Documentarian Ken Burns has stated publicly that he was not particularly a fan of country music at the time he started work on Country Music, his 16-hour historical overview of the genre currently airing on PBS. That Burns is far removed from the country music industry, having no real professional or personal ties to the music or its larger infrastructure, ends up being representative of what’s most notable about the documentary as a whole. Historically, country music has viewed perceived outsiders with, at best, skepticism and, in its ugliest moments, with overt hostility. As an outsider himself, Burns approaches the genre from a perspective that gives thoughtful consideration to the experiences of artists whose contributions have been marginalized. Burns’s exploration of the genre concludes in 1996, but the greatest value of his series is in reframing conversations that have dominated discussions of country music in 2019.

Arguments about the status of country music are in no way a recent phenomenon. For decades, notions of “authenticity” or genre purity have butted against the view that even the most traditional forms of music must evolve to remain artistically vital and commercially viable. Throughout 2019, that tension has frequently manifested in efforts at gatekeeping, and those discussions have centered primarily around Lil Nas X’s Old Town Road. The year’s biggest single has been the subject of controversy first for the way that Lil Nas X cleverly entered the single’s metadata so that it would appear as a country track across digital platforms, and then for decisions to include and then exclude it from Billboard’s country charts. While there’s been some hemming and hawing about chart methodology, the arguments have reduced to whether Old Town Road belongs in country music.

What Country Music illustrates, then, is that singles like Old Town Road are hardly anomalies in the history of country music. Beyond considerations of what’s been dubbed the “Yeehaw Agenda” or of how often artists have actually attempted to set a cheating song with references to Wrangler jeans over a trap beat the way that Lil Nas X has done, Burns provides frequent and meaningful examples of how liberally country artists have incorporated disparate styles into their music and have done so from the genre’s very inception. The first episode alone includes profiles of both Jimmie Rodgers, whose signature yodel became an early hallmark of country music and who eagerly performed that yodel on most any type of record that might sell to a wide audience, and DeFord Bailey, an African American multi-instrumentalist who performed alongside Bill Monroe and Roy Acuff and whose career was often hamstrung by racist institutions.

Country Music posits that the genre has always been more diverse than its stereotype would suggest while also accounting for the reasons why that diversity is seldom recognized to the extent that it should be. What’s different in 2019 are the intensity and focus of demands for country music to hold itself accountable for its problematic history of gatekeeping, which has too often excluded marginalized groups. At the moment, that’s a matter of asking whether a gay, African American rapper who gained popularity on TikTok before enlisting Billy Ray Cyrus to sing the hook on a remix of his viral hit truly has a place in contemporary country music. Throughout the year, that conversation has extended further to include Blanco Brown, whose single The Git Up, which lands halfway between a hoedown and the Cha Cha Slide, has gained traction across radio formats. Even more recently, country has struggled to know how to respond to The Highwomen, a quartet formed by women whose solo careers range from Maren Morris’s slick commercial country to Amanda Shires’ Americana. The group’s unabashed feminism is at odds with industry practices that have deliberately removed women’s voices from country radio.

Burns has drawn criticism both for not leaning hard enough into matters of institutional racism and sexism and for overstating those types of prejudices as the behest of a political agenda. Ultimately, that’s a matter of the scale of his project. Sixteen hours makes for a lengthy documentary series, but it simply isn’t sufficient to provide more than a survey course in one of American culture’s most enduring and substantive art forms. Burns is purposeful with regard to representation, but the examples he provides are not exhaustive when it comes to the contributions of socially marginalized artists. And certainly the intersections of race, sex and class within the country music industry are ripe for deep explorations that re-center unbalanced power dynamics. Indeed, that might make for a more challenging documentary than Country Music. Burns’s macro-level view, though, is still instructive in the sense that a single like Old Town Road might not be viewed as a lightning rod today had country music truly reckoned with and accounted for its biases, having had many opportunities to do so before 2019.