Second-guessing Ken Burns documentaries has become a national pastime, especially when they focus on something close to viewers’ hearts, like music. When he tackled jazz years ago, naysayers ran rampant, and his 2019 PBS doc Country Music is similarly fodder for Monday-morning quarterbacks.

Even when you’re making an eight-part miniseries in which each episode runs about two hours, if you’re tackling a topic as monumental as country music, some things are bound to end up on the cutting-room floor. Burns did a bang-up job overall, but that doesn’t mean there weren’t some inevitable omissions.Y

ou don’t have to go digging back through all eleventy-jillion hours of Country Music to figure out which important country artists didn’t make the final cut. We’ve done the heavy lifting for you with this playlist of the people who were left out. While some of the artists Country Music forgot might be familiar only to hardcore country fans, others are bound to induce a major amount of bemused head-scratching.

Let’s look at some of the legendary, enormously influential artists who fall into that latter camp, for starters. We’ve got the likes of Billy Joe Shaver, who’s as responsible for the outbreak of outlaw country in the ’70s as anybody. Then there’s rock ’n’ roll giant Jerry Lee Lewis, who managed a remarkable comeback as a country hitmaker in the ’60s and ’70s. And speaking of hitmakers, how about Don Williams, whose sonorous baritone brought him dozens of Top 10 country singles in the ’70s and ’80s? That’s saying nothing of country/pop crossover queen Linda Ronstadt, one of the biggest superstars of the ’70s.

Lesser known but equally important names like country-soul pioneer Tony Joe White, trucker-country hero Del Reeves, and bluegrass star Jimmy Martin are conspicuous in their absence from the series too, but you’ll find them right here. You’re bound to come away with a wider view of country than what Burns’ narrative encompasses.

Blues iconography is overloaded with male guitar heroes, to the point that you’d think nobody without a Y chromosome ever hoisted an axe to bang out some blues riffs. In fact, the truth couldn’t be more contrary to that notion. Women guitarists have been a vital component of the blues since the beginning. So let’s leave B.B., Stevie Ray, and the rest of the boys out of the conversation for once and let some well-deserved light shine on the ladies who have contributed to the blues-guitar continuum, from the early days all the way up to the present moment.

Memphis Minnie started making music in the late 1920s; her songs and guitar style made her a queen of the country blues and even influenced later generations of blues rockers like Led Zeppelin, who covered her classic “When the Levee Breaks.” Sister Rosetta Tharpe became a pioneer of the electric guitar in the ’40s, while Etta Baker and Elizabeth Cotten emerged as influential guitar stylists in the ’50s (even though Cotten had already been at it for decades). And in the ’60s, Jessie Mae Hemphill started making her name; she would become a linchpin of the Mississippi hill-country style.

From the ’80s onward, the number of gifted female blues guitar slingers has grown exponentially, and these days there are more of them out there than ever. Susan Tedeschi, Sue Foley, and Ana Popovic are a few of the most widely known fret-burners of the contemporary crop. But the likes of Samantha Fish, Australia’s Fiona Boyes, and Brits Dani Wilde and Joanne Shaw Taylor are tearing it up these days too. So if you think the halls of blues-guitar greatness are strictly a boys’ club, you’re about to be proven wrong in the most pleasurable way possible.

You know the segment of the horror and sci-fi movie spectrum we’re talking about here. The worse they are, the better they are; the lower the budget, the higher the entertainment value. And the more goofy and outlandish the plot, the more there is to love about it. They operate in an entirely different universe than venerated, “legit” horror films like, say, The Exorcist or Rosemary’s Baby. They’re the kind of movies that turn up in the wee hours on TV, or maybe in a cult film festival if you’re lucky.

Some of the songs assembled here pay direct homage to some of those films. For instance, Roky Erickson’s “I Walked With a Zombie,” John Cooper Clarke’s “(I Married a) Monster from Outer Space,” and Screaming Lord Sutch & The Savages’ “Dracula’s Daughter” are all inspired by the films that bear those titles. And after recording “House of 1000 Corpses,” Rob Zombie took matters into his own hands and directed his own movie of the same name.

Then there are the tunes that suggest an alternative history of cheesy horror movies, ones that never actually existed but sound like they should have. Blondie’s “The Attack of the Giant Ants,” The Hollywood Brats’ “Vampire Nazi,” and The Cramps’ “Burn She-Devil, Burn” are creations that originated entirely in the minds of the musicians, but after you hear them it’s hard to resist imagining them coming to life at three in the morning on your TV screen.

It’s the perfect playlist to fire up when All Hallows’ Eve rolls around, but if you’re a lover of B movies and vintage cinematic kitsch, these tunes will do the trick whenever you’ve got the urge to get gloriously tacky on the scary side.

When it comes to rock ’n’ roll sans boys, sisters were doin’ it for themselves all over the globe as far back as the mid-’60s. Half-baked historians tend to trot out ’70s bands like Fanny or The Runaways as examples of rock’s first self-contained all-female bands, probably because—though hardly stars—they became better known than most of their forebears. But the fact is that when the mid-’60s garage-rock phenomenon was inspiring tons of teenagers to bust out guitars and drums, eschew aural niceties, and start playing guts-and-gravel rock ’n’ roll, there was no shortage of young women revving up for the revolution.

In the U.S., distaff ’60s bands were thick on the ground. Goldie & The Gingerbreads, the launching pad for respected rocker Genya Ravan, were probably the first, getting together in New York City in 1962. But within a couple of years, they were joined by The Pleasure Seekers (including future glam-rock star Suzi Quatro alongside her sisters), The Debutantes, The Luv’d Ones, and hordes of others.

But America wasn’t the only place where this phenomenon was being forged. England had its own female Merseybeat band in The Liverbirds, while Germany had Die Sweeties, and Indonesia boasted Dara Puspita. Quebec gave Canada Les Intrigantes, and Las Mosquitas generated a buzz (sorry) in Argentina, while Sanjalice showed up in Yugoslavia. Some of these bands were cutting covers of the hits of the day, but a lot were writing their own tunes, and even if the bands that made the femme-rock underground of the ’60s never really found their way to fame and fortune, they still made a crucial contribution to the culture. In an era when the women’s movement was just getting underway, the original Riot Grrrls made it clear that guys didn’t have a monopoly on rocking out.

For more ladies of the first generation of rock, read Jim Allens story on pleasekillme.comhere.

Prince was nothing if not prolific, but turning out material at a breakneck pace didn’t necessarily gel with the marketing agenda of a major label. Prioritizing creativity over commerciality, he began warring with said label over its refusal to release as much material as he wanted. That’s when he began rebelling by adopting his famously unpronounceable symbol, with the world consequently calling him The Artist Formerly Known As Prince. But beginning with 1996’s aptly titled Emancipation, Prince (who eventually reverted to his given name) was freed from his contract. Releasing records through his own NPG imprint—sometimes distributed through other labels—he opened the floodgates and a startling torrent of music flowed through.

Even in his earlier days, Prince had always put out records at a pretty constant pace, but it was only after he entered his indie phase that it really became apparent just how much material he was producing. It wasn’t merely the amount of music that was overwhelming; it was the broad range of styles. He worked in a multiplicity of formats, sometimes on his own and sometimes backed by groups ranging from the rocking 3RDEYEGIRL to the funkier New Power Generation, and occasionally joined by guests including Sheryl Crow, Kate Bush, and Maceo Parker. In these settings, Prince slipped into R&B, rock, hip-hop, funk, jazz, electronics, and more.

The trouble is—and this is where Prince’s former label’s concerns were not entirely unfounded—wading through that much music can be a daunting, even confusing process. A lot of people had trouble keeping up with the emancipated Prince’s output. To this day, it can be a challenge, so here’s a handy guide hitting plenty of the highlights, from the steamy funk of “Black Sweat” to the smooth soul of the Stylistics cover “Betcha By Golly Wow,” the blistering rock of "PLECTRUMELECTRUM," the supple jazz of "Xemplify" and beyond.

What better soundtrack could you have for celebrating Independence Day than the most unbound kind of music around? Hell, it’s right there in the name: free jazz. These are the sounds of liberation, of minds and spirits set loose from all constraints. We start at the birth of free jazz in the early ’60s, when visionaries like Ornette Coleman were looking beyond the horizon line to determine where jazz could go next. For Coleman and legions of others to follow, the answer was unfettered improvisation, whereby the melodic, harmonic, and rhythmic settings could shift on a dime, determined by the flow of the musicians in the moment. Ornette dubbed his 1961 album Free Jazz, giving the genre a natural tag. No longer tied to any kind of conventions, free-jazz players invented musical languages of their own, and although the first bursts of the music may have all been energized by a similar spirit, every musician’s artistic argot was completely their own. The light, darting lines of Don Cherry’s trumpet, the industrial-strength blast of Albert Ayler’s saxophone, and the heady abstractions of Andrew Hill’s piano, for instance, were islands unto themselves, but anybody was welcome to visit.

Free jazz was also the sound of liberation in the sense of African Americans boldly defining their cultural identity, as groups like the Art Ensemble of Chicago did with their Afrocentric, unfailingly idiosyncratic musical statements. But as subsequent generations and cultures took up the free-jazz mantle, the music moved in multitudinous directions, from the postmodern pianistics of Matthew Shipp to the visceral trumpeting of Steph Richards and beyond. There are a couple of Europeans in the mix too, but jazz is one of the ultimate American art forms, and the most untrammeled end of its spectrum makes the ideal musical companion for marking America’s anniversary of independence.

The world has gotten smaller. If you compare the U.S. and U.K. Top 40 pop charts these days, you’ll mostly see the same batch of songs on both. It’s probably a function of the Information Age turning cultural variations into one big, transatlantic pile of homogeneity.

But it wasn’t always that way. In decades past, the British and American pop charts were almost entirely different creatures. Americans trawling through the U.K. Top 40 would encounter a slew of songs and artists that were foreign to them in every sense of the word, as well as some they might know but would never have expected to have mainstream appeal.

The U.S. Top 40 has always been known for playing it safe. Rarely does anything too far outside the margins pop up. But in England of old, you could find edgy, underground artists rising to the top as well as utterly eccentric bits of weirdness with no readily discernible explanation, the results of the kind of old-fashioned regionalism that’s been increasingly phased out.

This collection of U.K. Top 40 hits from the ’60s through the ’90s is designed to astonish Americans who’ve grown used to thinking of the pop charts as the home of the lowest common denominator. On one end of the spectrum are the artists too cool, too quirky, or too in-your-face to ever score U.S. pop hits. That encompasses everything from the doomy post-punk of Joy Division and Public Image Ltd. to the goth glory of Bauhaus, the seminal electro-pop of Kraftwerk, the punk roar of The Damned, and the thrash-metal madness of Megadeth.

But before you decide the U.K. musical mainstream is just exponentially cooler than that of the U.S., take a look at the other end of the spectrum. There’s goofy pre-WWII pastiche, Peter Sellers’ mock-dramatic recitative of “A Hard Day’s Night,” a loopy-sounding brass-band instrumental, a ska remake of a tune whose only lyrics are “Ne Ne Na Na Na Na Nu Nu,” and plenty of other bizarre entries unknown to most Americans.

It all adds up to one of the most schizophrenic playlists you’re ever likely to experience, swooping back and forth from the sublime to the ridiculous with giddy glee. And the breathless momentum incurred will echo the mercurial feeling of following the U.K. Top 40 in the pre-internet era.

Welcome to a history of the Grammys’ greatest misses. The first Grammy Awards were given out in 1959, and obviously the organization has doled out well-deserved honors to countless awesome artists since then. But let’s face it: It’s a lot more fun to home in on the mistakes that this august assemblage of music-industry pros has made in terms of legendary artists they’ve snubbed for decades. So here’s a handy tally featuring some of the most glaringly obvious omissions from the Grammy rolls. Note that if we’d made this list in 2019, it would have also included Tanya Tucker, who won her first Grammy in 2020 at the age of 61, no less than 47 years after her first nomination (yes, she started young). And note further that we aren’t counting Lifetime Achievement awards, which are bestowed as opposed to being won in a competitive context.

Looking all the way back, the Grammys actually missed a big one straight out of the gate. The first awards ceremony occurred in May of ’59, three months after Buddy Holly was killed in the infamous “The Day the Music Died” plane crash, and both of his solo (i.e., non-Crickets) albums had been released in ’58. You can probably tell where this is going. Many of the artists who shaped the ’60s didn’t fare much better—Jimi Hendrix, The Doors, and The Grateful Dead, for instance, remain in the non-Grammy pile to this day. The awards missed their share of ’70s heroes as well, from ABBA to Bob Marley and beyond. (For the latter, it didn’t help that the industry did not have a reggae category until 1985.) So how did the Grammys do when hip-hop and New Wave were in the ascendant? Well, ask Run-DMC, Public Enemy, Depeche Mode, or The Cure, whose (surviving) members have presumably given up on waiting for the call. The Notorious B.I.G. and Nas can tell you there was some catching up to do on the hip-hop side in the ’90s. And country superstars like Dierks Bentley and Martina McBride have their issues with the institution too. In fact, when you step back and see how much titanic talent has been given the cold shoulder by the GRAMMYⓇs, it sort of starts to seem like a badge of honor.