The first family of country

“The Carter Family: Will the Circle Be Unbroken,” which airs tonight on PBS as part of the “American Experience” series, tells the story of the “First Family of Country Music,” and it is a title inarguably deserved.

There have been Carters singing country for three generations now, including what is now called the Original Carter Family -- the trio of A.P. Carter, his wife (and then ex-wife) Sara, and his sister-in-law, and Sara’s cousin, Maybelle -- followed by Maybelle’s daughter June and June’s daughter Carlene, among other Carters.

The music the Carters made was based on the traditions of rural southwestern Virginia, on songs whose authorship was lost and communal and which had been passed down and passed around sometimes for generations before them. But it was not, strictly speaking, “country music” until it was fixed -- “fixed up,” as A.P. called his arranging of the songs he collected from the hills and hollers -- and recorded and distributed and put up for sale.

A surprisingly many good things happen because someone thinks there’s money in it. The beginning of the country era is widely traced to a week in 1927, when a talent scout for the Victor Talking Machine Co. set up a microphone and recording machine in an old hat factory in Bristol, Tenn., to record all comers. The Carters made the trip to Bristol and within a couple of years were selling as many as 100,000 copies of a record. Among the songs they introduced to the wider world were “Wildwood Flower,” “Single Girl, Married Girl,” “I’m Thinking Tonight of My Blue Eyes,” “Will You Miss Me When I’m Gone,” “Wabash Cannonball” and what would become their theme, “Keep on the Sunny Side.”

The documentary, a production of Nashville Public Television, is slight in some ways -- relative, at least, to the importance of the subject. It doesn’t do quite as much as it might to explain the historical roots of the Carters’ music or, except by expert assertion, communicate the full breadth of its freshness or effect on the culture, especially given how dry and old-fashioned it can sound to modern ears. But it is a worthwhile hour, often moving, sometimes exciting.

Though there is no footage here, or perhaps anywhere, of the original group in performance, there are many photographs, haunting and lovely -- these were handsome people. Like most documentaries nowadays, this one resorts to a little dramatic re-creation, including artificially aged footage of three actors lip-syncing to the old records. This is a little strange, but you can close your eyes and just listen.

Singer Gillian Welch, whose whole persona and style derives from the Carters, demonstrates Maybelle’s “Carter scratch,” the melody-in-the-bass strumming guitar style into which every modern picker naturally falls; country star Marty Stuart catches their poetry (“It was like ghosts were in the car with me,” he says of hearing them come on the radio one night); and Joan Baez testifies to the ubiquity of “Will the Circle Be Unbroken.” Various informed commentators keep the story moving, as do sundry friends and relatives.

And it’s really the personal story, more than the musicological, that animates the film -- a story with the depth, heartbreak and intrigue of a great mountain ballad, in which a man falls in love with a woman’s singing and loses her by making her sing.

It’s the story mostly of A.P. Carter, a man who possessed, or was plagued with, an almost electrical energy -- attributed by his mother to a close encounter with lightning during her pregnancy -- and beset by trembling hands and a peripatetic restlessness that today would have doubtless found him on Ritalin. He was ambitious for his music and himself far beyond anything seen in his parts, and beyond his bride’s desire. The realization of his vision was also his ruination.

Carter Family recordings are used to underline their story in sometimes obvious ways, but it does make the point that the mountains produced a song for every occasion, emotion or state of mind.

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‘American Experience’

What: “The Carter Family:

Will the Circle Be Unbroken”

Where: KCET

When: 9 to 10 tonight

Ratings: TV-G (suitable for all ages)

Robert Duvall...Narrator

Executive producer, Mark Samels. Director, Kathy Conkwright. Writers, Kathy Conkwright and Mary Makley.