20 Country Music Documentaries That Tell a Great Story

On July 5, the Country Music Association releases its first feature-length film, CMA Fest: 50 Years of Fan Fair. The documentary, available on Hulu, offers the stories behind the festival’s five-decades of connecting fans and artists, and along the way building the signature country music festival’s ever-strengthening global impact. These stories are told through the eyes of multiple generations of artists, as well as key music industry members, including the CMA CEO Sarah Trahern.

CMA Fest: 50 Years of Fan Fair looks into the festival’s beginnings as Fan Fair in 1972, when it drew 5,000 fans to Nashville’s Municipal Auditorium, and chronicles the festival’s evolution into a festival that now draws more than 80,000 fans a day across four days, with attendees from not only every U.S. state, but also nearly 40 countries. The 75-minute doc features interviews with an array of artists, including Bill Anderson (who has attended nearly every Fan Fair/CMA Fest since in 1972), Dierks Bentley, Miranda Lambert, Frankie Staton, Lainey Wilson, Carrie Underwood, Vince Gill, Wynonna Judd, Sawyer Brown’s Mark Miller, Dolly Parton and Jeannie Seely.

As the past several years have become what some would consider a “golden age” for music documentaries in general — with a plethora of documentaries on Whitney Houston, Lady Gaga, P!nk, Britney Spears, Shania Twain, Joan Jett, music mogul Clive Davis, producer David Foster and multi-hyphenate Quincy Jones, just to name a handful — we look at a non-comprehensive list of 20 additional country music-centered documentaries.

These documentaries span from multi-part, history-encompassing docs, as well as documentaries that tell the stories of the industry that helps bring the music to the masses, and documentaries that center on the stories of individual artists ranging from Luke Bryan and Jelly Roll to Guy Clark, DeFord Bailey and Linda Ronstadt. Check out our list below.