20 Best Country Music Documentaries That Tell a Great Story – Billboard

This 2021 five-part documentary, which premiered on Apple Music, documented the highs and lows Bryan experienced during his journey to earning two CMA entertainer of the year trophies and amassing 26 No. 1 Country Airplay hits, including navigating tragic family loss and finding his way within the Nashville music industry.

This film documented the lives of some of the Outlaw movement’s founders during the years of 1975 and 1976. The documentary features artists including Guy Clark, Townes Van Zandt, Steve Earle, Rodney Crowell, the Charlie Daniels Band and David Allan Coe.

This foundational documentary is remarkably unstructured, zeroing in on the lived-in moments of these musicians. David Allan Coe is filmed performing at the Tennessee State Prison, where he recalls his time as a former inmate there and welcomes friends of his onstage. The film highlights not only concert performances from the artists, but personal moments, such as a Christmas Eve party at Clark’s home, which features several musicians, including Earle and Crowell.

In 2022, Cody Johnson earned his first No. 1 single on Billboard‘s Country Airplay chart, with the CMA song of the year-winning track “’Til You Can’t.” But long before he was selling out top venues and winning music awards, Johnson was competing in rodeo arenas throughout and beyond Texas. This doc depicts Johnson’s own story of competition, defeat, and ultimately career triumph, turning his journey into a documentary and weaving in stories of others who have undergone trying circumstances that forced significant life changes, including Johnson’s producer Trent Willmon, Johnson’s “Dear Rodeo” duet partner Reba McEntire, and American Sniper Chris Kyle’s widow Taya Kyle.

This 2015 CMT documentary centers on the story of Gilley’s Club in Pasadena, Texas, which operated from 1970 to 1990. Local club owner Sherwood Cryer entered into a partnership with country music entertainer Mickey Gilley; Gilley’s featured its eponymous country star as the house entertainer, but also featured performers including Loretta Lynn, Waylon Jennings and Ernest Tubb.

In 1978, an Esquire magazine article that focused on the atmosphere and happenings at the club led to the movie Urban Cowboy being filmed primarily inside the club in 1979. The movie, starring John Travolta and Debra Winger, spurred torrential tourist interest in the club (and in mechanical bull riding for a time), while Johnny Lee earned a crossover hit with one of the soundtrack’s songs, “Looking for Love” and Gilley earned a No. 1 Country Airplay hit with another song on the soundtrack, a remake of Ben E. King’s “Stand By Me.”

The documentary follows the legal battles that followed the club, as Gilley sued to gain control of the club in 1988; he was ultimately awarded $17 million. Gilley’s closed in 1989 and the club’s main building burned to the ground in July 1990; no one was charged with setting the fire. The rest of the property was demolished in 2005.

This 2011 documentary, directed by Bobbie Birleffi and Beverly Kopf, centers around the coming out story of country music singer-songwriter and gay rights activist Chely Wright. In 2010, Wright was the first significant country music artist to publicly come out as gay.

Filmed over a three-year period, Wish Me Away details Wright’s childhood growing up in Kansas and her journey to becoming a country music hitmaker, who garnered No. 1 hits such as “Single White Female” and earned awards like the 1995 top new female vocalist honor from the Academy of Country Music. However, at the time, Wright was also battling fear and guilt as she hid her true sexual orientation.

The film follows Wright and her team in the weeks and months leading up to her publicly coming out, as she struggles with fear and works toward how to approach telling her coming out story and navigating public responses.

With her golden-throated, timeless vocals, Ronstadt issued music that traversed country, pop, folk, standards and classic Mexican music. This documentary chronicles Ronstadt’s childhood, as she grew up performing Mexican canciones with her family, and follows her burgeoning career through her days performing as part of the Stone Poneys, earning solo country hits such as “When Will I Be Loved,” working on the Trio and Trio II albums with Dolly Parton and Emmylou Harris, issuing the Spanish-language album Canciones de mi Padre and more.

This PBS documentary traces the life and career of the late harmonica player DeFord Bailey, one of the Grand Ole Opry’s most popular early performers. Known for performing signature songs such as “Fox Chase” and “Pan American Blues” (in which he imitates the sound of a train), Bailey became known as the “Harmonica Wizard.”

DeFord was a regular on the Opry from 1926-1941, when his career suddenly halted, as the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers (ASCAP) battled with those in the radio industry over licensing fees for broadcasting songs. As WSM could receive hefty fines for broadcasting ASCAP-affiliated songs, they told Bailey to not perform his ASCAP-affiliated songs, and ultimately fired him later that year.

Bailey died on July 2, 1982, he was posthumously inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame in 2005.

This two-part documentary initially aired on A&E in 2019, and goes deep into Brooks’ childhood — as well as his career surge in the 1990s, and the personal challenges that have come alongside his rise to become the best-selling solo artist of all time. The documentary includes interviews with not only Brooks, but his three daughters, wife and fellow artist Trisha Yearwood, the songwriters behind some of his signature hits and artists including James Taylor and Keith Urban, as well as Brooks’ ex-wife Sandy Mahl.

This 2022 documentary, directed by Joshua Kissi and released via Amazon Music, examines the musical careers, experiences and struggles of Black artists within the country and Americana music spaces — including pioneers such as Frankie Staton, as well as more contemporary artists Jimmie Allen, Mickey Guyton, Amythyst Kiah, Brittney Spencer, Allison Russell and more.

“I hope that this documentary can push back against the toxic single story – the strong bias towards a white, male, heterosexual-centered narrative in mainstream country music,” Russell previously told Billboard of the documentary. “I hope it will serve as a gateway for active listeners to open their ears to a whole world of country, country adjacent, all Americana, Folk – the whole rainbow coalition of roots music—whose wildly diverse, eclectic, genre expanding artists are making albums that matter. I hope it will reach other roots leaning up and coming or closeted -black and BIPOC artists, queer artists who’ve felt isolated or without a community. I hope it gives them some encouragement. We need all the voices and all the stories. Representation matters because we do.”

Released in 2017 and produced by Thirteen/American Masters, this documentary offers archival material from the Cline estate as well as rare performances, alongside interviews with Reba McEntire, Kacey Musgraves and Wanda Jackson, with narration by Rosanne Cash. The documentary centers on how Cline (born Virginia Patterson Hensley) shifted culture with her music, a blend of pop and country which she crafted alongside Decca Records producer Owen Bradley, as one of the pioneers of the Nashville Sound in the 1950s and early 1960s. The documentary traces her experiences overcoming industry gender biases and reaching success — only to have her life cut short, as Cline was killed in a plane crash at age 30 in 1963 in Camden, Tennessee.

This 2006 documentary, produced and directed by Barbara Kopple and Cecilia Peck, centers on the controversy and backlash that followed Texas-based trio The Chicks (then-called the Dixie Chicks) over a three-year period, after the trio’s lead singer Natalie Maines criticized the then-president of the United States George W. Bush during a show in London on their 2003 On Top of the World tour, sharing her disagreement with Bush’s authorizing the United States-led invasion of Iraq that same year.

In 2003, the trio was indeed on top of the world, having performed the national anthem at the Super Bowl and selling millions of copies of their albums. During the London concert, Maines made the statement in introducing the trio’s song “Travelin’ Soldier,” which at the time was seated atop the Country Songs chart. As news of Maines’ comments made their way back to the United States, a cloud of controversy followed, with “Travelin’ Soldier” plummeting from the chart. The trio’s records were burned, and people showed up to concerts with protest signs.

The documentary acts as a time capsule of a moment in country music history that has had indelible negative influence on many country artists, rendering them afraid to speak out on political topics for fear of losing radio airplay and their fanbases; in her 2020 Netflix documentary, Miss Americana, pop superstar Taylor Swift discussed her fear of “getting Dixie Chick’d.”

This 2016 American Masters documentary follows the life and career of Country Music Hall of Fame member Loretta Lynn, with never-before-seen home movies and interviews with Lynn’s fellow musicians, including Jack White (who produced Lynn’s Grammy-winning project Van Lear Rose), as well as celebrated acolytes like Trisha Yearwood, Miranda Lambert and Bill Anderson. The film also includes footage of Lynn in the studio with producer John Carter Cash at the Cash Cabin Studio in Hendersonville, Tennessee, as they record the album Full Circle.

This documentary began in 2011 as a concert special to honor the 25th anniversary of Travis’s genre-shifting 1986 album Storms of Life. But as the project was being finalized in 2013, Travis suffered a massive stroke, which left him unable to perform and also limited his ability to speak and sing. The documentary quickly became a tribute to Travis’s musical legacy, and captures Travis in some of the final performances and moments of his career prior to his stroke — including some of the last footage of Travis performing song such as “Deeper Than the Holler” and “Three Wooden Crosses.”

Travis and his wife Mary are interviewed as part of the documentary, as well as Travis’s longtime producer Kyle Lehning and music executive Martha Sharp, who signed Travis to his label deal with Warner Bros. Records Nashville (now Warner Music Nashville). Randy Travis: More Life was directed and produced by Shaun Silva and Tacklebox Films, with Warner Music Nashville’s Shane Tarleton and Mike Dupree serving as executive producers.

Jelly Roll, known for hits like “Son of a Sinner” and “Need a Favor,” is the subject of this ABC News documentary, which offers an in-depth look at his journey from struggling with addiction to achieving chart-topping country music stardom. The documentary aligned with the release of Jelly Roll’s latest album, June’s Whitsitt Chapel.

Jelly Roll was also recently Billboard‘s cover star of its Country Power Players issue, and was honored with the breakthrough artist honor during the industry-only Country Power Players event held in Nashville, as well as the Country Power Players Live! conference.

This American Masters documentary, directed by Barbara Hall, chronicles the late Country Music Hall of Fame member’s life, including his childhood as a sharecropper’s son on a cotton farm in Mississippi. Pride spent his time listening to the Grand Ole Opry on the radio and dreaming of a baseball career. Eventually, he met producer Jack Clement, and signed with RCA Records, leading to his rise to prominence as one of country music’s greatest artists — and country music’s first Black superstar.

In 1963, Pride auditioned for manager Jack Johnson, who introduced Pride to producer Cowboy Jack Clement. Clement and Pride recorded demos that sufficiently impressed RCA Records’ Nashville leader at the time, Chet Atkins. Pride signed to RCA Records Nashville and released the single “Snakes Crawl at Night.” From there, Pride went on to earn three Grammys and was named the Country Music Association’s entertainer of the year in 1971. Pride was inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame in 2000. He passed away in 2020.

This documentary — released in 2015, and presented by the Annenberg Space for Photography in association with the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History and the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum — offers a visual chronicling into how the image of country music and its artists has been crafted and evolved. From gingham dresses and flashy rhinestone suits to the more modern styles seen today, the shifts in country fashion are shown through the work of revered music photographers including Les Leverett, Raeanne Rubenstein and David McClister.

This 2017 film from NPT documents how Nashville’s “Music Row” area became home to a creative community of artists, musicians, songwriters and producers, and the hub of the country music industry–beginning with the rise of the Grand Ole Opry, and the launch of recording studios in Nashville’s downtown area. The film discusses the mid-1950s, when brothers Owen and Harold Bradley purchased a two-story house on 16th Avenue and turned it into Music City Recordings (later known as Bradley Film and Recording Studios). They later added the metal Quonset Hut behind the building, and the Quonset Hut soon became the more favored studio. The buildings served as recording homes to artists like Patsy Cline and Johnny Cash.

The documentary follows the rise of the music industry — including music publishing houses, booking agencies, record labels and management companies — that grew around 16th and 17th avenues in Nashville. Among the figures featured in the film are Bill Anderson, Ray Stevens, Harold Bradley and authors/historians Don Cusic and Robert K. Oermann.

This 2020 documentary, spearheaded by Tamara Saviano and Paul Whitfield, centers on the life and career of legendary singer-songwriter Guy Clark as well as his wife Susanna and their deep, enduring friendship with fellow singer-songwriter Townes Van Zandt.

The film is based on Susanna Clark’s diaries, as well as Saviano’s 2016 book Without Getting Killed or Caught: The Life and Music of Guy Clark. Academy Award-winner Sissy Spacek (known for her role as Loretta Lynn in the 1980 movie Coal Miner’s Daughter) voices Susanna’s narration.

This 2014 documentary centers around Country Music Hall of Fame member Glen Campbell, known for hits including “Gentle on My Mind,” “Wichita Lineman,” and “Rhinestone Cowboy.” The documentary’s director James Keach followed Campbell on his farewell tour across the U.S., Australia and Europe. The documentary also spotlighted Campbell’s battle with Alzheimer’s Disease. The film also features many artists who offer their tributes to Campbell’s talent and legacy in music, including Bruce Springsteen, Paul McCartney, Vince Gill and Brad Paisley.

Campbell and the film’s executive producer Julian Raymond won a Grammy and were nominated for an Academy Award for best original song for writing the film’s theme “I’m Not Gonna Miss You.” Campbell died in 2017 at age 81.

Ken Burns produced and directed this epic film, which was also written and produced by Dayton Duncan, and produced by Julie Dunfey. This deeply reported, overarching documentary on the evolution of country music instantly became an essential piece of country music’s documentary canon upon its release in 2019.

Starting with launch of what was called “hillbilly music,” and country music’s “Big Bang” that featured the discovery of the Carter Family and Jimmie Rodgers, the documentary also highlights the impact of Black musicians — including Lesley Riddle’s influence on A.P. Carter, and the influence of African American blues on the music of Rodgers. From there, the documentary follows the genre’s growth during the Great Depression and World War II, the rise of Texas Swing, the breakthrough of artists including Grand Ole Opry star Roy Acuff and “The Hillbilly Shakespeare” Hank Williams, Sr. — then pivots to Memphis, and the era of rockabilly under Sun Records, with artists including Johnny Cash and Elvis Presley.

The gut-wrenchingly honest, bold songwriting of artists like Merle Haggard and Loretta Lynn is explored, as is the rise of Charley Pride. The documentary also highlights the rise of bluegrass music under artists including Bill Monroe, as well as the influential Nashville recordings of artists including Bob Dylan and The Byrds. From there, the documentary explores the rise of singer-songwriter Dolly Parton, who found success in and beyond Nashville, and explores the Outlaw movement with artists including Waylon Jennings and Willie Nelson, as well as the “New Traditionalist” movement in the 1980s, spearheaded by artists like The Judds, Randy Travis and George Strait. Finally, the documentary ends with the rise of Garth Brooks in the 1990s, followed by Johnny Cash’s late-career resurgence.

The eight-part, 16-hour documentary highlights the artists and stories that have created country music, and features interviews with over 80 artists.