I_SForEver

[country music plays]

Country music is all about real life.

They're songs that tell a story. It's a story about people.

Mamas, trains, and going away. That's all you gotta know to write a country song.

[Kenny Rogers] Country is where the heart is.

But country is more than music, and photography has captured it.

[David McClister] As the music evolved and the image evolved,

photographers captured the entire story of country music.

[Larry Gatlin] For a long time it was boots, hat,

fancy shirts, big belt buckles.

You had the rhinestone cowboy look. They were outlandish.

[Les Leverett] They audience would go crazy

about every one of them, and I was there with a camera.

We wore long gowns, and this big 'do, up here like this.

[Roy Clark] A lot of people have said we are setting the image

of country music back 20 years.

[Tanya Tucker] I didn't see what the big deal was.

I say get the camera and let's go, 'cause I know a good picture.

[country music plays]

Country is about being connected to something genuine,

so I want to make pictures that tell you the truth.

My interest was making them reveal themselves to me.

[Henry Diltz] Are these real people? What is their life really like?

- I want to grab that moment. - Country music has represented

the heart of America for a really long time.

[Keith Urban] There's so many images that have captured

where those artists are at and where country's at.

When you look at that picture and feel that same feeling,

that's the shot.

[country music playing]

[Loretta Lynn] ♪ Well, I like my lovin' done country style ♪

♪ And this little girl would walk a country mile ♪

♪ To find her a good ole slow-talkin' country boy ♪

♪ I said a country boy ♪

♪ I'm about as old-fashioned as I can be ♪

♪ So I hope you're likin' what you see ♪

♪ If you're lookin' at me ♪

♪ You're lookin' at country ♪

♪ You don't see no city when you look at me ♪

♪ 'Cause country's all I am ♪

♪ I love runnin' barefooted through the old cornfields ♪

♪ And I love that country ham ♪

♪ Well, you say I'm made just to fit your plans ♪

♪ But does a barnyard shovel fit your hands? ♪

♪ If your eyes are on me ♪

♪ You're lookin' at country ♪

♪ If your eyes are on me ♪

♪ You're lookin' at country ♪

[song ends]

[cheers and applause]

[country music playing]

[Lovett] Country music in its origin

came from a place that's pure

and uncorrupted by the rest of the world.

[Peter Cooper] Early country music was a confluence

of European fiddling and the banjo that came from Africa.

When these sounds converged in the American South,

you get the building blocks of country music.

It was what you would hear just driving by a house out in the country.

Somebody sitting on their front porch making music

to satisfy and entertain themselves.

In the '20s, they were hardcore country people.

I mean, they were country people singing about country things.

[Michael McCall] It wasn't called country music for a long time.

It was just folk music,

'cause they called it Southern folk music.

And folk music wasn't considered commercial.

But record labels found that once they started recording

folk songs with fiddle players and country vocalists,

that stuff sold really well.

Some of the first recorded country music

came out of Atlanta,

with a guy named Fiddlin' John Carson,

who sells 100,000 copies of that first record.

And then in 1924, Vernon Dalhart sells a million copies

of "The Prisoner's Song."

Then the Carter Family and Jimmy Rodgers record in 1927.

And that's really the beginning,

that's the big bang of country music.

That's when it really becomes commercial.

[Cooper] Jimmy Rodgers and the Carter Family were discovered

at the Bristol Sessions.

It was an all-call, a discovery process,

where lots of musicians came in,

kind of like an early "American Idol," only a lot better.

[Marty Stuart] Ralph Peer discovered the Carter Family

and Jimmy Rodgers in one week in 1927.

And all of a sudden, we have country music.

[Cusic] The Carter Family gave us a body of work

that's still with us today.

And Jimmy Rodgers becomes a superstar.

He was a dandy and set the standard for the country star

and influenced so many of those early country performers.

[Stuart] Pop Stoneman, the Gully Jumpers,

Dr. Humphrey Bate, those characters lit the fire on country music.

Especially the Carter Family.

When you look at those photographs,

it looked as if the Old Testament had come to life.

[country music plays]

[Cusic] Radio comes into American life in the 1930s

during the Great Depression,

and that's when country music comes of age.

[McCall] A lot of it was built around barn dances.

Musicians would come from all over the region to play,

and radio stations like WLS in Chicago

and WSM in Nashville would broadcast it out

all across the country.

Radio was huge for country music.

[Shannon Thomas Perich] Country music was an amalgamation of regional sounds.

So until there was some sort of mechanism for them

to all be delivered nationally, they remained regional.

But once country music becomes more widespread,

and you're hearing it on the radio,

it's becoming more professional.

And performers would go to studios and have their pictures made.

They would be distributed to the radio stations.

Those photographs would appear in newspapers.

[McCall] They purposely would look as country as they could,

but they were selling what they thought of as rural music.

In the early days, guys would come in wearing

a suit and a hat and change into overalls and plaid shirts

in order to perform 'cause it was part of the image.

[Diane Pecknold] Women were consigned to family stereotypes,

so the sentimental mother and the pure mountain girl sweetheart

were very prominent characters and had prominent roles in country music.

It was family entertainment, and there were cultural expectations

about who they were supposed to be.

You're selling music to a certain kind of people,

a certain kind of American, and the image plays into that.

Jimmy Rodgers is gonna wear a brakeman hat.

Kitty Wells reflects that sweet country girl image.

You're gonna have the hillbilly look.

The image is completely tied to the music.

[Stuart] I've always thought of hillbilly as an endearing term.

But Ernest Tubb used to say, "If you're gonna call me hillbilly,

you damn well better smile when you do it."

[Cusic] In the late 1930s and early '40s,

you get the singing cowboys out in Hollywood,

with Gene Autry, Roy Rogers, Tex Ritter.

And that changes the image of country music

because no kid wants to grow up being a hillbilly,

and everybody wants to grow up being a cowboy.

[McCall] The cowboy hat became this iconic image that spoke of romance,

it spoke of truth, honesty, and the good, old American way.

[Cusic] Gene Autry was a huge star and a great influence on country music.

Not for what he sounded like, but for what he looked like,

because he really popularized that Western look,

and others followed Autry's path.

[Bill Anderson] The cowboy look came into country music

influenced by Western culture,

with the boots, and some of the acts wore hats.

That was around for a long period of time,

and then it began to phase out and people came in to other styles

and other ways of trying to present themselves.

[Leverett] Lester Flatt and Earl Scruggs, Bill Monroe,

never went onstage without a coat and a tie.

They looked like gentlemen, and they acted like gentlemen.

[Holly Williams] In the '50s, the women wore dresses

with the belt that came in at the waist,

and the hair that was flipping up all over the place.

You know, that really classic kind of country feel.

[Connie Smith] June Carter looked so much like a lady

with the chiffon dress on, and she'd do that bit

where she crossed her legs and showed her pantaloons

for her comedy act.

[Davis] If you were a new artist, the studio was gonna send you

to get your photo taken by Walden Fabry.

It was a rite of passage.

Walden Fabry was a Chicago photographer.

Minnie Pearl met him in Chicago and talked him into coming to Nashville,

'cause country artists didn't have anyone like that

making these amazing glamor shots,

and that's what got sent out to radio, fan magazines,

and those photos were what you needed to sell the music.

If you're an artist, you might go to a different photographer for different things.

Elmer Williams was a photographer just having fun.

He started out as an amateur.

In the '50s, he started hanging out backstage in Nashville

and made friends with all these country music artists.

And then he started getting some work in town.

He took photos for tobacco companies

who were big sponsors for country artists.

The Philip Morris sponsored this tour with Carl Smith and Ronnie Self.

And that's what they toured on, it wasn't fancy at all.

Elmer Williams shot for about ten years,

and then he applied to be a policeman.

And apparently, it was his biggest dream

because he stopped photography and never picked it back up again.

He was completely out of the country music world.

[Henry Horenstein] Country music in the '40s and the '50s was fighting music,

dance music, drinking music, good time music.

They sang soulful songs about life, life and love really.

It was Ernest Tubb, and it was Hank Williams.

♪ Hey, hey, good looking ♪

♪ What you got cooking? ♪

[Cooper] Hank Williams was an exciting, energetic performer, a superstar.

He was only in the spotlight for very few years.

He died at 29, yet was among the most prolific writers.

He just wrote, song after song, and they're classics.

[Anderson] I would buy his records, and I thought this guy must be so real

because he's singing what he's writing, so he must feel it,

this must be who he is.

[Holly Williams] My grandfather would say,

"I don't know what you mean by country.

I just write songs the way I know how." He was a country boy.

He was from Alabama, and these simple, basic lyrics

were resonating with millions of people.

This is where the roots of country was from.

Simple and absolutely timeless, even down to the perfect curve of the hat.

[Cooper] Country music had become the American sound,

and it could be heard all across the country.

But by the late '50s, things were changing.

[Anderson] Country music was in the doldrums.

The big artists like Hank Snow and Ernest Tubb,

their careers were on the downhill slide

because there was this thing called rock and roll and rockabilly.

[Brenda Lee] ♪ My baby whispers in my ear ♪

In my day in rock and roll, we were all in the music together,

inventing it as we went along.

They nicknamed me Little Miss Dynamite.

And the music was very rhythmic, a little bit of gospel,

a little bit of blues, a little bit of country.

Country music was such a big influence of what became rock and roll.

But, in a way, rock and roll left country behind

through its energy and through its youth and through its images.

[country music plays]

Elvis Presley thought of himself as a country singer.

He just happened to be a really fast, energetic one.

[Lee] I appeared with Elvis December the 13th, 1957.

He was just getting started.

The great success was yet to come,

even though he was really, really popular.

[Cooper] Elvis and Buddy Holly took all these kids away

who'd been loving Webb Pierce and Ray Price

and all this shuffling honky-tonk music,

and the fate of country music was in question.

[Anderson] There were a lot of country fans that embraced rock and roll,

but there were still the people that liked the traditional sounds of country.

They began to come back.

And the Grand Ole Opry was very important.

It laid the foundation for what we call Music City.

I'm not sure that Nashville would be Nashville

had it not been for the Grand Ole Opry.

[country music plays]

[Stuart] There was a Grand Ole Opry history picture book

that would come around every now and then when I was a kid.

And the photography made me want to be a part of country music

as much as the music did.

And the photographer, I kept noticing,

shot after shot, was Les Leverett.

He shot from the heart in a different way.

[Leverett] I went to work at the Grand Ole Opry as a photographer,

April 1st of 1960.

And gosh, I loved it.

When I started, it was really a big, big thing.

You could hardly buy a ticket.

The crowds would line up outside and go around the block.

It was the biggest country music show in the world.

And that's the big dream in those days...

if you were a country music star, to be a member of the Grand Ole Opry.

And if not, at least to sing on the stage of the Grand Ole Opry.

[Anderson] My song "City Lights" was a big hit

and opened all the doors for me in Nashville.

But when I got the phone call asking me if I wanted

to be a part of the Grand Ole Opry, it was like

asking me if I wanted to go to heaven when I die.

[Leverett] Everybody had suits in those days

with sequins shining in the spotlights.

And to see those fancy boots, it was glamorous.

They would have a 30-minute show

and a star would come out and sing.

Seldom did they do more than one song.

Or as one guy said one night,

"One song per hillbilly, buddy."

I shot so many acts: Grandpa Jones,

Minnie Pearl, the Jordanaires, Jim Reeves.

But I'm so busy making pictures, trying to get a good shot,

I don't know what they sang.

[Stuart] Les Leverett gave country music so much

of its importance and its image

because he was there to document it

when nobody else was paying attention.

- Here's one made in the Opry. - Oh, look at that.

- I'd sneak in that one. - That's a nice photo.

You never knew who was gonna show up at the Opry.

[Libby] I love to just look through my dad's photographs.

It always amazes me how much he's contributed to country music history.

I remember when I was small and I would go backstage at the Opry with you

at the Ryman Auditorium, we'd go in the big back door,

and it was like going into a fair.

It was so cool.

[country music plays]

The atmosphere backstage was like a family.

I watched my dad work, and he knew the artists that he was photographing,

so when Dad took those photographs, there was emotion.

He waited until just the right time to capture the moment with the camera.

[Leverett] There was always something exciting going on.

And I'd go anywhere, knock on a dressing room door.

You couldn't tell if they said come in or not, so I would just go in.

I was shameless.

[Anderson] When I first came here, the Grand Ole Opry

was basically a radio show, and it had been since 1925.

[Leverett] In 1925, the National Life Insurance Company in Nashville

decided to open a radio station, WSM radio.

[Cooper] WSM was carrying opera from New York.

One day, the announcer said to the radio listeners,

"For the past hour you've been listening to grand opera.

Now we're gonna bring you the grand ole opry."

He just said it off the cuff.

So WSM developed their program into the Grand Ole Opry.

WSM stands for "We Shield Millions"

which was the insurance company's motto.

And they used the radio show to sell insurance.

Their agents would go to homes and knock on the door

and say, "I'm from the Grand Ole Opry."

And give 'em a little brochure with opera stars' pictures.

"Well, come in." So they got in, and next thing you know,

they sold a burial policy or something.

But the Opry came on really strong and just kept growing.

So many people wanted to be on that radio once it got started.

[Cusic] Uncle Dave Macon, at 50 years old,

was the first star of the Grand Ole Opry.

Plays that banjo and rolls it around.

It was just entertainment then, and that's what Uncle Dave Macon was.

He was an entertainer.

But the story of country music is a fight for respect.

They want to be respected as musicians.

And so what we see is that move to the rhinestones,

and basically that was poor folks saying, "I'm somebody."

That was hillbilly bling.

A lot of country artists wore custom clothes

and custom boots and flashy things.

And a guy by the name of Nudie made their clothing.

[Leverett] When Nudie came along, they started putting on

those heavy suits with all those sequins.

When those spotlights hit those things, they started twinkling.

[McClister] The Nudie suit was such a unique style.

It set Nashville and country music apart from the other genres.

When you look at classic country photography,

the Webb Pierces of the world, Lefty Frizzells of the world,

always more a Nudie suit.

It made country music distinct. It was so cool.

[Anderson] I was very comfortable wearing rhinestones.

But these were suits that people used to tease me

and ask me if you plug them in, will they light up?

The clothes you wore, that was part of your story.

Porter Wagoner, the thin man from West Plains,

up there on the Opry stage wore these remarkable suits

with wagon wheels, 'cause it was Porter Wagoner and the Wagonmasters.

[Leverett] The fans in those days really loved those sparkles.

And I was there with a camera.

But in addition to my job, I started doing LP covers.

I've done 197 covers that I know about.

And I would always try to make the picture look like the title of the album.

[Porter Wagoner] ♪ I'm just asking you to listen ♪

[Leverett] In 1967, I did a picture of Porter Wagoner dressed up as a bum

for Confessions of a Broken Man,

and we did it on the back steps of the Ryman Auditorium.

They say Porter went down to some of the offices on Music Row later

and asked for a handout, and nobody knew who he was and they asked him to leave.

I always felt I was just trying to get a good shot of whoever I was working on.

Like when Loretta Lynn found out she was the latest member of the Grand Ole Opry,

and she's just excited beyond belief.

But I just went wherever people wanted me to go.

There was a recording session at Columbia Studios.

June Carter was sitting there and Johnny is whispering to her

because at the first session Johnny never showed up.

But he's trying to soothe her so she wouldn't feel bad at him.

With Johnny Cash, you knew you were gonna get good expressions.

You couldn't get a bad picture of him, I didn't think.

A photograph freezes the moment, and you've got it as long as you want to have it.

[Johnny Cash] ♪ Well, you wonder why I always dress in black ♪

[Devik Wiener] I feel like I'm preserving history.

There was a photographer based in Southern California by the name of Leigh Wiener.

And I'm his son. I'm doing the best I can

to administrate the archive he left behind

of almost half a million black and white images,

30,000 enlargements, and 40,000 color transparencies.

[Johnny Cash] ♪ I'm the man in black ♪

It wasn't until after my father's passing

in 1993 that I discovered most of the Johnny Cash work.

Just under 500 photographs, most of them black and white, some color.

Leigh Wiener photographed Johnny Cash between 1960 and '63.

He was hired by Columbia Records and he shot candids in the Columbia recording studio,

posed portraits in his own studio in Hollywood.

He considered himself a photographer of people.

And he loved the psychology of photographing people.

Presidents, captains of industry,

Hollywood celebrities, an incredible array of very famous people.

[Leigh] Any guy with a camera can take a picture.

Photographing people is unquestionably the most

difficult form of still photography there is.

Your portrait is not a duplication of a face.

A portrait is the revelation of a person.

You wanna tell something about the person.

[Devik] He didn't like filters in his camera. He preferred no makeup.

And he made every frame count.

He developed a rapport with most of his subjects,

and you can see by the imagery they developed a rapport during the course of their shoots.

The images tell that quite loudly.

[Perich] Leigh Wiener develops this relationship with Johnny Cash,

and they go out to Gene Autry's ranch.

Those photographs point to the singing cowboy,

a particular code of ethics.

Then you have Johnny Cash standing in some ways against that.

He becomes that very American idea of tradition,

but rebelliousness as well.

[Rosanne Cash] I recognize the qualities that make my dad iconic.

And there's a lot of projections that go on to him,

a lot of which are not true.

When my dad started out, he was not totally a real country music artist.

He was from Memphis, he wasn't from Nashville.

And he did not think specifically about country.

He just didn't. He listened to what they called race music,

and that was hugely influential.

Johnny Cash broke in as a rockabilly guy in the 1950s on Sun Records in Memphis,

along with this incredible stable of artists,

like Elvis Presley and Carl Perkins and Roy Orbison.

But in the 1960s, he moved over to Columbia Records,

Nashville-based, and did really well.

[Gatlin] Johnny Cash wrote some incredible songs.

He became a tremendous influence on country music.

But it's more than that. He could walk in a room,

behind you, and you felt his presence there.

[Cusic] He had a charisma that very, very few people have.

Cash was larger than life. He wasn't just an entertainer.

I got a call from his guitar player, Bob Wootton.

He says, "John wants to know if you'd be interested

in playing in the band." And so when we were introduced,

he just kept looking at me and kept shaking my hand.

Well, I prepared since I was a little boy to shake hands with Johnny Cash.

He said, "You know my songs?" I said, "Probably all of them."

And he said, "You got anything black to wear?"

[Cooper] You see these classic Cash images and the pictures tended

towards gravity and depth and weight.

And Manuel would make these remarkable suits for him.

[Manuel] One time Johnny Cash says, "I wanna talk to you."

He says, "I'm on the road. I'm gonna go on the road,

and I need nine suits, like... right away, man."

So I started sewing, and later he was on the road

and he says, "I got these suits. How come they are all black?"

One time he says, "Well, I wore black before,

but Manuel put me in a better black."

There was something about him.

He had that aura,

'cause he created his own image.

[Rosanne] My father cast a very large shadow.

And image is crucial to the artist,

but the image has to be authentic.

[Cooper] The late '50s and into the '60s is what we call

the Nashville sound era of country music.

When the sound went uptown, and there was a lot of piano, as opposed to fiddle.

It was an updating.

Chet Atkins and Owen Bradley, these two genius producers

were the architects of that sound,

shifting the sound more towards pop.

[Urban] Nashville was this magic land.

It was on the back of every record.

You flip it over and it would say,

"Recorded in Nashville, Tennessee."

So that's where you'd go to make records.

There was Music Row, 16th and 17th Ave,

and building after building after building

was either a studio or a record company.

But Nashville is a very traditional town.

So when Chet Atkins put an orchestra and a string section

on a country record, it's pretty blasphemous.

It's got nothing to do with Ernest Tubb.

It's got nothing to do with Hank Sr.

And they make no bones about the fact that they were

trying to reach a bigger audience.

[Smith] Chet Atkins, he signed me in June '64.

I wasn't really career-minded. I just wanted to sing.

But the controls were tighter back then,

and they wanted me to go middle of the road.

They said you can sing more than country.

[Urban] They were trying to give it a more contemporary sound.

Some people said, "It's destroying our genre."

But country's constantly changing,

and what's deemed traditional keeps moving.

[country music plays]

Country music has a definite tradition of rebellion,

and that was very much the case in Bakersfield, California, in the '50s and '60s.

People had come to Bakersfield from Oklahoma and Texas

during the Dust Bowl migration, way back in the '30s,

and they brought their music West as well.

And then when World War II broke out, even more people came West

to work in the shipyards and the aircraft factories.

And after the war, a lot of them stayed in Bakersfield

because there was work in the oil fields.

So the Bakersfield sound is really the music of Oklahoma,

Texas, Louisiana, and these guys didn't care what Nashville was doing.

The explosion of Bakersfield was an answer to the pop-ish type of sound

that was coming out of Nashville.

One of the key events was Buck Owens

strapping on a Telecaster guitar.

That was a very different sound for country music.

It was rough and edgy and kind of a honky-tonk thing.

[Price] Buck Owens got his first job at a honky-tonk in Bakersfield,

and then got his first big break when Capitol Records signed him.

And then by about 1961, all of a sudden, America couldn't get enough of Buck Owens,

and that roll just kept going.

You look at photos from Bakersfield,

it was just jeans and button-down shirts, nothing fancy.

But once Buck Owens hit it big and started playing gigs like Carnegie Hall,

Nudie was making suits for The Buckaroos too.

Country music does have a definite sensibility to it,

but the people of Bakersfield were really in their own world,

and they were dealing with so many different influences,

and that's reflected in the Bakersfield sound.

[Merle Haggard] A lot of country music came out of churches,

but the Bakersfield sound didn't come out of a church.

It came out of a barroom.

I grew up in Bakersfield.

A country singer couldn't have had a better life

and a past to draw from.

My father had worked for Santa Fe Railroads.

And he bought a city lot that had an old Santa Fe reefer on it,

and he said, "I'll just leave it there. I'll make a house out of it."

My father passed away when I was nine.

And pretty soon, I wouldn't mind my mother and I wouldn't go to school.

So they put me in reform school, and I ran away and stole a car,

so I was guilty of a felony.

I was 19 years old and I was in prison.

[Haggard] ♪ I turned 21 in prison doing life without parole ♪

[Haggard] New Year's Day in San Quentin, 1958,

Johnny Cash played what was called the Warden's Show.

He played prisons all over America, and I saw how he was able

to capture the audience.

And for the first time in my life,

I had a hint on what I might be doing the rest of my life.

I spent two years, nine months in San Quentin.

When I got out, I wound up with my own band.

And we played a type of country music that was identified with a steel guitar,

or better known as a pedal guitar.

And when we came onboard with that sound, it was different.

Nashville was happening, and somebody started to make a little noise somewhere,

they get you on the phone, say, "Come join the Grand Ole Opry."

So we didn't go down there.

I always wanted to be different from Nashville.

I wore a different kind of boot

just to let people know that I wasn't a hillbilly.

I was a flatlander.

So very early in my career, I was typecast as a rebel.

Johnny Cash had been to jail one time for four hours.

But everybody thought he was an ex-con. He looked the part.

And he said to me one time, "Haggard," he said,

"you're everything people think I am."

I was doing a Johnny Cash Network show,

and he talked me into letting it go public that I had been in prison.

- So he told the audience... - He sings those prison songs

like, well, you'd think he's been there.

Merle Haggard!

[Haggard] And I'm glad that I did it.

'Cause I don't like to be lied to.

If you lie to people, they'll reject you.

You've gotta be an honest person.

Your music's gotta be honest or else your tour will be over

and you'll be back in the oil fields.

So I kept on making music the way I heard it.

And right or wrong, it'll be honest.

[Cusic] The essence of country is that it's the music

of the white working class or the white Southern working class,

and it articulates their thoughts, feelings, issues.

It was imagined as the music of pure mountain culture,

which was understood as white,

and that was part of its marketing appeal.

But that was really a fiction.

[Cooper] There are people who say country is white music,

or they'll refer to blue-eyed soul,

but there was a tremendous African-American influence

in early country music.

And a major star of the Grand Ole Opry

was a black harmonica player named DeFord Bailey.

In fact, in the first music that anyone heard on the Grand Ole Opry radio show

was DeFord Bailey's harmonica.

- [harmonica playing] - But Nashville emerged at a time

when the South was deeply segregated.

And he was fired in 1941

in a racially-informed dispute.

[Pecknold] The general consensus is that he was expected to follow orders

in a way that white artists were not,

which he chafed against and they fired him.

It was reflecting the culture of segregation

and people who wanted a return to a pure white culture.

And in the early 1960s, country music became associated with racism

when George Wallace started to use country music in his campaigns.

[announcer] Governor George Wallace made a campaign promise to prevent the integration

of the last all-white state university.

[Pecknold] And there were country music artists

who did go and support George Wallace.

At the same time, the country music industry was consciously

seeking a way to change its image.

So when Ray Charles recorded Modern Sounds in Country and Western Music,

you used to see all of these picture of Ray Charles in country music magazines.

It was not a country record, but they were trying to use the success of his album,

and especially his image, to reimagine what the country audience looked like.

[Cooper] Ray Charles was doing country songs,

but he wasn't a country singer.

And no significant African-American star emerged in this music

until renegade producer Cowboy Jack Clement

took Charley Pride into the recording studio.

♪ So I feel so blue ♪

♪ Sometimes I wanna die ♪

[Pride] My career was smack-dab in the middle of civil rights,

and a lot of people thought I was a little bit off.

Meaning, how do you think you gonna make it in a... white man's music?

Like I wasn't thinking straight or something.

But I wasn't discouraged

because it's my music too if I like it.

I grew up in Sledge, Mississippi,

55 miles below Memphis, Tennessee.

My dad's favorite artist was Bill Monroe and the Bluegrass Boys,

and I just got hooked on it.

I bought me a Sears Roebuck guitar when I was about 14 years old,

and if I heard a song I liked, I would sing it.

I was picking cotton alongside my dad and I said,

I ain't gonna be no cotton picker.

My dream was to go to the Major Leagues,

and when I saw Jackie Robinson do it,

I said here's my chance, I'll go and break all the records in baseball,

then I can sing.

I played in the old Negro League

right behind Ernie Banks,

Hank Aaron, and Willie Mays, and I was really good.

But I cracked my elbow in 1956.

And I still thought I could make it.

I went up to Montana to play in the Pioneer League.

Then I went to spring training with Gene Autry's team, the Angels in '61.

And the next year, spring training with the Mets,

but they wouldn't look at me.

So I got there, I just didn't stay.

People always encouraged me to go to Nashville,

and that's what I did.

I met Jack Johnson, who ended up being my manager.

Jack had always told people, if you find me a colored guy that sing country music,

you send him to me. Took his glasses and he looked and he says,

"All right, sing something."

So he heard me and he said, "Where you from?"

I said I was born and raised in Sledge, Mississippi.

I said I live in Montana now. "How do they take you up there?"

I said, well, about the way you're doing right now when they first see me.

And he give me seven songs to work up.

We do the demo, and Chet Atkins took the dub and played it for RCA.

And they said, "We like it, good voice, good voice."

Then they passed my picture around.

And everybody kind of looked at one another

and they all said, "We still gonna sign him.

We just not gonna say anything about the uniqueness of his pigmentation, you know?"

They signed me September of '65.

They never said anything about color.

They just released the record out there to all the DJs

and they let the rumors start.

"What color you think he is?" "What do you mean what color is he?

He's white." "No, no."

"What?" "How much you wanna bet?"

[country music plays]

[Cooper] At a time when there was fighting on the streets

about segregation, people learned to love the music

before they figured out what the guy looked like.

And once you love something, it's hard to take that back.

[Pride] I always thought that I was just as good

as anybody else and wasn't no worse.

I had more obstacles to walk around than the average fight.

But people liked my voice. There's something about it.

And I'm just glad that I was given a chance to sing.

And everything turned out beautiful.

[Cooper] You can't segregate the airwaves.

Country demanded a stylistic and cultural cross-pollination.

By the 1960s, Nashville was a top-down town

with producers really running the show.

[McCall] The producers chose the musicians,

they worked in the same studios all the time,

they often helped choose the songs.

[Cooper] And some people demanded to be in control

of their music in a way they had not been before.

- They were the outlaws. - [Willie Nelson] ♪ Yesterday wine ♪

[Cooper] You have Willie Nelson who had a very atypical way of singing.

And he was made to fit in, being instructed how to sound, what to wear.

He looked like he could be an insurance salesman.

He went back down to Texas and said,

"The heck with all this, I'm gonna do something else."

And by 1973, he looked like Willie Nelson.

[McCall] Willie Nelson identified with hippies

and hippie culture was such a powerful aspect of America.

A lot of musicians were smoking pot

and experimenting with drugs and growing their hair,

and it certainly influenced country music.

[Cooper] You had people like Kris Kristofferson come along,

changing the language of this music.

Kristofferson was as influenced by Bob Dylan as he was by Hank Williams.

[Lovett] Great singer-songwriters showed me what songs could be.

Songs didn't necessarily have to have a catchy line that repeated over and over.

A song could be about something, a song could tell a story

and be way more than a song.

[McCall] The outlaws wanted to use their own bands,

they wanted to decide how they sounded and how they looked.

[Cooper] Waylon Jennings was about leather

and looking like he just jumped off his motorcycle.

But that was what the outlaw movement was about. It was about distinction.

[Raeanne Rubenstein] Waylon Jennings was the first country artist

to appear at Max's Kansas City in New York.

And believe me, in the early '70s,

no one was interested in country music

on the Lower East Side of Manhattan.

But everyone wanted to see Waylon

because he was a renegade,

an independent, wild cowboy.

I photographed him. He was posing, flirting,

and New York just went crazy for Waylon.

I've been photographing country music my whole career.

Practically shortly after rock and roll.

The fourth roll of film that I ever took

was a concert with Janis Joplin and I thought those pictures

were beautiful and she looked amazing.

And my interest was piqued.

I wanted to go to more shows and shoot more performances.

I photographed artists like The Who, BB King,

I shot John Lennon's birthday.

I photographed so many legends, it was just amazing.

But my first assignment in Nashville was Johnny Cash.

[Cash] Hello, I'm Johnny Cash.

[Rubenstein] They were taping The Johnny Cash Show

at the Ryman at the Grand Ole Opry.

[Cash] ♪ I hear the train a-coming ♪

But I didn't know anybody there.

So I was sitting there waiting,

and all of a sudden there was this tap on my shoulder.

And I looked up and, oh, my gosh, it was Johnny Cash.

And he said, "Hello, little lady. Can I help you?"

It was awesome!

My fate was sealed. I started coming to Nashville

and I would photograph country artists for magazines in New York.

It wasn't necessarily the kind of place that I was accustomed to,

but I liked the people and I liked the artists.

[Stuart] Raeanne coming in the early '70s

when country music was struggling to find its way into the mainstream

and then taking it back to her world was almost like having a correspondent.

It gave country music a voice.

[Perich] When you start seeing country music performers

in Time magazine and in Rolling Stone,

it becomes a stamp of approval.

a sign that there's a wider audience.

And photographers are recording not just the performer, but the culture.

[Rubenstein] When I got affiliated with Nashville,

there was a specific look for country artist photos.

Photographers were not hired by the labels to tell the truth

about the personalities of their stars.

And that is my exact interest.

I like making them reveal themselves to me.

And I felt that if you put that into a photo,

it would make your artist even more successful.

[Smith] I like a song that clicks with me,

and it's the same thing with a picture.

You go through a whole contact sheet of pictures,

and then there's just this one that just has something.

You can read somebody's soul in a picture sometimes.

[Rubenstein] With Tammy Wynette, the shoes, the glasses,

the wig reflected her taste and her lifestyle.

Whether the person is playing an instrument

or standing on their porch with his wife,

my job is to put together a little story

that's revealing about them,

so people see them the way I do.

I had an assignment from Life magazine

to shoot country artists on their tour buses

because that was very unusual at the time.

Most rock and roll artists flew, and almost no one had buses.

Only country artists. Dolly Parton was on the cover,

and I shot her in her bus.

She was already a queen of country music.

[Parton] ♪ The man I loved had a selling route ♪

♪ Selling goods from house to house ♪

[Leverett] Dolly knew where she was going when she came to Nashville.

Right after high school, I think she came over here the day after she graduated.

She knew what she wanted to do. And the girl had the talent to do it.

[Horenstein] She was a member of the Porter Wagoner band,

but every once in a while she'd put out a record

and they were starting to do better than his records.

I photographed Dolly Parton in 1972

backstage at Symphony Hall in Boston.

She definitely stood out in a crowd.

Dolly is the ultimate entertainer,

and the way she presents herself is part of that.

[Leverett] Dolly asked me to do the cover on the album, Bubbling Over.

So we went out to the fountain over there at the Hall of Fame.

And sure enough, we drew a crowd. You can't help it with Dolly Parton.

And then I thought, why don't we get a close-up or two of Dolly here?

Then I put the transparencies together and that became the cover.

[Rubenstein] What's unique about photography is that you have

to tell the story without any words

and capture the essence of the moment in a 250th of a second.

Photography put us out there in front of people,

and portrayed us as we truly are.

I signed my recording contract when I was 12.

And my image from the start was the girl next door.

You couldn't dress it up or dress it down.

I had to be who I was.

Back then, the record buying public were girls.

So my image was cemented by what they thought of me.

I was a little girl with a big voice.

But you could see the growth every time an album came out.

You would see a little different Brenda.

Then later on, photographers took what I was and expanded on it.

It was a little slice of life and letting people into your home a little bit,

to see your family,

but I wasn't afraid to show that.

Country artists are accessible to their fans,

and that is really special.

But, my goodness, I hope Ronnie got rid of those pants.

When you grow up with the country way of life,

it teaches you so much,

and your beliefs are solidified

by the people around you.

[Gatlin] A lot of us learned to sing in church.

We were raised by God-fearing, good, honest, decent, hardworking people.

So the gospel influence was very big.

[Smith] When you hear gospel music and when it lifts you,

it's the spirit behind it, I think, that makes the difference,

and country music is that way.

[Gatlin] But it's not a bright, well-defined line.

If you're in despair, if you're in trouble,

if your heart is broken, you turn to Jesus.

In country music, if you're in despair and your heart is broken,

you go have a beer.

[Smith] People, when they're having a hard time,

they need someone to identify with.

When I sing, I'm telling a story.

And when I get hold of a song, I'm gonna get it across

and make sure they can hear what I'm saying

because the most important thing is that you do connect with the audience.

[Horenstein] People feel very connected to country music,

and in some ways, feel that those singers aren't that separate from who they are.

[country music plays]

When I was starting my photography career,

I had friends who had a record company,

and they needed pictures of their musicians.

So they would get me a pass to the Grand Ole Opry.

The old style singers that I was photographing

weren't people with a lot of pretense.

Like Roy Acuff, king of country music,

who kind of ruled the Grand Ole Opry for decades.

As a photographer, I'm interested in country music

and the people who make the music.

But I'm mostly interested in the place

and the people who make up the place.

In the '70s, there were seven honky-tonks in Boston.

These are places I used to go quite a lot to photograph.

Nashville North, then the Blue Star Lounge,

and the Hillbilly Ranch, the most famous of all.

And this honky-tonk is... I've not seen anything.

And people like Grandpa Jones who started in Boston

would come by all the time to perform.

The old style honky-tonk was a place outside of town

near no schools or churches with live music.

A place where working people went out and had themselves

a beer on Friday, Saturday night.

Maybe got to meet somebody, maybe got to dance,

maybe got into a fight.

And it was glamorous on some level.

I saw this honky-tonk culture starting to disappear,

and I wanted to document these people,

record their lives and make them part of history.

Tootsie was a legendary character in Nashville.

She ran this successful honky-tonk on lower Broadway,

Tootsie's Orchid Lounge.

It was a different kind of person that went in there

that would go into a country music show today.

And you could go in and write your name,

and the stars would go in and write their names too.

Supposedly, Willie Nelson wrote "Crazy" there for Patsy Cline.

And performers would come from all over to Tootsie's

in hopes that they can somehow make a connection.

Tootsie's was famous to me because I'd read all about it in all the history books.

So when I came to Nashville, I went into Tootsie's

and got up to sing, kind of impromptu.

And by the end of my little mini set, they'd offered me a job.

I played at Tootsie's on and off for tips for two and a half, three years,

doing covers and a lot of traditional country,

singing the people's music, singing about what people

were living and breathing every day of their lives.

But it was a different time and a different culture.

[Horenstein] It was a drinking culture, it was a blue collar culture.

It was a different world, but this is where the music's from.

[Rubenstein] People had beliefs and customs that we didn't have in New York,

and there were prejudices.

[Pecknold] They were called rubes and were perceived

as promiscuous, poverty stricken, stupid.

And people made fun of country music.

They associated it with a hayseed, hillbilly audience.

[McCall] There's always been stereotypes in country music and the media

and television played off this idea of what Southerners were like.

[braying]

♪ Hee haw ♪

[Clark] Two Canadian producers came to me and said,

"We're getting ready to do a musical variety show, not unlike Laugh-In.

Would you be interested?"

Well, I found out early in life

that you say yes to everything.

[Halsey] When "Hee Haw" came out,

country music had been trying to get away from the bales of hay

and the cornbread image.

And everybody said this will just be a disaster.

[Clark] The critics screamed. They thought it was

the worst piece of trash they'd ever seen.

But country music fans said, "At last here's something

that I can identify with."

[Halsey] It was visual,

and you didn't have to be an intellectual to understand it.

It was just one thing, right after another, one cut right after another.

Bam, bam, bam. Ha, ha. Music.

A funny look. Then we'd pop out of the cornfield.

Hee-haw!

[Clark] I was hosting with Buck Owens and I don't think

any other combination would have been the same.

Looky here, Roy, we got something that says "Hee Haw."

[Clark] Because Buck had the radio play, and sold records.

And I was known on television.

So the two of us brought in two different audiences.

[Halsey] "Hee Haw" was the hottest show in the country.

And that brought a lot of people to like country music

that never before even thought about country music.

[Clark] We were on CBS for two and a half seasons.

And "Hee Haw" was still high in the ratings.

But CBS started complaining about its hillbilly image.

They said it's not the audience that our sponsors want to see.

We have to get rid of it. So they took "Green Acres,"

"Beverly Hillbillies," and "Hee Haw" and let us all go.

Hee-haw!

[Halsey] But that wasn't the end of "Hee Haw."

They syndicated the show and it actually had a bigger audience than when it was on the network,

because they were on more stations.

And all of a sudden, country music was everywhere.

It was really exceptional. They always had three or four guests every week.

And they got all the top people, Loretta Lynn, Waylon Jennings, Johnny Cash.

[Clark] Willie did it. Merle Haggard.

In fact, a lot of the big stars today got their break

and their first national exposure on "Hee Haw."

And we just grew. We were in production for 28 years.

- [caws] - Some people felt it was insulting

and set country music back, but there was a part of "Hee Haw"

that was really great for country because it was in every home,

because it exposed so many artists, and because it was so popular.

[Halsey] "Hee Haw" made people laugh. It made people feel better.

That was the power of that show.

[Clark] We never hurt anyone.

We had nothing to gain except saying

we'll put on the corny stuff, let's you and I have some fun.

And everywhere you went, people would say, "I'm a pickin',"

and I would say, "Well, I'm a grinnin'."

In the 1970s, the look and sound of country music started changing.

And when I was a kid, Ernest Tubb and the Texas Troubadours

came to my hometown county fair wearing matching pink cowboy suits.

It was hillbilly Hollywood, and it was beautiful.

But Nudie suits were out of style and kind of an embarrassment

to the new image of modern country music.

I'm thinking, "This is not right.

Somebody needs to be taking pictures."

Photography was almost parallel to music to me.

As a kid, I started when I was 12 years old

playing bluegrass festivals, and then I played in Lester Flatt's band.

His peers were Roy Acuff, Bill Monroe, String Bean.

And when we would go on the road,

these characters would all be together.

It looked like history in motion.

And nobody seemed to ever have a camera.

So I just simply started to photograph the proceedings,

because I was there.

And I fell in love with photography.

The images from that time are very precious,

because in the late '70s and early '80s,

the old sound, the old look of country music

was kind of having to fight for its life.

Because the Urban Cowboy thing had come in so strong.

[Pecknold] Urban Cowboy represented a new version of country

that was younger, that was club-based and dance-based.

It set off the line dance craze

and showed that that Southern image, that identity,

could be exported anywhere.

[McCall] And all of a sudden, guys in New York

were buying cowboy boots and wanted to learn how to two-step.

Country music was appealing to a lot of people

who hadn't thought of themselves as country fans,

and records were selling bigger than ever.

[Gatlin] You had the term crossover.

When a record got so hot, that not just country folks

wanted to hear it, other people wanted to hear it.

And so country singers crossed over

from the country charts and the pop radio stations would play them.

There were people like Glenn Campbell and Dottie West.

Later, Ronnie Milsap. And it blossomed.

♪ Smoky Mountain rain keeps on falling ♪

♪ I keep on calling ♪

♪ Her name ♪

[Milsap] Crossover was kind of a nasty word back then.

I wasn't trying to make crossover records.

But once I had my first million-seller single,

I thought my music is in a different place.

The country fans like it,

people who like all kinds of music like it too.

And I always loved playing all kinds of music.

It started just because I heard records on the radio.

I grew up in the Smoky Mountains of North Carolina.

My mother did not want to raise a blind child.

It could be that she didn't really know how.

So I was raised by my grandparents.

I learned Braille when I was six.

I learned violin when I was seven,

piano at eight.

I had a musical aptitude.

And any song that I could hear, I could play it.

So I came out of school wanting to make these things

that I was hearing on the radio called records.

I started out as a R&B singer in Memphis,

and had a top five hit on the first record we put out.

But Charley Pride heard me sing and he said,

"I can tell from listening to your voice,

"you are a country singer.

You need to move to Nashville."

So I signed a contract with Charley Pride's manager,

and he went right to the president of RCA, Jerry Bradley.

And Jerry said, "We know Ronnie Milsap. He's not a country singer."

But he listened to my demos and said, "You know what?

That SOB can sing country."

And all of a sudden, I'm on RCA Records.

That's the record label of Charley Pride,

of Elvis Presley.

I loved making records.

But there's something phenomenal about doing a live show.

My style is always make sure that when I go out onstage,

that I look presentable with a lot of rhinestones

and all kinds of pretty designs.

It costs a lot of money to dress like that, but that's part of my image.

The fans expect it and they deserve it.

And the fans know exactly what you're supposed to be.

I was worried about being a crossover artist,

and I walked that line a lot, every record I put out.

Country fans, they don't want you to stray from country.

But you can't be afraid to try something new

because your intuition may be right.

♪ You got to know when to hold 'em ♪

♪ Know when to fold 'em ♪

[Rogers] I took a lot of flak for taking country music pop.

But I'm a country artist with a lot of other musical influences.

And I've never worn a cowboy hat in my life.

I was the first artist to work large venues

with lots of production.

I was wearing three-piece suits, white suits,

and it wasn't an attempt to be bizarre.

It was just where I was comfortable at the time.

And I think I was resented for taking it away from that country base.

But country music is what country people will buy.

And you can't do what everybody else is doing.

♪ When the deal is done ♪

You develop styles in this business

by listening to what people say.

It's like "Islands in the Stream."

Barry Gibb from the Bee Gees wrote that song.

Then I agreed to cut it. But he said,

"You know what we need? We need Dolly Parton."

♪ Islands in the stream ♪

♪ That is what we are ♪

♪ No one in between ♪

♪ How can we be wrong? ♪

I didn't really know her at the time.

But once she walked in, that song was never the same.

We both just kind of locked in to each other.

Your image will attract attention,

but then you have to sell it with the music.

If you give me a song that touches me,

I can make it touch somebody else.

Country is where the heart is.

And in country music if it hurts, you say it hurts,

and I saw the value to simple songs with lyrics that had something to say.

I don't wanna just sing words. Because it's not a song, it's a story.

When people hear "The Gambler," they realize that's a great way to live your life.

Know when to walk away and know when to run.

We're all three people. I'm who I think I am,

I'm who you think I am, and I'm who I really am.

And throughout my whole career, I tried to stay true to who I was.

[Tanya Tucker] What makes us beautiful is our differences.

♪ Delta Dawn, what's that flower you have on? ♪

I got started early.

I was a 13-year-old kid when I recorded "Delta Dawn."

And my producer said, "I don't want anybody to know that this girl's 13 years old.

'Cause this is a great record. We don't want a freak show."

But that song was meant to be.

Growing up, everybody called me the female Elvis.

And I thought country music should be bigger than it was.

I wanted to take it to another place.

But I loved to have fun.

And when I moved to LA, I started drinking.

The party didn't start till I got there.

♪ When I die ♪

That's when I did the TNT album.

♪ I may not go to heaven ♪

It was a bad deal all the way around.

I've got a bunch of 'em, bad reviews.

They didn't like the music,

and especially didn't like the pictures.

I didn't even notice the microphone cord was between my legs.

My manager puts an ad in Hustler magazine.

Said this album is so good, it's gonna get your ears hard.

But if I had been involved, I don't think I'd approve that.

I became known as the bad girl of country music.

A lot of people said, "She's outside the box."

And I said, "Shit, I've been trying to get in the box

for I don't know how long. Where is the box?"

But I am country.

And people have said, "Your music helped me through

some of the worst times." The voice is the gift.

And I'm just singing the songs best I know how.

[Horenstein] People feel very close to country music,

and they feel that they could be that person onstage.

But you go to a rock and roll show, there's no way you're gonna be that person.

[Diltz] I think a lot of rock guys wanted to play the guitar

to meet girls and go on the road.

But it seemed like country musicians are a little more serious.

I'm comfortable shooting musicians because I'm a musician

in my heart and a photographer in my head.

I first picked up a camera in '66 on the road with my folk singing group,

the Modern Folk Quartet.

We stopped at a little store in East Lansing, Michigan,

and bought these secondhand cameras

and started taking pictures of each other and whatever we saw.

When I got back to LA, I had a slideshow

and it was amazing to see these images huge on the wall.

That got me hooked.

So I started photographing my friends

who were virtually all musicians.

Stephen Stills, Neil Young,

Joni Mitchell playing a mountain dulcimer.

[country music plays]

My favorite way of photographing is the fly on the wall

to try to get candid shots and see what was really happening.

JD Souther was a terrific songwriter

and his girlfriend at the time was Linda Ronstadt.

I photographed Linda very early on.

She did a concert in LA singing harmony with Emmylou Harris.

I photographed Emmylou at the Troubadour

and hanging out in the San Fernando Valley.

Glen Campbell had his own television show, "The Glen Campbell Show."

And I was on the other side of the dressing room

sneaking little candid shots.

I don't feel like I make photographs.

I'm just lucky enough to be the guy there

to push the button to grab that moment.

Kris Kristofferson was recording an album in Colorado,

and I'm looking for that moment when they really shine,

and then catch it as it happens.

Even the stuff you do on stage, that's all lit and very exciting.

But I'm looking for the person to look the way I think they look the best.

And I get to pick the moment.

In the '80s, I ended up doing a lot of work with Capitol Records.

And they had a new artist named Garth Brooks.

[Brooks] I'm an average Joe from Oklahoma.

And I just wanted to be George Strait. That's all I wanted to do.

Pictures capture some of the biggest highlights of my life.

[Diltz] When I work with Garth, I can go anywhere.

And that's fantastic when you get all these great vantage points.

Like standing out on the edge of the stage from behind.

[Brooks] When a photographer captures you,

and all you see are people and the New York skyline,

that picture is the truth.

You can feel everything that people were there felt.

[Diltz] A lot of country artists have a microphone and they stand there,

they play the guitar, and they don't move around a lot.

Garth Brooks never stands in one place.

He'd be standing right here, I put a wide angle and look up.

Oh, he's over there now! Now I gotta switch to a telephoto.

By the time I get that out, he's back on that side.

He did crazy things like smash guitars,

get bottles of water and shake 'em all over.

Then the good stuff happens. He'd climb the rigging and swing on a rope.

- It was amazing. - [Brooks] The arms were out, legs were moving.

If there was a cowboy hat in the shot, even if it was blurred,

that meant movement.

That action symbolized what we stood for.

[McCall] A decade before, cowboy hats had been out of fashion.

The only guys in cowboy hats were Hank Williams Jr., Charlie Daniels.

Guys who weren't really mainstream country.

When George Strait came along in the early '80s,

he was wearing a cowboy hat and by the late '80s, it became iconic again.

It became the hat era. And all the guys were wearing hats.

Dwight Yoakam, Clint Black, Alan Jackson.

Somebody in the music business said, "When you get a record deal,

you need to wear that hat. There is no girl doing that Be the first one."

And when I first got signed, I wore the hat in,

and my manger, he said, "They're not really sure."

Well, I think I should wear it. I think they're crazy if they make me wear spike heels.

I would've looked like I was in drag walking in that.

It would have been ridiculous. And it's become a big part of my image.

If there was anybody that didn't know my name,

and somebody said, "The girl in the hat," "Oh, I know who that is."

[LeAnn Rimes] I don't think the image of me could have ever matched my voice.

I've been in this business for 20 years, and when you start as a child,

your image evolves so much.

In the '90s, I dressed like a teenager.

I had really big hair and big bangs.

By the time I was 18, I started to be a little more fashionable

because country music was going a little more pop,

and the image changed with that.

People like Reba took country music to a different kind of sophistication.

First nominee is Reba McEntire.

[Rimes] I think of the red dress.

[Sandi Spika Borchetta] I designed that dress.

And the lighting enhanced the cleavage.

People gasped and I didn't know if I was gonna have a job the next day.

Reba received more press from the red dress

than if she would have won an award.

[Pecknold] Reba McEntire is famous for having

15 costume changes in a single show

with some of the changes happening onstage

while she's surrounded by dancers.

And as it becomes apparent, by the early '90s,

what a big business country music is,

women are becoming more visible

and Reba began the transformation

that you see later with Shania Twain or Faith Hill,

where they are taking on the style of rock and pop stars.

[Borchetta] Country singers were now wearing higher fashion.

They were more trendy and started gaining attention from designers

who would then loan them clothes.

And the image of the artist became more important

than it had been.

[Lorrie Morgan] If I feel like wearing something, I wear it.

If I feel like looking a certain way, I just do it.

And I don't follow rules very well at all.

And that's got me in trouble many times in my life.

Because I have always been the one who wore the too-short dress

or showed too much cleavage, so the record labels

gave me the real short haircut to try and make me sultry.

And then I would get too sultry and they'd have to pull the reigns back.

[Stuart] Everybody has their own image.

And that's the beauty of coming from a rural area like so many of us did.

Country boys and girls can kind of make it up as you go. We're self-made characters.

[Smith] Grandpa Jones wouldn't have been Grandpa Jones without his hat.

Or String Bean without the pants down to here, without his long shirt.

That was part of their image.

[Cooper] These artists were very aware

that the way they looked was part of the show.

And that was included in the price of the ticket.

And they worked hand in hand with people like Nudie

and later on Manuel to craft their image.

[Manuel] People wanted to see a show, but if you don't see something

that you have not seen before, why spend the 20 dollars

or the thousand dollars for the front seat?

I worked for Nudie for 14 years before I went on my own.

I grew up with ranchera music in Mexico.

So I was very familiar with the meaning of country music.

And it was through country music I knew Nashville.

I came here because Nashville was Music City, USA.

I was trying to make one-of-a-kind clothes.

That's my mission from day one.

They are all originals.

And nobody has escaped the rhinestones by Manuel, I don't think.

To be a star is difficult.

So I say, let me make you a suit that you love.

That's made for you. So when they go onstage,

they feel confident to be the stars that they really are.

[Morgan] It just makes you better,

because you feel better about how you look.

You know, I've got a Manuel jacket on tonight

and I'm gonna sing my ass off.

- Oh, my baby. - Manuel. Mm.

[Morgan] When you come in to get a fitting with Manuel,

you can't be modest

because he has to measure every part of you.

- 36 and a half. - He's the one that measures you.

And he's the one that makes your image.

- Look what I got for you. - Oh, my God!

Manuel!

Pink is my favorite color.

I love everything about these boots.

I can wear them with everything. Yeah!

Or nothing at all.

[Terri Clark] Growing up, I always saw the women with the great big hair

and the sparkly earrings and jewelry, evening gowns.

And it definitely evolved over the years.

But there was still that classic look.

The greatest women, their images convey who they are truly.

And it's authentic.

When I started out, people tried to look through me to see my dad.

So it was important for me to craft my own self.

But in the beginning, when I was first signed to a record label,

there was this meeting about my image.

And the head of marketing said, "We just have to make her look fuckable."

I was shocked. I mean, I shouldn't have been shocked, but I really was.

You know, I was really confident about the music I wanted to make.

And this is what it boiled down to?

And I didn't play along.

We're judged very quickly on image.

But I want the image on an album cover to say something about what's inside.

That's always the goal. And it's a collaboration with the photographer.

[Rogers] Music is very subliminal. And photography is obviously visual.

It's a way of exposing yourself.

I've never done drugs, I don't drink, I don't smoke.

I take pictures.

When I was at the peak of my career, I took a picture

and someone said, "Wow, that's a great picture."

I thought, really? I don't even know what I'm doing.

So I hired a professional photographer to teach me the tricks.

And it was just fascinating.

I love to shoot people, and obviously I love country artists.

And photography gave me a chance to get to know

some of these people that I'd never met before.

I shot people like Faith Hill, Brad Paisley, Martina McBride.

And as a photographer, you really do get a chance to feel their soul,

feel what they're all about.

And it's magical.

[Urban] Photography can say an enormous amount.

But one of the least enjoyable things to me is doing a photo shoot.

When I came to Nashville, I was already an established artist in Australia.

I had my look and my sound. But I was completely out of sync

with everything that was happening in Nashville.

As an artist, you should never compromise.

But I think you do have to adapt.

And so I had to start again.

And in the midst of trying to fit in,

I sort of lost myself.

My first solo record, I remember the label president saying,

"It looks like the picture that comes with the frame."

He was dead on, seriously. But I had to keep believing.

And all the covers I've been able to do have really captured,

for better or worse, where I was at at the time.

And it was a slow process to get to where I am now.

[Lee Ann Womack] Sometimes image can get in the way.

Sometimes it's what made an artist work, what made 'em famous.

I was hardcore traditional country.

And nobody really said, "You need to have this image."

But my label just thought, "We just gotta get this girl some clothes."

So they took me shopping, and it does give a girl from East Texas

a little bit more confidence. And the camera really reads that.

♪ Don't listen to the wind ♪

A great photographer can position you a certain way

or put you in a certain setting that works.

♪ Can't you hear it call his name ♪

Country music can be wrapped in all kinds of packages.

But it's gotta have that heart and soul.

And when the music and the image complement one another,

that's when you have something really special.

[Michael Wilson] When you're photographing a musician, there's expectations

that are not just the photographer's, not just the subject's.

There are expectations by the record company, or the management.

In the '90s, when I first started trying to get work in country music,

there were art directors whose point of reference was not just celebrity portraits.

They were interested in beautiful pictures

that would be an appropriate parallel for the music.

And that's what country is about, being connected to something genuine.

So I steered in the direction of making portraits of musicians.

People like John Hiatt and the Carolina Chocolate Drops,

taking that traditional music and making it their own.

I know when I see beautiful lighting.

And you can sit somebody down in that beautiful light and know that this is a gift.

But the portrait is more than just the fall of light on a subject.

A portrait is also a conversation.

And the real making of that picture has to do

with the interaction I have with the person.

I first shot Lyle Lovett in '92 for the record Joshua Judges Ruth.

[Lovett] ♪ It was a private conversation ♪

♪ No one heard her say ♪

I'd done a few projects for Warner Bros.

and they thought he would be a good fit.

♪ 2,000 miles away ♪

The role a photographer plays in establishing an image

depends on the relationship.

And what's key for me is the trust that we've developed

over the last 22 years.

[Wilson] Lyle has strong ideas about his image.

'Cause he has a strong idea of who he is as a person.

[Lovett] I went to Nashville because Nashville was the city of songs

and a place where I could play my own songs.

And when it came time for me to start making records,

I thought back to the classic photos.

And there was a real dignity in the way people dressed.

And that image of the country performer stays with you.

So I decided to wear a suit.

I didn't expect my hair to be anything of note,

but it turned into something people remembered.

Once something like that happens, you have to go with it

and hope that it helps cement your identity in the mind of the public.

What I'm imagining is just the venue in the background.

It's a big deal to me that I've gotten to play here so many times over the years.

To be able to make pictures here at Wolf Trap in Vienna, Virginia is fun.

It's kind of great, actually, with the snow falling. I'm thinking something dead center.

Lyle and I, when we work, it's kind of an improvisation.

It's lovely.

[Lovett] It's a tremendously creative environment.

I feel completely comfortable working with Michael, and I can be completely myself.

There's something about that tree that's bugging me.

- But if we got between these two trees, I think I'd be happier. - Okay.

[Wilson] I arrive at a place and am just at the mercy of the environment.

That's good, Lyle.

I'm looking for those surprises.

[Lovett] And when he sends the contact sheets,

they're always images that I didn't realize he had taken

and that I didn't expect.

[Wilson] A still photograph allows you into this space that doesn't really exist in time.

And it becomes a trigger for the music.

♪ As I lay sick and broken ♪

♪ Viva Mexico ♪

[Lovett] When you hear country music,

you imagine the singer to be a character in those songs.

And to see pictures just serves to reinforce that identity.

But a successful picture of me is a picture that makes me look better than I look.

That's what I'm looking for.

[Rimes] ♪ Got a date a week from Friday ♪

[Rimes] These days you're supposed to be an actress and a model.

You're supposed to know how to express all of these feelings that are inside of you,

in so many different mediums, and feel free enough to expose yourself

- and be that vulnerable. - ♪ Probably wouldn't be this way ♪

[McClister] LeAnn and I, we stepped out of the box on the very first video we did.

She came up with the premise and trusted me as a director

to let her go to that place and be real, to keep it real.

I love being able to go back and forth between music videos and photography.

But they're very different approaches.

Music videos are very structured, whereas photo shoots

are very spontaneous. You can go wherever you want to go,

where the light is taking you, where the artist is taking you.

My first professional photo session was Ryan Adams Heartbreaker.

It was an intense, amazing two hours.

And it was a pretty great way to start.

I photographed Jamey Johnson for Rolling Stone.

He was a huge Waylon Jennings fan.

And he had just purchased Waylon's Cadillac.

Even with stills, I like to keep the artist moving

because that's when you get that spontaneity.

I was backstage with Eric Church.

There was a bit of time before the show.

And there was a bar across the street.

And the lighting was amazing.

You only have a very limited time with the artist.

You'll walk in, totally cold, under the gun to get a great shot

and try and establish that rapport right away

to get that natural feeling moment in ten minutes.

But when you actually can go out with the artist

and hang out with them, that's when you get the most natural, real photographs.

Like Emmylou Harris at Lawrence Records in Nashville.

She got a big thrill out of going in and checking out all the vinyl.

I'm trying to help create the vision they have for themselves.

And that comes from listening to the music,

and then capturing the essence of the moment of the artist.

Even an icon like Dolly, she's already Dolly when she walks in.

But she puts her trust in you to create a great portrait, capture a moment.

I think a lot of music photographers secretly wanted to be artists.

And is there anything cooler than being in the studio with one of your heroes?

Getting to actually take a photograph of Willie.

He's got such an amazing face. It's not hard to take some really great shots.

They're legends, they're icons.

But I do get to work with new artists

who have their own voice, who have their own style.

Like Kacey Musgraves backstage at Bonnaroo

having fun with the image.

I want a great shot. I'm not afraid to try anything.

Especially with an artist who have a uniqueness in their sound

and in their visuals and get it and stand up for it.

[Kimberly Perry] The spirit of the song guides our style.

♪ Chainsaw ♪

It's the visual extension of our music.

We grew up on rock and roll and country.

And our songs really are a blend of both of those genres.

[Neil] Our musical style is very traditional.

The three of us grew up loving Loretta Lynn, Johnny Cash, Patsy Cline.

And we maintained a lot of the traditional country songwriting.

But when we record our songs, we take a lot of cues from modern music.

And we like to make our songs as big as they possibly can sound.

[Kimberly] Whatever we're portraying, whatever story we're telling,

we just hope that folks get the spirit behind it and see authenticity.

[country music plays]

[Holly Williams] As a musician, you hope to create moments.

And people can relate to your music better if they can relate to your whole image.

I love to get decked out and wear fun heels and dresses, but it doesn't really fit

with the type of music that I'm doing.

So onstage I wear these jeans, these boots,

and a black t-shirt. Simple Americana branding.

But everyone has their own thing.

You've got people doing very edgy fashion.

You got the more bedazzled guys.

Then you got the simple guys with cowboy boots and jeans.

[Gatlin] Today I've seen people walk out on the stage

of the Grand Ole Opry in a pair of jeans and a baseball cap.

I didn't come to the Opry to get an oil change.

[Horenstein] Although country music is very popular now,

the music is not the same, the culture is not the same.

The bands today have marketing teams.

They have investors. It's a whole business.

They call some places honky-tonks now and they are physically.

But it's a different audience.

Trout's in Bakersfield is one of the classic places of country music.

It's a remnant of what used to be.

One of the last honky-tonks.

It's an older crowd.

They're people who are going out for a night on the town.

It's people who come out to see Red Simpson.

He's one of the originals, and they remember him.

♪ Driving away and ignoring ♪

These places are gonna disappear.

But this is where the music's from.

And it's part of the story.

[McClister] Going back, I think there was something that was different

that people gravitated to.

When you look back at some of the '60s, '70s records,

there was some great concept photography.

They went out on locations, they thought about wardrobe.

And photo shoots were addressing the themes of that record,

whether it was songs of the railroad or gunfighter ballads.

Those artists didn't have the bleached teeth and the faux five o'clock shadow

and the, you know, buff bodies.

They had talent like you can't believe

and when you saw their pictures, it was beautiful.

[Lovett] I just remember listening to an entire album

and never putting down the album jacket.

Looking at that cover and looking at the pictures

on the back the entire time.

When you look at photos like the famous Johnny Cash one with the middle finger,

the look on his face, that said it all.

[McClister] That's the one image from the great Jim Marshall

that summed up Johnny Cash defying the establishment.

And it's a reminder about how powerful an image can be.

I actually met Johnny Cash. It was the week after June had passed.

And I took some portraits of Johnny. He was in a wheelchair.

But he was recording with Randy Scruggs and Marty Stuart.

Toward the end of his life, the work order became keep JR entertained.

And so in the bedroom of the Cash home,

we set up microphones and had recording sessions.

Because music was what he was holding on to.

At one of those sessions, the afternoon light started coming in on his back.

And he looked like an old president.

I said, "JR." And he sat up straight.

And he gave me that look.

And I took the photograph.

It was the last portrait.

He was John R. Cash, JR,

Ray and Carrie's boy from Arkansas.

[Cooper] This music, at its best, is taking what seems personal

and presenting it in a way that becomes universal.

That's why country music happens all over the world.

And to a lot of people, it often embodies the best parts of America.

I played from Denmark to Amsterdam to Italy to Spain, all these places.

And the people in Europe are so into the stories and the songs of country.

[Rogers] I had people from Korea and Poland say we learned

to speak English listening to your music.

I sang in Morocco, 130,000 people were singing along with all the songs.

I did a thing called Glastonbury.

180,000 young people knew all the music.

We go to many countries and sell out performances all over the world.

And there are artists today that have taken country music

to where we took it and beyond.

[Stuart] People have always said, "What's happening to country music?"

But country music can do anything it wants to do.

As long as the roots of country music are felt.

Success means you hang onto your roots and grow from there and branch out.

[Urban] Everybody's voice is so important.

We have to have the people who are pushing the boundaries.

And we have to have the people who are pulling it back to the center.

- Everybody's needed. - ♪ I can feel it flying ♪

♪ Like a hand out the window ♪

[Gatlin] People tell me the music that's going on today is not country music.

And I beg to differ. These kids are living their dreams,

they're singing it the way they feel it.

[Kimberly] We love the stories of country and embrace a lot of the tradition

and try to bring it back around.

[Rogers] Somebody's got to do something different.

And it takes someone who's strong enough

or unique enough to do something that people will go, "Wow."

♪ Our song is a slamming screen door ♪

♪ Sneaking out late Tapping on your window ♪

Taylor Swift has helped propel country music into the forefront.

Taylor Swift represents a new kind of authenticity

that hasn't been in country music before.

She is a deft blend of traditional country

with the mainstream appeal of pop music.

And for her to keep challenging herself musically, it had to go somewhere.

♪ Losing him was blue like I'd never known ♪

♪ Missing him was dark grey all alone ♪

[Gatlin] Taylor Swift, she had a great band.

She sang great songs. She changed wardrobe, she flew across the stage,

and she communicated with that audience.

That's not exactly how Patsy Cline did it.

That's okay 'cause Patsy Cline didn't do it

exactly like Mother Maybelle.

♪ Loving him is red ♪

Taylor has a lot of ideas. And so we were backstage,

bouncing ideas off each other. She was totally game to try anything.

But there's something about that gaze, that simple honest look.

- And that's your goal. - ♪ Loving him is like driving ♪

- ♪ A new Maserati ♪ - To capture the essence of that personality.

[Diltz] Photographs grab moments.

And the photograph is one way to look at the lifespan of country music

from its early roots to what it is today.

[Anderson] When you start thinking maybe things weren't a certain way,

you look at those pictures and, "Hell, they were that way, weren't they?"

[Rimes] Cowboy boots and rhinestones and big hair.

All of those pictures explain what people thought about country music

and where it came from.

[Lee] We need to know who brought us to the dance.

And to learn the great history of our musical family.

[Rubenstein] Each artist has to stand out to make the image revealing

so that it never fades away.

The camera gives the photographer a chance to represent them.

So that the public can see who they really are.

[Rogers] The people who last the longest are what they present.

And they don't vary from who they are.

[Wilson] These are the alchemists, these are the magicians.

And nothing has ever moved me the way music does.

It's songs that get me.

[Brooks] Country music is what moves you and if something moves you

in the rap world, the rock world, they stole it from us.

[McClister] Country photography has such an interesting arc.

And being let behind the curtain over the decades is very powerful and exciting.

[Urban] Country has always been like a church.

It's gotta figure out constantly how to honor its values

and stay true to itself, but grow and evolve.

[Horenstein] Country music was stories about working people and what they did.

It was music to drink to, cry over, fight over, and be nostalgic about.

[Terri Clark] All these artists and all these images shape

people's perception of country music and country lifestyle.

But it's really about what it does to your heart when you look at something.

Music is a conversation, and it's the greatest healing force in the universe.

[Smith] Everybody gets their heart broke, everybody wants something that they can't have.

And these are the things that we sing about.

Country music is the cry of the heart.

[Stuart] It will touch you and absolutely meet you with the truth.

That's what Harlan Howard called country music: three chords and the truth.

[Lovett] It's that desire to believe something's genuine,

sincere, and absolutely honest.

That's what drives country music.

And that's what people look for in a country song.

[country music plays]

♪ Country is ♪

♪ Sitting on the back porch ♪

♪ Listen to the whippoorwills ♪

♪ Late in the day ♪

♪ Country is ♪

♪ Mindin' your business ♪

♪ Helpin' a stranger ♪

♪ If he comes your way ♪

♪ Country is ♪

♪ Livin' in the city ♪

♪ Knowin' your people ♪

♪ Knowin' your kind ♪

♪ Country is ♪

♪ What you make it ♪

♪ Country is ♪

♪ All in your mind ♪

♪ He was driving home one evening ♪

♪ In his beat-up Pontiac ♪

♪ When an old lady flagged him down ♪

♪ Her Mercedes had a flat ♪

♪ He could see that she was frightened ♪

♪ Standing out there in the snow ♪

♪ Till he said I'm here to help you, ma'am ♪

♪ By the way my name is Joe ♪

♪ She said I'm from St. Louis ♪

♪ And I'm only passing through ♪

♪ I must have seen a hundred cars go by ♪

♪ This is awful nice of you ♪

♪ And when he changed the tire and closed her trunk ♪

♪ And was about to drive away ♪

♪ She said how much do I owe you? ♪

♪ Here's what he had to say ♪

♪ If you really want to pay me back ♪

♪ Here's what you do ♪

♪ Don't let the chain of love ♪

♪ End with you ♪

[applause]

[instrumental country music plays]

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