MUSIC SECTION -- KEN BURNS (about American country music)

MUSIC SECTION — WITNESS THREE

THE TESTIMONY OF KEN BURNS

COURT EXHIBIT — THE SEPTEMBER 8 SACRED RECORD

PRESENTED BEFORE THE TESTIMONY OF KEN BURNS

SPOCK Before the next witness is called, Affirmative Counsel has indicated they wish to present a court exhibit. Proceed.

AFFIRMATIVE COUNSEL (THE A-TEAM) Thank you, Your Honor.

The proceeding asks the court to receive the following as a formal exhibit — documented historical facts requiring no witness testimony, entered into the record on their own evidentiary weight before the next witness takes the stand.

The exhibit is titled: The September 8 Sacred Record.

September 8 is a date this proceeding has been watching since its first exhibit — the V-2 rocket striking London for the first time on September 8, 1944. The proceeding has watched it accumulate across the technology section, the power section, and now the music section. But before the court receives what the music tradition has placed on this date, it must first receive what was already there. What was there before the weapons. Before the missiles. Before the music.

What was there is this.

September 8, 70 AD.

The Roman general Titus breached the final walls of Jerusalem and destroyed the Second Temple. The city fell. The old covenant order ended in fire and stone. Jesus of Nazareth had stood in that Temple forty years earlier and told his disciples: do you see these great buildings? Not one stone will be left upon another. Every stone will be thrown down. Matthew 24. Mark 13. Luke 21. Three gospels record the prophecy. September 8, 70 AD is the documented date of its fulfillment.

The proceeding enters this as documented historical fact.

September 8, 1504.

Michelangelo's David was unveiled to the city of Florence in the Piazza della Signoria — to the admiration, the records say, of all people. The Galleria dell'Accademia, which now houses the original, states it precisely: on 8 September 1504, the statue was unveiled to the city.

The marble from which the David was carved had been rejected by every sculptor who examined it before Michelangelo. It sat abandoned in the cathedral courtyard for twenty-six years. The document describing it called it badly blocked out and laid on its back. Two sculptors had tried and failed. Michelangelo took the rejected stone at twenty-six years old, worked it in secrecy behind wooden fences for three years, and produced what the world regards as the greatest sculpture ever made.

David is the ancestor of Jesus Christ in both the Matthean and Lukan genealogies. Every Gospel account of the Messiah traces through David's line. The shepherd boy who killed the giant with a stone and a sling. The king from whose lineage the Christ would come. His image — carved from the stone every other builder had rejected and abandoned — was unveiled to the admiration of all people on September 8.

The proceeding notes: the stone the builders rejected becoming the cornerstone is the verse Jesus quotes about himself in Matthew 21:42, citing Psalm 118. The greatest image of the ancestor of the Messiah was carved from the rejected stone. It was unveiled on September 8.

The proceeding enters this as documented historical fact.

September 8, 1774.

Anne Catherine Emmerich was born on September 8, 1774, in Westphalia, Germany. She was an Augustinian nun and mystic whose visions of the life and Passion of Jesus Christ were documented in extraordinary detail — the routes he walked, the dimensions of the rooms he entered, the specific injuries he sustained. Her visions were recorded by the poet Clemens Brentano and published as The Dolorous Passion of Our Lord Jesus Christ. They became the primary source material for Mel Gibson's film The Passion of the Christ. She was beatified by Pope John Paul II in 2004. She was born on September 8.

The proceeding enters this as documented historical fact.

September 8, 1784.

Ann Lee died on September 8, 1784, at Watervliet, New York. She was the founder of the United Society of Believers in Christ's Second Appearing — known as the Shakers. Her followers believed she was the female second coming of Christ. She had spent years traveling through New England preaching that message, met repeatedly by violent mobs who beat her and her companions. When her body was later examined upon reinterment, she was found to have a fractured skull — from the beatings she had received. She died of those injuries on September 8, 1784. Her last words, documented by her followers, were: I see Brother William coming in a golden chariot to take me home. She died singing in unknown tongues, sitting in her rocking chair.

The woman her followers believed to be Christ returned in female form died a martyr's death on September 8. Her fractured skull was the evidence. Her last vision was a golden chariot.

The proceeding enters this as documented historical fact.

The court now has four September 8 encounters with Jesus in the record.

The Temple destroyed — his prophecy fulfilled to the stone, forty years after he spoke it.

The ancestor of his messianic line unveiled in marble, carved from the stone every other builder had rejected and left for dead.

The mystic who documented his Passion with greater precision than any historical record — born on the date.

The woman her followers believed to be his female return — dying on it, a fractured skull, a golden chariot in her last breath.

Four encounters. Across fifteen hundred years. On the same date.

The proceeding does not argue that September 8 was chosen by divine design. It enters what the record contains and asks the jury to hold it.

What the record contains is this: the date that carries the fall of the Temple, the unveiled ancestor, the birth of the Passion mystic, and the death of the woman believed to be Christ returned — is the same date that carries the V-2 striking London. The missiles arriving in Cuba. The solar storm. The first day of school at Sandy Hook. And as the next witness will establish — the Father of Country Music, the first woman in the Country Music Hall of Fame, and a country musician who died on his way to the stage.

The dark accumulation and the sacred accumulation are on the same date.

The proceeding holds both without resolving the tension between them.

The jury will consider what it means that the date carrying the weapon also carries the ancestor of the Messiah carved from rejected stone.

SPOCK The court receives the September 8 Sacred Record as a formal exhibit.

The following are entered as documented historical facts: the destruction of the Second Temple on September 8, 70 AD. The unveiling of Michelangelo's David on September 8, 1504. The birth of Anne Catherine Emmerich on September 8, 1774. The death of Ann Lee on September 8, 1784.

The court notes the A-Team's observation that the dark accumulation and the sacred accumulation occupy the same date. The court does not resolve that tension. It holds it and instructs the jury to do the same.

The exhibit is admitted.

Affirmative Counsel, call your next witness.

AFFIRMATIVE COUNSEL (THE A-TEAM) The court calls Ken Burns.

CALLING THE WITNESS

(The prior witnesses established the origin of the call in the Black American musical tradition and its transmission to the world through a man who lived at the product of the proceeding's two sacred numbers. This witness brings the court home. Home to the parallel river — the white Appalachian tradition that was running alongside the blues in the same poverty, in the same southern dirt, making the same music from the same grief and the same twelve notes, kept separate by commerce and category but never actually separate at all. The court has just received the September 8 Sacred Record as a formal exhibit. This witness did not compile it. He did not know it existed. He documented a tradition that has been marking the same date — three times in its biographical record, and once in the scheduling of his own film's celebration — without any awareness of what it was joining. The proceeding asks: what does it mean when the music keeps finding the date the sacred record was already on? This witness answers through his work.)

(The WITNESS is sworn.)

SCOPE AND LIMITS OF TESTIMONY

SPOCK Mr. Burns, you appear before this court as a documentary filmmaker and the director of the 2019 PBS series Country Music — an eight-part, sixteen-hour documentary covering the full history of American country music.

You are not asked to testify to the complete history of country music or to every figure your documentary examines.

You are asked to testify to three specific documented matters: your central argument about what country music is and where it comes from — specifically the relationship between the white Appalachian tradition and the Black American tradition the prior witnesses established. The three figures in your documentary whose births and death fall on September 8 — the date the court has just received as a formal exhibit. And one further documented fact about your own work that you did not choose and did not know.

Do you understand the limits of your testimony?

WITNESS (BURNS) I do. And I want to say at the outset that the question your proceeding is asking — where does the music come from and what does it mean that it keeps crossing the lines we draw to contain it — is the question I spent years trying to answer in that documentary. I'm not sure I fully answered it. I'm not sure anyone can.

SPOCK The court notes that observation.

Proceed.

DIRECT EXAMINATION

IDENTITY AND METHOD

AFFIRMATIVE COUNSEL (THE A-TEAM) Please state your name and the work you bring to this proceeding.

WITNESS (BURNS) Ken Burns. I've spent my career making documentary films for PBS — The Civil War, Baseball, Jazz, The National Parks, Vietnam War, among others. In 2019 my team released Country Music — eight episodes, sixteen hours, covering the history of American country music from its roots through the 1990s. We filmed 175 hours of interviews with 101 artists and other figures connected to the tradition. The writer was Dayton Duncan. The goal, in his words, was to demonstrate that country music isn't and never was just one type of music — that it was always an amalgam of American music, springing from very different roots, and that all its branches are connected.

AFFIRMATIVE COUNSEL (THE A-TEAM) That phrase — all its branches are connected. What does that mean in practice?

WITNESS (BURNS) It means that the story told commercially about country music — that it is a white tradition, a Southern white tradition, a genre separate from blues and jazz and rhythm and blues — is not accurate. It was never accurate. Country music and the blues grew up in the same soil. Poor white southerners and poor Black southerners were living in the same poverty, working the same land, hearing the same sounds, sitting in proximity at medicine shows and on front porches and in juke joints and church halls. The separation between what got called hillbilly music and what got called race music was a commercial decision made by record labels in the 1920s. It was not a musical reality. The music itself was always crossing the line. The categories were always fiction.

Jimmie Rodgers — the man the Country Music Hall of Fame called the Father of Country Music, the man who started it all — learned to play banjo and guitar from Black railroad workers on his father's work gangs. His blue yodels drew directly from the blues tradition. The first star of country music was a white Mississippi railroad worker who had been musically educated by the Black men working beside him. That is where the tradition begins. Not in separation. In contact.

THE ONE RIVER ARGUMENT

AFFIRMATIVE COUNSEL (THE A-TEAM) The prior witnesses established the blues and rock and roll as the Black American musical tradition — its origin in the field holler and spiritual, its crossing in Memphis in 1954. You have argued that country music is the same river. Make that argument for the record.

WITNESS (BURNS) It is the same river. Running in two channels that kept finding each other despite everything that tried to keep them apart.

The raw materials are identical. Pentatonic scales. Call and response. The lyric shaped by grief and longing and hard work and the desire for something better. The story of a people who had very little except their voices and what they could make with those voices. That description fits the Mississippi Delta blues. It also fits the Appalachian ballad tradition — the Scots-Irish and English and Welsh immigrants who settled in the mountain hollows and carried their old world songs with them and mixed them with everything they encountered in the new world, including the music of the Black neighbors they were told to stay separate from.

The music didn't stay separate. It never did. Jimmie Rodgers. Hank Williams, who learned from Rufus Payne — a Black street musician called Tee Tot — who taught young Hank his first chords and his first understanding of the blues in Georgiana, Alabama, when Hank was a child. Elvis Presley, who the prior witness established as the Memphis convergence. Ray Charles, who took country songs and made them his own. Charlie Pride, who became one of country music's greatest stars despite being a Black man in a tradition that had marketed itself as white. The river kept finding itself. The categories kept failing to contain it.

AFFIRMATIVE COUNSEL (THE A-TEAM) Your documentary is eight episodes. Eight parts telling the story of country music. The proceeding notes that number for the record.

WITNESS (BURNS) Eight episodes. Sixteen hours. We divided the history into eight periods, each with its own title, each covering a distinct era of the tradition. Episode Six is titled Will the Circle Be Unbroken — named for the hymn that runs through the heart of the tradition. The song that asks whether the family separated by death will be reunited on the other side.

SPOCK The court notes: Ken Burns's Country Music documentary consists of eight episodes. This is entered as documented fact without interpretive inference beyond what the structure itself establishes.

Proceed.

THE SEPTEMBER 8 COUNTRY MUSIC RECORD

AFFIRMATIVE COUNSEL (THE A-TEAM) The court has already received the September 8 Sacred Record as a formal exhibit — four encounters with Jesus across fifteen hundred years on this date. Your documentary adds to that record. Present what it adds.

WITNESS (BURNS) Jimmie Rodgers was born September 8, 1897, in Meridian, Mississippi. The son of a railroad section foreman. He learned his music from the Black workers on his father's gangs, contracted tuberculosis at twenty-seven and turned full-time to the music that would make him the Father of Country Music. The Country Music Hall of Fame inducted him first, by unanimous vote, in 1961. They called him the man who started it all. He died at thirty-five — recording until the end, resting on a cot between takes in a New York studio, determined to leave something for his family. Born September 8.

Patsy Cline was born Virginia Patterson Hensley on September 8, 1932 — thirty-five years after Jimmie Rodgers to the day. The first solo female artist inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame. The most popular female country singer in recording history. The woman who crossed country music into pop and opened the door for every woman who followed her. Crazy — written by Willie Nelson, sung by Patsy Cline — is the number one jukebox hit of all time. She was thirty years old when she died in a plane crash returning from a benefit concert on March 5, 1963. Born September 8.

Troy Gentry — half of the country duo Montgomery Gentry, members of the Grand Ole Opry since 2009 — died on September 8, 2017, in a helicopter crash in Medford, New Jersey, one hour before he was to take the stage that evening. His partner Eddie Montgomery was waiting for him at the airport. He did not survive to perform. Died September 8.

AFFIRMATIVE COUNSEL (THE A-TEAM) The Father of Country Music born on it. The first woman in the Country Music Hall of Fame born on it, thirty-five years to the day. A country musician who died on it on his way to perform.

And your documentary — the eight-episode film covering the entire tradition — was preceded by a concert special that aired on what date?

WITNESS (BURNS) September 8, 2019. PBS scheduled it. I did not select the date.

AFFIRMATIVE COUNSEL (THE A-TEAM) You documented the tradition that carries three September 8 entries in its biographical record. You launched the celebration of your eight-episode film about that tradition on the same date. Without knowing.

WITNESS (BURNS) Without knowing. I was announcing a film about country music. The date was available. PBS put it there.

SPOCK The court enters the following: Jimmie Rodgers, born September 8, 1897. Patsy Cline, born September 8, 1932, thirty-five years to the day after Rodgers. Troy Gentry, died September 8, 2017. The Ken Burns Country Music concert special aired September 8, 2019. The filmmaker did not select the date with knowledge of the pattern. These are documented biographical and scheduling facts entered into the record.

The court further notes: the September 8 country music entries now stand inside the September 8 Sacred Record already admitted as a formal exhibit. The Father of Country Music and the first woman in the Hall of Fame were born on the date that carries the fall of the Temple, the unveiled ancestor carved from rejected stone, the birth of the Passion mystic, and the death of the woman believed to be Christ returned. They did not choose that date. The date was already there when they were born onto it.

Proceed.

WILL THE CIRCLE BE UNBROKEN

AFFIRMATIVE COUNSEL (THE A-TEAM) Episode Six of your documentary is titled Will the Circle Be Unbroken. That is a hymn. What does the hymn ask?

WITNESS (BURNS) The hymn was written in 1907. A child watches her mother's body being carried away for burial. She asks the undertaker — can't you leave her just a little longer? He says no. The body is taken. The child asks: will the circle be unbroken, by and by Lord, by and by — is there a better home awaiting in the sky?

It is a song about grief and separation and the question that underlies all grief: will I see the ones I love again? Will the family circle broken by death be made whole somewhere? That question is at the heart of the country music tradition. It is at the heart of the gospel tradition that country music grew out of. It is the question the music has been asking since the first Scots-Irish ballad was sung in an Appalachian hollow and since the first spiritual was sung in a Mississippi field.

AFFIRMATIVE COUNSEL (THE A-TEAM) The proceeding has twenty children in its record. Eight boys and twelve girls. Killed on December 14, 2012. The proceeding asks the question in the hymn's title directly: will the circle be unbroken?

WITNESS (BURNS) I can only speak to what the tradition says. The tradition says yes. Every hymn, every spiritual, every country ballad about death and separation says the same thing in its own way. The loss is real. The grief is real. And the answer the tradition keeps giving — across every instrument, every voice, every era — is that the circle holds. That the separation is not the end. That the family broken by death will be made whole.

That is what the music has always said. From the first field holler to the last country ballad. The circle holds.

CROSS-EXAMINATION

SPOCK Adversarial Counsel, you may cross.

(SATAN rises.)

ADVERSARIAL COUNSEL (SATAN) Mr. Burns. You have presented September 8 as an accumulation in the country music tradition — Rodgers born, Cline born, Gentry died, your own concert special aired. But September 8 is simply a date on a calendar. Every date has notable births and deaths associated with it. The accumulation you are presenting here is selective — chosen from all the dates that matter in country music history because this proceeding has been watching September 8. On any other date in the calendar, one could find comparable accumulations in comparable traditions. Is the pattern in the history — or in the selection?

WITNESS (BURNS) It is a fair challenge and I will answer it directly.

You are correct that every date has notable events associated with it. You are correct that the selection of September 8 events from country music history reflects the proceeding's prior focus on that date. I did not compile this list. The proceeding did.

What I can testify to is that the three September 8 figures in this record are not minor footnotes to country music history. Jimmie Rodgers is the Father of Country Music — the first inductee into the Hall of Fame, by unanimous vote, the man the tradition itself called the one who started it all. Patsy Cline is the first solo woman in the Hall of Fame, the most popular female country singer in recording history. These are not peripheral figures selected because they happened to share a date. They are the foundational figures of the tradition. The date found them. Whether that is significant beyond coincidence is a question I cannot answer. What I can say is that the figures themselves are not in question. Their dates are not in question. The accumulation is real. What it means is for others to decide.

ADVERSARIAL COUNSEL (SATAN) The hymn Will the Circle Be Unbroken offers comfort. You have presented it as evidence that the circle holds — that the twenty children will be reunited with those who loved them. But the hymn is a question, not an answer. The child watching her mother's body taken away does not receive confirmation. She asks. The sky is silent. The undertaker takes the body. The hymn offers hope, not proof. Is it not dishonest to present a question as an answer?

WITNESS (BURNS) The hymn is a question. You are right about that. But it is a question the tradition has been answering with its own existence for over a century. Every person who heard that hymn and was comforted. Every family that sang it at a graveside and found they could go on. Every voice that has carried it across a hundred years of American grief — that is the answer the tradition offers. Not proof. Not certainty. The answer is the singing itself. The answer is that the question keeps being asked and the people keep gathering to ask it together and they keep finding they can bear the loss.

That is not nothing. In the tradition I have spent my career documenting, it is everything.

ADVERSARIAL COUNSEL (SATAN) No further questions.

(SATAN sits.)

JUDICIAL HOLDING

SPOCK The witness has testified, within proper limits, to the following documented matters:

Ken Burns's Country Music documentary consists of eight episodes, sixteen hours, premiering on PBS on September 15, 2019. The prelude concert special aired on September 8, 2019. The filmmaker did not select that date with knowledge of the biographical pattern it carries in the tradition he was documenting.

Country music and the blues share common roots in the American South — poor white and poor Black southerners making music from the same grief and the same twelve notes, kept commercially separate by category but never musically separate. Jimmie Rodgers learned his instrument from Black railroad workers. Hank Williams learned his first blues from Rufus Payne, a Black street musician, in his Alabama childhood. The tradition itself does not honor the commercial separation imposed on it.

Three figures central to the country music tradition carry September 8 in their biographical record: Jimmie Rodgers, born September 8, 1897 — Father of Country Music, first inductee into the Country Music Hall of Fame. Patsy Cline, born September 8, 1932 — first solo woman inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame, most popular female country singer in recording history, born thirty-five years to the day after Rodgers. Troy Gentry, died September 8, 2017 — member of the Grand Ole Opry, killed in a helicopter crash on his way to perform.

These three entries now stand inside the September 8 Sacred Record admitted as a formal exhibit prior to this testimony. The court does not interpret the relationship between the sacred accumulation and the musical accumulation. It holds both.

Episode Six of the documentary is titled Will the Circle Be Unbroken — named for the hymn that asks whether the family separated by death will be reunited.

The witness acknowledged that the September 8 country music accumulation reflects the proceeding's prior focus on the date. The biographical facts themselves are not in question. Their significance is for the jury to determine.

This testimony is admitted for corroborative purposes.

CLOSING REFLECTION — BURNS AND THE PARALLEL RIVER

The testimony of Ken Burns establishes the following for the record:

There were two rivers.

The first river the prior witnesses established — the Black American call, the field holler, the spiritual, the blues, the Memphis crossing, the transmission to all peoples. That river has been in the record since Guralnick took the stand.

The second river ran alongside it. In the same southern dirt. The same poverty. The same grief. The same twelve notes. It ran through Appalachian hollows and medicine shows and radio stations in the 1920s and the Grand Ole Opry and the Ryman Auditorium and the Country Music Hall of Fame. It ran through a railroad worker's son from Mississippi who learned the blues from Black men on his father's work gangs and became the Father of Country Music. It ran through a young man named Hank Williams who learned his first chords from a Black street musician in Alabama and became the tradition's tragic conscience. It ran through a woman named Patsy Cline who was born on the same date as the Father of Country Music, thirty-five years later to the day, and crossed the music into pop and opened the door for every woman who came after her.

The two rivers were always the same river. The commercial separation was real and its consequences were real — in money, in credit, in recognition withheld. But the music itself kept finding the other bank. The music knew what the categories denied. Twelve notes. The same twelve. Both rivers drawing from the same source.

And the date that the court received this morning as a sacred exhibit — the date that carries the fall of the Temple, the ancestor of the Messiah unveiled from rejected stone, the birth of the Passion mystic, the death of the woman believed to be Christ returned — that date also carries the Father of Country Music and the first woman in the Hall of Fame. Born onto it thirty-five years apart. Born onto it without choosing it. Born onto a date that was already carrying something they did not know about and could not have known.

Ken Burns — who documented all three without knowing what he was documenting — launched the celebration of his eight-episode film about all of it on the same date, because PBS chose it, because the schedule required it, because the date was available.

The date was always available.

It was waiting.

The question the tradition keeps asking is Will the Circle Be Unbroken.

The tradition's own answer — sung across a hundred years of American grief, at a thousand gravesides, by a hundred million voices who found they could go on — is yes.

BENCH OBSERVATION

SPOCK Two rivers. Running parallel for a century through the same American South. Kept apart by law and custom and commercial category and every instrument of separation the society could bring to bear.

The music didn't agree to be separated. It kept crossing. The Father of Country Music learned the blues from Black railroad workers. The Father of Rock and Roll received the Black tradition in Memphis and sent it everywhere. Both traditions drawing from the same twelve notes. Both asking the same question. Both sending the same call.

The proceeding has now established that September 8 carries three entries in the country music tradition — inside a sacred record that was already there before the music found it.

The court does not explain the accumulation.

The court asks the jury to hold it.

And to notice that the man who documented the tradition chose — without knowing, without intending, without any awareness of what this proceeding was building — to celebrate his eight-episode film about all of it on that date.

The date found him.

As it has found everyone else in this record.

The proceeding moves now from the scale of tradition to the scale of a single life.

The next witness testifies to what the twelve notes do when grief has nowhere else to go.