“Century of Country” Tonight at 8 on The Nashville Network

THE place for history without cobwebs is The Nashville Network, which tonight begins “Century of Country,” a 13-week documentary series, in marvelous form – and voice, thanks to CBS newsman Bob Schieffer’s twangy narration.

Like ABC News’ “The Century,” which this week began a 12-hour lecture to Alphabet Network viewers, “Century of Country” begins in 1927.

To those who know their country music, 1927 is more significant for anevent called “the Big Bang of country music.”

It was the year New York music executive Ralph Peer headed for the hills of Tennessee to record “traditional music.”

He spent two weeks in a makeshift studio in Bristol, Tenn., but it only took two days to capture the seminal sounds of the Carter Trio and Jimmie Rodgers.

The Carter family tree still casts an influential shadow over today’s big-time country music. It seems like everybody either is descended from or married to a Carter.

Johnny’s wife June Carter Cash says Mother Maybelle Carter didn’t know how good she was on the guitar. The Nitty Gritty Dirt Band’s Jeff Hanna shows us how to do “the Carter scratch,” in which the thumb picks out the melody and the fingers strum along.

If the Carters were, as Hanna says, “ground zero” for country music, which would ride the radio waves out of the hills and hollows, Rodgers was its first superstar. In 1933, he died at New York’s Taft Hotel after a day at Coney Island and after an explosive six years in which even a quack doctor hawking goat gland cures for impotence and a waning opera singer would play big roles in country.

Variety dissed “hill-billy” music in those early years, but millions of other people got it.

We suspect that Rand Morrison, who has been senior producer on a number of CBS News magazines and is executive producer of this CBS New Productions jewel polished for CBS Cable’s TNN, is one of them.

If he isn’t, he’s done a terrific and infectious job of faking it.