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Hello and welcome to the London Review of Books podcast. My name is Thomas Jones and today I'm speaking with Alex Abramovich, who has a piece in the last issue of the LRB on the history of country music.

It's a review of Ken Burns' documentary series broadcast broadcast on PBS last year and BBC4 earlier this year,

and it draws out some of the troubling illusions in that series, and in Burns' other documentaries,

for example, on the American Civil War, especially when it comes to questions of race.

But today we're going to be talking less about Burns, I think, and more about country

music away from the documentary, though those troubling questions won't go away. Hello, Alex,

and thank you for joining me. Hey, Tom, thanks for having me. So I thought we could begin, not at the

beginning, because it's hard to say when that was, but at the moment in the 1920s that the label

country music was first

applied. So it wasn't a term used by the people who played string band music in the south

to describe what they played, was it? So who came up with the name and who did they give it to

and why? My understanding is that, you know, in the 19th century, people talked about love songs,

and they talked about religious songs, and those were really the distinctions.

And you were either playing hymns or singing hymns, or you were singing anything else,

and anything else was really a love song, whether it was a murder ballad or anything else.

...