Heidi Alexander: “Ken Burns told me last year that his 8- part, 16-hour ``Country Music'' film, which concludes on PBS this week, could be…”

“Ken Burns told me last year that his 8- part, 16-hour ``Country Music'' film, which concludes on PBS this week, could be more popular than his Civil War film. After watching the first episodes, I suspect he might be right. His new film plumbs the depths of the American soul, using the one tool--music--that is the most likely to touch the largest number of us. As a U.S. Senator from Tennessee, I will confess my bias. The first 2 hours of ``Country Music'' a week ago Sunday were about the recordings of hillbilly music in 1927 at the birthplace of country music in Bristol, where the Tennessee-Virginia State line runs down the middle of Main Street. Two years ago, the Senator from Virginia, Mr. Kaine, and I, played a little concert--I on the keyboard and he on the harmonica--at the end of that Main Street, at a fiddler's festival that they had. The rest of the Ken Burns episode winds through a community called Boogertown in Eastern Tennessee, in the Smoky Mountains, where Dolly Parton was born, to the Grand Ole Opry in Nashville and to Beale Street in Memphis. We like to say that the whole world sings with Tennessee, but country music is more than Tennessee music. It is more than Appalachian music. It is more than the music of poor white Americans. It comes from the heart. As Burns' and Duncan's storytelling reminds us, every one of us has a heart. There is no better evidence of this than paying less than $20 to sit at a table at the Bluebird Cafe in Nashville.…”