Open Country

A Film by Glenda Drew and Jesse Drew

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We are offering the film to community organizations, down-home music venues, alternative film spaces, union halls, and grass-roots projects as a means to spread the word and to help you generate some funds and resources to continue doing the good work you do.

Our idea is to offer the film to use as a funds-generating and community connecting event. We will attend your event and introduce the film and answer any questions at the end. Every event will open with a few songs played by a local musician. We are only releasing Open Country for an in-person audience. It will not be streamed or on any on-line platform. It is meant to be experienced in-the-flesh. This will be an event worth attending in person, to help build community and bring people together. It is a already a proven crowd-pleaser!

If you would like to participate and benefit from Open Country your organization would:

You can charge whatever you like and use the entirety of the income to support your good work! We only ask that you provide a modest contribution (to be determined) to a local musician to play a few songs at the beginning of each event.

Use the button below to send us an email if you are interested and we can arrange the means to review the film. As Open Country will only be released at in-person events, it is critical that we guard access to the film, so please respect this necessity. The value of the film is contained in its in-person screening presentations. We prefer it to be seen in a crowd of neighbors and friends, not alone on your smart phone! Our intent is to use it to build community.

ABOUT

Open Country is a journey into the roots of American Country music, reclaiming it as the creative musical expression of working people of all colors. Through archival clips, contemporary interviews, performances, and animated graphics, Open Country repositions country music into its rightful place as a people’s music. This film features interviews with Billy Bragg, Mat Callahan, Keith Cary, Davey D, Barbara Dane, Ryan Davidson, Hazel Dickens, Hilary Dirlam, Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, Bairbre Flood, Archie Green, Gerald Haslam, Toshio Hirano, Roger Knox, Jon Langford, Hannah Mayree, Morgan McDow, George Metesky, Yvonne Moore, Utah Phillips and Pete Seeger.

With the twang of a steel guitar, the whine of a fiddle and the plunk of a banjo comes an instant association; the pick-up truck, the cowboy boots, the rolling hills, dusty fields, lonesome highways and the flag. Lots of flags. The twang of Country-Western puts you into the American heartland, on the ranch, the farm, or in the honky-tonk or beer hall. For many, it has also come to signify conservatism, “traditional values,” American chauvinism, or even racism, bigotry and the confederate flag. Country-Western music has been prominently featured by every major contemporary Republican figure, from Richard Nixon to G. W. Bush. George Bush the elder claimed Hee-Haw as his favorite TV show. Consequently, no one is too surprised when Country -Western radio disc jockeys smash CDs or ban music from groups taking positions frowned upon by the right-wing.

Does Country-Western deserve this reputation? Like the flags they fly so fervently, the right wing likes to promote this claim to ownership. But history and facts do not bear them out.

Although one wouldn’t realize it from listening to today’s pop Country-Western radio stations, country music has been anything but a rightwing soundtrack. To the contrary, the roots of Country and Western lie firmly in classic American traditions of resistance to capital, freedom from government interference, and in defense of the right of workers, poor farmers, and the dispossessed to live their lives in dignity.

This film shows the origins of country music as being drawn from the same well as what was originally called “hillbilly” or “folk.” Much early country music was written from the perspectives of Southern tenant farmers, Appalachian coalminers, working Southwestern cowboys, Western farmworkers and other marginal poor folk. These tunes were passed along generation to generation, with the lyrics often evolving as times and conditions changed. As the radio and recording industries grew up around the music in the 1920s and 1930s, vested financial interests formed and developed a stake in the financial viability and political identity of the music. In the 1930s and 1940s, a star system arose, as country music developed a fan base and began to challenge the hegemony of tin pan alley and urban popular music. In the 1950s, McCarthyism played a prominent role in the extraction of Country-Western from that of folk music, with its left-wing associations with artists like Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger.