![]() I would ask him for every project except those that are subject-wise African-American. Ken, is it project-specific when you choose to use Peter? I don’t know in what year it was that I did The West, but that began my relationship with Ken. That may have been one of the first documentaries that really synced totally with my politics and my ideas. Then I did a great movie for Alex Gibney, comparing American labor practices to Japanese labor practices. and Jagged Edge and Outrageous Fortune, I did a lot of ads - General Motors, Chevy, Cadillac, Tylenol, New York Life. I got my first Screen Actors Guild card in 1979, and by 1980 I was making five-digit money. I walked it around to every ad agency in San Francisco and I started getting work for ads. ![]() I wasn’t an actor at that time, so I made a comedic CD of myself talking in about 15 different accents, telling people how unreliable and unhirable this guy Peter Coyote was. Peter Coyote: I was broke after ten years in the counterculture and I needed a way to make some money. Peter, how did you get into the narration game? Vulture spoke with both men about Coyote’s unequaled voice, their unique recording process, and how they handle political disagreements. These days, he’s also an ordained Zen Buddhist priest.Ĭoyote has lent his voice to a plethora of ads and documentaries over the decades, but his decades-long relationship with Burns is something special. “Men and women who were broken by lies the government was telling.” As a young man, he was invited into Kennedy’s White House after staging a protest against nuclear testing during the Cuban missile crisis, threw himself headlong into a decade of drugs, Hell’s Angels, and commune living, narrowly escaped being drafted to Vietnam by pretending to be a cold-blooded marauder, helped run the California State Arts Council for eight years, and then decided to become an actor. ![]() “I saw grown-ups weeping in my living room,” he says. Growing up as a secular Jew with communist relatives during the McCarthy era, Coyote was an early convert to political activism and the counterculture. the Extra Terrestrial - but the man himself has lived a Zelig-like life. Generations of kids first met Coyote as the embodiment of authority - he played Keys, the head scientist in E.T. Rife with endlessly fascinating anecdotes, the stories in this sweeping yet intimate history will captivate longtime country fans and introduce new listeners to an extraordinary body of music that lies at the very center of the American experience.What would a Ken Burns documentary be without its measured, authoritative narration? In The West, The National Parks, Prohibition, The Dust Bowl, The Roosevelts, The Vietnam War, The Mayo Clinic, and now Country Music, actor Peter Coyote delivers hours of often dense, complex text - full of facts, figures, quotes, and grand unifying ideas - in a manner that Burns refers to as “God’s stenographer.” His calm, cowboy-around-a-campfire timbre is basically the voice of America, at least within the orbit of PBS. Here, too, are interviews with the genre's biggest stars, including the likes of Merle Haggard to Garth Brooks to Rosanne Cash. Here is Hank Williams' tragic honky tonk life, Dolly Parton rising to fame from a dirt-poor childhood, and Loretta Lynn turning her experiences into songs that spoke to women everywhere. With the birth of radio in the 1920s, the songs moved from small towns, mountain hollers, and the wide-open West to become the music of an entire nation - a diverse range of sounds and styles from honky tonk to gospel to bluegrass to rockabilly, leading up through the decades to the music's massive commercial success today.īut above all, Country Music is the story of the musicians. This deeply researched and hugely entertaining history begins where country music itself emerged: the American South, where people sang to themselves and to their families at home and in church, and where they danced to fiddle tunes on Saturday nights. The rich and colorful story of America's most popular music and the singers and songwriters who captivated, entertained, and consoled listeners throughout the 20th century - based on the upcoming eight-part film series to air on PBS in September 2019
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