Hidden in the Mix

he roots of country music are often associated with Appalachian hollers and sharecropper shacks in the Deep South. The uniquely American art form borrowed from European ballad traditions, African banjo music, gospel hymns, and the blues to emerge as a commercial genre known as hillbilly music in the 1920s. As Ken Burns illustrates in his ambitious new eight-part, 16-hour documentary series called—what else?—, it continued to spread, coming of age in honky-tonks, branching out into Texas swing, and giving rise to a subgenre called bluegrass. Thanks largely to the popular radio broadcast—which spawned booking