Beyond Nashville's Limits

By James Poniewozik

A year ago, the Trio Arts Network was a tiny, overlooked cable channel. Today it is a tiny, buzzed-about cable channel. How did it change? By catering shamelessly to people who write about cable channels. It reran "brilliant, but canceled" TV series, catnip for TV critics. It gave an interview show to Kurt Andersen, a media insider with a great following among other media insiders. And Trio's president, Lauren Zalaznick, has said that the network's focus on smart pop culture, through its documentaries and specials, "validates" the work of critics. Purrr!

Trio continues its canny strategy with its upcoming theme week, Country Is Cool. Who, after all, needs to be assured that country music is cool? Mainly, folks who like the Dixie Chicks because Toby Keith doesn't, who bought the O Brother, Where Art Thou? sound track because they finally got sick of the Buena Vista Social Club sound track--a group that includes a not-insubstantial subset of journalists.

But the whiff of condescension does not make the centerpiece documentary, Lost Highway: The History of American Country (July 5 and 6, 8 p.m. E.T.), any less rapturous. Highway, a BBC co-production, opens with a clip from O Brother, and the first hour, about bluegrass, hews closely to that movie's Ralph Stanley/Emmylou Harris/Gillian Welch pantheon. But from there it moves on to the less pored-over story of how country responded, post--Hank Williams, to pop, rock and America's changing politics and culture.

The villain of Highway is, curiously, Nashville: that is, the record labels that wanted to denature country's honky-tonk heart and turn the music into pop with a fiddle. Highway's heroes are artists like Willie Nelson, Johnny Cash, Dolly Parton, Loretta Lynn and Gram Parsons, who saved country's soul from the people trying to sell it. Highway explains not just the music's culture but also its mechanics--say, what a "four-beat shuffle" sounds like--and it's fleshed out with interviews and performances from artists from Buck Owens and Earl Scruggs to Shania Twain and Steve Earle. This is a rich American history, even for anyone who already thought country was cool. --By James Poniewozik