Original subtitles

MUSIC: Good Morning Boys by Dolly Parton

# Well, good mo-o-o-o-o-orning, captain

# Good morning to you, sir

# Hey, hey, yeah... #

If you look at it over the last 90 years now

that it's been being recorded, it wouldn't be one thing.

It wouldn't be anywhere close to one thing.

# Yeah, yeah... #

It's been a million different things in a million different ways,

and that's, to me, the way it should be.

You're going to play it differently.

Your heart's going to make it come out of you

in a different way than it is me.

That's the beauty of it.

# I'm a lady mule skinner

# From down old Tennessee way

# Hey, hey, I come from Tennessee

# And I can make any mule listen

# Or I won't accept your pay

# Hey, hey, I won't take your pay

# Yodel-a-ee... #

I don't think I would enjoy country music if it stayed the same.

It's not supposed to.

# Hee-ee-ee-ee-ee

# Hee-hee-ee

# Hee-hee-hee-ee... #

MUSIC: On The Road Again by Willie Nelson

# On the road again... #

Could a music of everyday people,

described as three chords and the truth,

survive the changes of the late 20th century

with its soul and its simplicity intact?

Would its stars and the music itself lose their way

or would they heed the old saying, "Don't get above your raisin'"?

"Don't get above your raisin'",

is a term I associate with the South.

It's the kind of advice that parents would give their children.

As you go into the world,

don't get so uppity that you forget us

and you forget the values that you were taught back home.

I think for country music it's just a reminder to the music in general,

don't forget where you came from.

We are all related when it comes to country music and to country songs.

You know, we're like blood kin. Anybody that loves country music,

they're related to you. You've got that in common.

# You're a country baby

# That's plain to see

# Don't get above your raisin'

# Stay down to earth with me... #

MUSIC: I Still Miss Someone by Johnny Cash

You can have a smoke with A.P.

I never got to have a smoke with A.P. before.

# Are falling... #

He died in 1960 and I never got to know him. Not really.

Never got to have a smoke with him.

# Sweethearts walk by together... #

By the mid-1980s, Johnny Cash was about to start

his fourth decade in country music.

To many people around the world, he was country music.

But his solo records were no longer selling.

Only two singles had reached the Top Ten in more than a decade.

# Be somewhere

# And I still... #

Many of his recent albums failed to chart at all.

In 1986, Columbia Records abruptly dropped Cash from its roster.

He had been with the label since 1958.

No-one, including Cash, saw it coming.

It was like somebody had dropped an atom bomb in Nashville.

The guy that ran Columbia at the time, Rick Blackburn,

everybody thought he was the devil,

because Johnny Cash was more than an artist.

He was a way of life for America.

It was regrettable and reprehensible that he was just, kind of,

summarily, disrespectfully dismissed and cast aside by a label

that had made millions and millions of dollars with Johnny Cash's music.

The fact that Columbia Records would drop Johnny Cash

was an insult to...

..anybody who'd ever listened to music.

MUSIC: I Don't Know Why You Don't Want Me by Rosanne Cash

Meanwhile, Cash's eldest daughter, Rosanne,

was carving out her own career in country music.

She carried painful memories of her father's neglect in the 1960s,

when he was strung out on drugs and never at home.

# I don't know why you don't want me... #

But she also shared his deep love of music and his fierce individualism.

It was so important to me that I do it on my own.

I even thought of changing my name.

And my dad didn't say anything about that.

He knew I was considering that. And then, when I didn't, he said,

"I'm so happy that you kept your name.

"I'm so proud of our name. I'm so happy you didn't give it up."

I realised that would have hurt him terribly.

She and her husband, Rodney Crowell, who was also her producer,

had moved from Los Angeles to Nashville,

where she had trouble fitting in.

When I moved to Nashville, I had purple hair,

I was a little bit streetwise,

urban girl, straight from Los Angeles,

and...

..you know, brazen.

Just came on the scene, like, "Well, here I am and this is great",

and I really put people off.

But her song I Don't Know Why You Don't Want Me went to Number One

and won a Grammy.

# I don't know why you don't want me... #

She was selling records and people were getting her music.

And that will endear you to the establishment pretty quick

because it adds to the bottom line, so...

You'd be surprised how much respect you get

when your records are selling

and you probably wouldn't be surprised

how little you get when they're not.

MUSIC: Tennessee Flat Top Box by Rosanne Cash

Rosanne Cash's newest album went gold

and produced four consecutive Number One singles,

including Tennessee Flat Top Box,

a song her father had first recorded in 1961.

# To the little dark-haired boy who played

# The Tennessee flat top box... #

I felt kind of guilty that my career was really...

I was having a lot of Number One records

and getting a lot of attention.

At the same time, my dad was dropped from Columbia

and he was really floundering.

I felt bad for him because he put a lot of stock in being Johnny Cash

and to not have that, he was a little disconcerted

and at sea and depressed.

# My daddy is a rancher

# He's wrangled cattle dang near all his life... #

My accent has been with me forever

and because of the way I talk and the way I sing,

I can't cross over that much.

It's a big old bar that comes up. The barriers do come up.

Reba McEntire grew up on an 8,000 acre cattle ranch

near Kiowa, Oklahoma.

Her father, a three-time world champion calf roper,

taught his four children to work hard and love horses.

Her mother taught them to harmonise and love music.

By high school, Reba was performing with her brother and sister

as the Singing McEntires

and competing in rodeos as a barrel racer.

# Oh, say does that star-spangled

# Banner yet wave... #

When she sang the national anthem at the National Finals Rodeo in 1974,

her voice prompted an invitation to Nashville, where she signed

a recording contract and released several albums.

But as the years went by, she grew dissatisfied with the way her label

tried to mould her into a countrypolitan style artist.

Of course, me being a strong-willed...

..third child out of four kids and a red head,

I had my own opinion of how things would be done.

In 1984, a new label finally listened to her.

And I said I would really like things more country.

I don't want orchestra and violins, I want a steel guitar and a fiddle.

# Somebody should leave

# But we hate to give in... #

I wanted the help to bring country music back to more traditional,

so that was...boy, that was really something that I love.

George Strait, Ricky Skaggs, Randy Travis.

That started me having more control of the songs that I recorded.

# Swe-e-e-e-e-et... #

One night, after a concert in San Diego,

eight members of McEntire's band perished in an aeroplane accident.

The biggest tragedy for the close-knit country music family

since Patsy Cline was killed in a place crash in 1963

after a concert in which Cline had introduced a new song of hers.

Sweet Dreams.

# Why can't

# I forget the past... #

Sweet Dreams was the last song I sang in San Diego

in March of '91, when the plane crash happened.

That was the last song I got to sing with that band.

# Instead of having... #

Reba McEntire would go on to form her own entertainment company,

be the first artist to be chosen the Country Music Association's

Female Vocalist of the Year four years in a row,

appear in movies, television shows and on Broadway,

and become the most successful female country artist of her era.

It's women standing up for themselves in all walks of life,

any job you have.

Women have to work twice as hard, sometimes three-times as hard,

and that's just the way it is in life.

And you do it. You do it with a smile.

But you win.

Reba was discovered singing The Star-Spangled Banner at rodeos.

George was a real cowboy down in San Marcos, Texas.

We were real.

We didn't need a focus group or a marketing meeting

and that kind of stuff,

and people were hungry for that.

# Grandpa

# Tell me 'bout the good old days

# Sometimes it feels like

# This world's gone crazy

# Grandpa

# Take me back to yesterday... #

Naomi Judd was a divorced mother of two strong-willed daughters,

Wynonna and Ashley, living in Los Angeles,

when she decided to move back to her native Kentucky in 1976.

Wynonna was 12,

Ashley was eight,

and I had taken them back home to a mountaintop in Kentucky

to expose them to their ancestry.

I wanted to really, sort of, plug the kids into their...

..incredibly rich eight-generation Kentucky heritage,

so we lived on a mountaintop, Morrill, Kentucky.

Very isolated.

# Tell me 'bout the good old days... #

We lived in a home that a woman rented to us for 100 a month,

but it had handmade quilts on the bed,

it had blueberry...blackberry bushes in the back and apple trees.

It was a paradise.

Yet we had nothing.

We cut our own hair, we grew a garden,

my mother made everything from scratch.

If we didn't make it or grow it, we didn't have it.

I mean, it was simple, simple, simple.

No TV, no telephone. It was all about creativity

and spending time in the quiet of the wilderness.

It was in that splendid...

..solitude that I handed the 12-year-old nemesis,

erm, I handed Wynonna...

..a plastic string guitar,

and voila.

The truth is, I wasn't into music.

I was not into even being a singer.

I just was bored out of my mind living on a mountaintop

with a single parent and a sister who wouldn't leave me the heck alone

and I think the guitar became my friend

because I was just so lonesome.

# Did lovers really fall in love to stay

# Stand beside each other Come what may?

# Was a promise really something people kept

# Not just something they would say... #

While Wynonna practised her guitar, Naomi studied nursing

and the two of them managed to ease some of their

mother-daughter tensions by learning to harmonise together.

I would learn a song and, all of a sudden,

she'd be right behind me humming or singing along.

I'd be, like... OK.

And then it became a thing.

People started asking us to sing at family gatherings

and the next thing I know...

# Tell me 'bout the good old days... #

We were studying the Delmore Brothers

and they had the most tempestuous relationship

and it occurred to me,

if you look at the word kindred, it's dread of kin.

Hm!

And Lord knows, there were many times

Wynonna and I couldn't talk to each other.

But we could sing together.

So, yeah, she started to harmonise with me

and that's when I started to realise... OK, here we go.

They moved to Nashville, where they appeared on a local television show

at 5:30am each morning, before Naomi went to work at a hospital

and Wynonna went to high school.

Naomi spent her days off knocking on every door on Music Row,

trying to get an audition with a record label.

# Why not me? #

Finally, through the help of the family of a patient

Naomi had nursed back to health,

the Judds managed to get an appointment with Joe Galante,

the head of RCA records in Nashville.

# Why not me on a rainy day? #

And Wynonna and I had had a huge fight, of course,

and we weren't speaking.

So we go into this room and...

It felt very much like going into the principal's office

and yet I knew that these were men who had a business

that could help us musically.

I was used to singing.

I just wasn't used to being in a boardroom full of men.

And I felt very, erm...

I guess the word is guilty.

I felt guilty that I had put her in that situation.

I mean, she was only

17 and a half years old and she was terrified.

I mean, like...

..terrified in a bad way - just frozen.

And I looked at her and I said, "OK, there you go, kiddo.

"We're back on that mountaintop and there's a storm rolling in

"and we're sitting on the porch.

"Let's just sing."

# Why not me? #

And they came in.

Wy had braces, Naomi was stunning as always,

and they opened up their mouths and it was...

We all just kind of went, "Oh, my God."

# You had to see if the world was round

# It's time that you learned how good settlin' down could be

# Why not me? #

Their first album, released in 1984, hit the top of the charts.

They would become the most dominant country music duo

for the rest of the 1980s.

# When the nights get cold? #

That song became our anthem, actually.

Why Not Me was, my mom would say...

She would say, you know, we wake up every day

and we just look up and say, why not me?

I'll never forget her saying that

because everyone wanted us to make it.

We were mother and daughter, they knew our story

and they knew that we had nothing and they wanted to see us make it.

We were the underdog and Why Not Me became our anthem.

# Baby, why not me?

# La, la, la, la, la, la, la

# Ooooh

# Baby, why not me? #

APPLAUSE

# Hey, pretty baby Are you ready for me?

# It's your good rockin' daddy down from Tennessee... #

Regardless of whether it was new traditionalists,

old traditionalists, country rock or countrypolitan,

all of it was good for Music City.

The financial resurgence also made room for other artists

who were harder to categorise.

Nanci Griffith had been a kindergarten teacher

before making a name for herself with plaintive ballads

and songs she described as folkabilly.

Lyle Lovett, a singer-songwriter from Texas,

came out with albums tinged with everything

from folk to honky-tonk, gospel to rhythm and blues.

In Alberta, Canada, k.d. lang adopted a persona

as a punk reincarnation of Patsy Cline.

As a rebellious teenager, Steve Earle dropped out of high school

and claimed Townes Van Zandt as his songwriting mentor and role model.

He struggled for 10 years to get known, until 1986,

when he emerged with a sound

somewhere between country and early rock.

# Hey, pretty baby Don't you know it ain't my fault

# I love to hear the steel belts hummin' on the asphalt

# Wake up in the middle of the night in a truck stop

# Stumble in the restaurant wonderin' why I don't stop... #

I mean, we kind of all think of it as a golden age in country music,

where everybody was welcome.

You heard Nanci Griffith on the radio,

you heard Steve Earle's voice on the radio, you heard Lyle Lovett.

My picture of it in my mind is these big doors opening up.

Just opening.

Where...

..instead of being the gatekeepers who were letting a few people in,

suddenly everybody was welcome.

I mean, we were country music.

# When I was a young girl

# My daddy told me... #

Growing up in West Virginia,

Kathy Mattea originally sang folk music and bluegrass.

Her tastes broadened when she took a job as a tour guide

at the Country Music Hall of Fame

and broadened again when she started earning extra money

singing on demo tapes for songwriters

pitching their tunes on Music Row.

# You've got to sing Sing

# Like you don't need the money

# Love Love

# Like you'll never get hurt... #

Along the way, Mattea got a recording contract

and ended up with the independent producer Allen Reynolds.

I actually decided I would sell my studio

and then, before I managed to do that, I met Kathy Mattea,

and I really liked her.

I liked her mind and I liked her talent

and I got to working with her

and it ended up being very nourishing for me.

# It's got to come from the heart

# If you want it to work... #

My first obsession with country music was in the '90s.

It was Reba and Mary Chapin Carpenter and Kathy Mattea.

I love strong women telling stories

and I think in country music, especially at that time,

if you want to look for super-strong women telling amazing stories,

you went to country.

Early in her career, Mattea had performed regularly

at a newly-opened dinner and music venue called The Bluebird Cafe.

Its founder was Amy Kurland,

the daughter of one of the leading session musicians

in Nashville's recording studios.

I have to confess, I opened The Bluebird Cafe

because I was dating a guitar player.

I wanted to be in the restaurant business and he said,

"If you put in a stage, me and all my buddies will play there for you."

I was just trying to keep my boyfriend happy.

Soon, the music became more important than the menu.

Kurland held auditions for aspiring songwriters,

then added a special writers' In The Round,

in which they sat in the middle of the audience

rather than on the stage and exchanged stories and new songs.

Another singer-songwriter also performed there.

His name was Garth Brooks.

He had grown up in Yukon, Oklahoma, in the 1960s and '70s,

the last of six children.

He was exposed to every kind of music.

The country stars like George Jones and Merle Haggard his parents liked

and the younger artists his older siblings listened to.

Bands like the Eagles, guys like James Taylor.

Here comes everything, from Townes Van Zandt to Tom Rush.

Everything from Janis Joplin

to Emmylou Harris.

# With old Huck Finn... #

Brooks went to Oklahoma State University on a track scholarship,

worked as a bouncer at a local nightspot

and formed his own band,

learning to play whatever the college audience wanted.

Kiss, Queen and Alabama.

"I've played more Alabama", he said, "than Alabama."

In 1987, he moved to Nashville,

began making the rounds at publishers and record labels

and played at The Bluebird whenever they would let him.

# Sometimes late at night... #

He began singing a song he had co-written.

If Tomorrow Never Comes.

# If I never wake in the morning... #

Sitting in the audience was an executive for Capitol Records.

Only a few days earlier, he had passed on signing Garth Brooks,

but something about the performance at The Bluebird that night

changed his mind.

# If tomorrow never comes

# Will she know how much I loved her?

# Did I try in every way

# To show her every day

# That she's my only one? #

With a modest advance of 10,000,

Brooks was assigned to a producer to create his first album.

There's nothing pop about Garth Brooks. He's just...

His show is pop but his music is countrier than I'll ever be.

# In low places... #

Everybody!

# I've got friends in all...

CROWD: # Whiskey drowns... #

Friends In Low Places, that's the kind of song you want to write.

You want to write a big drinking song like that,

where everybody's in the bar singing it at the same time.

Even people that don't know it, by the second chorus they know it.

# I've got friends in low places

# Think I'll slip on down to the oasis

# Oh, I've got friends

# In low places

# Oh, I've got friends

# In low places. #

CHEERING

Propelled by the astonishing popularity of Friends In Low Places,

Brooks' second album sold 700,000 copies in just 10 days

and reached Number Four on the pop charts.

It would soon become the first country album

to hit five million in sales.

His third album would debut at Number One on the pop charts,

another first for a country artist,

and sell more than eight million copies.

And he did this without ever once allowing his record label

to promote his records across into other markets,

like the pop market and all that.

He felt like his loyalty was to country radio

and his attitude was, let them come to us.

You know, let's be so good at what we do that they come to us.

And all of a sudden, it was like,

this guy is selling out the stadiums and doing specials...

..like, blowing the tops off record sales across the board,

and he's one of us.

In 1993, Brooks announced that he would be doing a concert

at Texas Stadium.

All 65,675 seats were sold out within 92 minutes...

Hello, Texas!

..beating a previous record held by Paul McCartney.

A second show was added and sold out in the same time.

So did a third.

Angered when he heard about the extravagant prices being charged

by scalpers, Brooks announced a fourth concert with free tickets.

There four concerts were like nothing any country star

had ever delivered.

Let's get on it. Raise some hands!

In front of the massive crowd, preparing for the biggest stunt

he had ever attempted, he remembered the first Queen concert

he attended when he was 17.

# Life is not trying It is merely surviving... #

I'm standing on my chair...

..and all I want that whole night is for Freddie Mercury

to look at me for three seconds so I can go, "Thank you, dude.

"Thank you. It's what I listen to before I play football,

"it's what I listen to when I'm down. Thank you. Thank you."

And it was funny.

You start to get to do this for a living,

you're the guy that gets to do it for a living,

and now all I do is scan the audience every night

for that three seconds, to go, "Thank you.

"Thank you. Coolest gig ever.

"Thank you." It's pretty cool.

I love that old man.

And towards the end of his life, I thought,

I want to go hang out with him one more time

and just spend the afternoon with him taking pictures.

And at the end of it all, we were standing by his barn,

just me and him playing mandolins.

BLUEGRASS MUSIC

But I could tell, in his last few days,

that he was really concerned about where bluegrass was going,

what was going to happen to it.

You know, where's it going to end up?

And I just said, "Mr Monroe, listen, this music is bigger than you.

"It's bigger than you.

"You got to hear it first, you got to play at first,

"and you got to sew great seeds with this music.

"I'm part of your seed,

"Marty's part of your seed, Vance is part of your seed.

"All of us that love bluegrass are part of your seed

"and it's never going to die,

"so you can go home and rest in peace.

"Don't worry about where the music's going.

"We're going to take care of it. Just be free."

Yes, I made a promise to him that I would play this music

all the days of my life

and I would always tell people where it came from.

Mr Monroe passed away in '96...

..and I just kept hearing this deep...

..calling into deep thing in me.

And it was like, you know,

simple life, simple life, simple life.

And I can take these acoustic instruments,

I don't have to have microphones, I don't have to have amps.

If we want to pull off the road and go to a little schoolhouse,

we can go play and entertain the kids.

I wanted to take it back to the front porch

and so that's what I did.

And I found out that what had happened

is I had become a success machine.

I simply wanted success.

I wanted to be accepted and my heart got left behind.

And then I went back and started listening to the Carter Family

and I listened to Bill Monroe and Tammy Wynette and George Jones

and Hank Williams and I started to cry and my heart came back to life

and I went, "I think I know what I need to do -

"go back to myself and start again and take it up again."

A year later, Stuart would marry country star Connie Smith,

just as he had predicted he would do when he was 11 years old

and got her autograph at the Choctaw Indian Fair in Mississippi.

# Only one that's gone and said goodbye. #

I grew up thinking that becoming famous was about the worst thing

that could happen to you because then you had to go on the road,

and if you went on the road you got divorced

and you didn't see your kids and you got on drugs

and everything fell apart.

There was something kind of ingrained in us -

this is not a good way to live.

As he aged, Johnny Cash had taken to writing poignant letters

to his daughters, asking them to forgive him for his many absences.

His daughter Rosanne had moved to New York City

and when her father came to town for a concert,

he asked her if she'd join him on stage for a song.

One he had co-written and recorded back in 1958.

I Still Miss Someone.

And I was mad at him about something, you know.

Some...

..childhood transgression he had committed

or something I was going through, something he hadn't done.

I don't even remember what it was.

And I very petulantly said "No, I don't think I will."

Can you imagine?

And he said, "OK."

And he turned and he walked out of the room

and as he walked out,

I looked at his back and I thought of the...

..thousands of times I had seen his back from sitting in the wings...

..offstage.

And seeing his back with the light coming down on him and his guitar,

so I said, "Dad, I'll do it."

So that night, erm, he called me out

and we sang I Still Miss Someone together.

# At my door the leaves are falling

# A cold, wild wind will come

# And sweethearts walk by together

# And I still miss someone. #

And everything got dissolved,

everything got fixed.

You know, just looking at him,

he worked out all of his problems on stage.

That's where he took his best self, that's where he took all of his...

..anguish and fears and griefs

and he worked them out with an audience - that's just who he was.

And he got purified by the end of the night.

So that happened with me that night, with him.

It just all got fixed.

MUSIC: It's Tricky by Run D.M.C.

Then, in 1993, a young producer named Rick Rubin,

who had helped popularise hip-hop music and recorded successful rap,

punk and heavy metal artists,

approached Cash about doing an album for his label.

Many of Cash's friends and family were aghast, certain

the collaboration would be damaging to his already faltering career.

He went ahead anyway.

So they began to focus on material.

Everything was honestly connected with my father

and who he was as a person.

Songs of faith,

songs of my dad's love for my mother,

songs of his humour,

songs of the elemental darkness within him.

# Delia, oh, Delia

# Delia all my life

# If I hadn't have shot poor Delia

# I'd have had her for my wife

# Delia's gone, one more round

# Delia's gone, one more round... #

Released in the spring of 1994,

the album American Recordings won rave reviews for its sparse

arrangements, Cash's still commanding voice,

and his song choices - from a traditional cowboy tune to

compositions by Tom Waits,

Leonard Cohen,

and Chris Kristofferson -

and the nearly century-old murder ballad Delia's Gone.

# She was low down and trifling

# And she was cold and mean... #

Everything was new again. He was back.

It was like the light shined on him again.

And he was so grateful and relieved that somebody saw his essence

and who he was and just wanted to bring that out,

just wanted him to be Johnny Cash again.

Most country radio stations ignored the album,

but it sold 150,000 copies -

more than any album of his since 1971 -

and won him a Grammy award for Best Folk Album.

Two years later, in 1996,

Cash and Rubin came out with the equally successful Unchained,

with Marty Stuart

and Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers as backup musicians.

This time, it won a Grammy for Best Country Album.

Over the next several years, even as his health deteriorated

and he could no longer make live appearances,

Johnny Cash would record three more albums with Rick Rubin,

with an equally wide range of songs.

# To see if I still feel... #

From ones he had written, to those by Bono, Sting,

Lennon and McCartney,

as well as Hank Williams and the Carter Family.

But what drew the most attention was a song called Hurt,

written by Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails.

# Try to kill it all away

# But I remember everything

# What have I become

# My sweetest friend?

# Everyone I know

# Goes away in the end. #

The album would eventually sell nearly 2 million copies,

earn Cash yet another Grammy

and, as a sign that the country music industry

wanted him back as one of their own,

won the CMA's award for Album Of The Year.

# I will make you hurt

# If I could start again

# A million miles away

# I would keep myself

# I would find a way. #

Shortly after the song's release,

June Carter Cash died.

Johnny hung on for four months without her.

In the last few months of his life, I...

..it seems like I sang a lot of Carter Family songs to him.

It comforted him.

And I read the Psalms to him.

The last song he heard was The Winding Stream.

That's what I sang to him when he was dying.

# Oh, give to me a winding stream

# It must not be too wide

# Where waving leaves from maple trees

# Meet from either side. #

It was June's favourite Carter Family song,

and I just liked to sing it and he liked to hear me sing it.

The Carter Family songs on the radio when he was a kid,

that pulled him forward and...

..Carter Family songs sent him out,

sent him away.

Johnny Cash died on September 12, 2003.

He was 71 years old.

He was buried next to June in the Memory Gardens Cemetery

near their home in Hendersonville, Tennessee.

Later, a memorial concert was staged at the Ryman Auditorium

with performances by a grand array of stars.

It began, as his mother would have liked, with a gospel song

performed by the Fisk Jubilee Singers.

# Can't hold my body down Hold my body down. #

Then Roseanne stepped to the microphone

and sang I Still Miss Someone -

this time, on her own.

# At my door the leaves are falling

# A cold wild wind will come

# And sweethearts walk by together

# Cos I still miss someone

# I go out on a party

# And look for a little fun

# But I find a darkened corner

# Cos I still miss someone. #

Take every piece of American music...

I mean, every piece of that stream,

all those tributaries that go into that pool of whatever

we call it - country music, American music,

from blues, gospel, bluegrass,

rock and roll...

I mean, that was all in John.

I mean, it was all in him.

# And I wonder if he's sorry

# For leavin' what we'd begun

# Yeah, there's someone for me somewhere

# But I still miss someone

# I still miss

# Someone. #

APPLAUSE

It rose up out of nothing,

uneducated, from the soul.

And came into what it is, which is...probably never been

anything like it and there are never be anything like it again.

This is our voice and this is our music,

telling those stories of those people who don't have that voice,

and they hear that song and they are like, you know, "That's my story."

Country music is a complicated chorus of American voices,

joining together to tell a complicated American story.

MUSIC: Will The Circle Be Unbroken by Johnny Cash and the Carter Family

It has been handed down from generation to generation,

moving from farm fields and churches and family porches

into every corner of the country.

# I said to that undertaker

# Undertaker, please drive slow

# For this lady you are carrying

# Lord, I hate to see her go. #

It has changed and grown at every turn,

tethered to its past

but always reaching toward its future.

It's almost like it needs to be exhumed

and new life breathed into it.

The part that is the songs of the people,

the hopes and aspirations of the people,

the pain and suffering of the people,

that needs to remain embedded in country music.

If, if...if it isn't there, I'm out.

# Oh, I follow close behind her... #

I'm not one of these old farts that says, "Hey,

"they're not doing it right, the way they used to.

And I say, "Look, they're not doing brain surgery they way they used to.

"They used to drill a hole in your head

"and let out all the bad air, you know?"

I'm not married to, in my philosophy,

to a concrete country music.

And I don't think there's any such thing.

# There's a better home a-waiting

# In the sky, Lord, in the sky

# I went back home My home was lonesome... #

It's always going to be connected to the past,

but we don't want to stay there.

You never step into the same river twice.

Music has to change too.

# What a home so sad and lone

# Will the circle be unbroken

# By and by, Lord, by and by?

# There's a better home a-waiting

# In the sky, Lord, in the sky

# We sang... #

There will be songs that should have been hits, that never were.

There will be songs that are hits, that shouldn't have been.

There will be people that you'll fall in love with

and they'll be gone in three weeks,

or after the next record.

And there'll be stars that come and get you inside of your heart

and stay with you for the rest of your life.

Somewhere along the way you'll discover an old country song

that will speak to that divorce you're going through,

or that tax problem you're going through,

or you losing your best friend...

# In the sky, Lord, in the sky... #

Country music has something for everybody,

and it's inside the songs, it's inside the lives of the characters.

It's really colourful in here.

I invite you in.

# There's a better home a-waiting

# In the sky, Lord, in the sky

# Will the circle be unbroken

# By and by, Lord, by and by?

# There's a better home a-waiting

# In the...

# Sky, Lord

# In the...

# Sky. #

# Oh, I'll twine with my mingles and waving black hair

# With the roses so red and the lilies so fair

# And the myrtle so bright with the emerald hue... #