On TV, country is the soundtrack to the American dream
Pop culture will find you, whether you look for it or not.
It fascinates me to think that my parents, because they were alive in the late 20th and early 21st centuries and went to movies and watched television, had some knowledge of hip-hop and EDM, of hard rock and winsome pop ballads that really let you feel the scene in which the heroine decides to change her life. Their own tastes ran to Oscar Peterson and Ella Fitzgerald; modern pop music was in their heads, if not their hearts.
Still, you never know what's going to stick.
Whatever your musical interests, you can't have lived in America during the last nine or 10 decades without getting a fair notion of country music, in one or more of its many forms - how it sounds, what stories it tells, what it looks like, even. Maybe you liked it already; maybe you got to like it. As related in Ken Burns' latest mega-documentary, "Country Music," premiering Sept. 15 on PBS - another beautifully illustrated collection of significant biographies, told with a fondness for pointed ironies - it's a music driven by modern media. Country might have come out of the hollers and cotton fields and
