I grew up certain for a while that I was going to be an anthropologist, until film turned my head. Ken Burns More Quotes by Ken Burns More Quotes From Ken Burns Civics is in fact politics, and politics is how things work not only in the political realm but in every other realm. It may be this simple mechanical glitch that unites everything. This is my philosophy. Ken Burns politicalsimplephilosophy Filmmaking is essentially about entertainment, but it's amazing to realize that it has this other muscle that could actually help. Do you know what I mean? People permit entertainment to wash over them, but every once and a while, entertainment - and this is entertaining - also galvanizes something else and that would be a really good thing to have happen in this case. Ken Burns would-bemeanpeople Country music at its Big Bang was two different musics, the music of Jimmy Rogers, which is Saturday night, and the music of the Carter Family, which is Country Music morning. That's been in tension in all of American music and in American life, I would suggest, all the way through. Ken Burns entertainment We tend to think of Country Music as one thing, but it's always been many things, country Music omnivorously wants to grab cowboy music and western swing, and the Bakersfield sound and the Nashville sound, countrypolitan and all the various permutations of string bands up and down Appalachia, one of which branches off into a whole new genre called bluegrass. Country Music's never ending and Country Music's omnivorous and Country Music's not Country Music. Country Music's always been connected. There's no border. No passports required, that allows you to go into RB or allows you to go into jazz or allows you to go into folk or rock. It is, in fact, one of the parents of rock with RB. Ken Burns entertainment Other music genres are separated and isolated by celebrity, by bold faced names, they're going through that same stuff, and People Magazine's going to discover them and ferret People Magazine out and tell you, or the tabloids will. But with country it's right in your face. You know what's going on when somebody miscarries. You know when this person's marriage is over or when somebody falls in love. That's a particularly intimate thing. Ken Burns entertainment I'd put her on the Mount Rushmore right away, dolly Parton voice is one of the greatest gifts from God any singer has ever been bestowed with. Dolly Parton is a phenomenal song writer... Dolly Parton's Dolly Parton and Dolly Parton's funny and Dolly Parton's self-effacing. Dolly Parton's a good human being. Dolly Parton makes fun of Dolly Parton. So Dolly Parton's the total package, as somebody says in the film. Ken Burns entertainment His phrasing owes more to jazz than it does to any country rhythms, and that's what made it hard for him to fit it into Nashville, they couldn't figure out what to do with his phrasing and he needed to retreat to his native Texas, where they loved him and took him for what he was. Ken Burns entertainment We're in an age when everybody wants to suggest that we should separate and go back to some pure, singular American thing, it never existed. We've always been a mutt. We've always been a mongrel. And if you try to say that country music is identified more with that, you're already in trouble because it's just not true. Ken Burns entertainment We say about Country Music,' Oh, Country Music's about pickup trucks and good ole boys and hound dogs and six packs of beer.' And that is a part, but a very small subgenre of Country Music. Ken Burns entertainment I think we too often make choices based on the safety of cynicism, and what we're lead to is a life not fully lived. Cynicism is fear, and it's worse than fear - it's active disengagement. Ken Burns thinksafetyfearlife You know, you meet some people, and do a lot of interviews, and you come across a Buck O'Neill and you know you are going to know him for the rest of your life. The same thing happened with Curt Flood. Ken Burns restyoulifepeople
