Ken Burns takes us inside his 16-hour epic 'Country Music,' which he calls, 'as emotionally compelling as any film we’ve made'
Burns has been living in rural New Hampshire since 1979, not long after he finished at Hampshire College. In 1991, flush with the success ofhe bought a rambling Victorian house, which would become the editing hive of his company, Florentine Films. One day this spring, a team there was focused on a six-hour Ernest Hemingway documentary.
The rest of the New Hampshire site, including the 66-year-old filmmaker’s home, is perched on top of a hill about 1.5 miles outside town. Burns’ office is a museum of American history and his own work. He likes to show people around; in a gesture you sense he’s repeated a few times, he hands a visitor an iron manacle, dating to the days of American slavery. “This is the United States also, you know?” says Burns.s secret weapons. He’s something of a genre Zelig.
‘It’s really important people know country music is a hybrid, a creolization that comes out of African and European cultures mixing,” says singer Rhiannon Giddens, an early-American-music scholar who drove that point home earlier this year on a concert program with Burns, Marsalis, Stuart, and the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra. “Also, most importantly, it comes from working-class people mixing.
There’s also the scene where Rosanne Cash, after a backstage disagreement with her dad, describes watching him walk away from her, as he’d done “so many times before,” most notably when he abandoned her and her mother. It’s heartbreaking, but she was willing to go there. “By that time, I trusted [Ken and his team],” Cash says. “And you know, what’s the point of not going there? Truth is powerful.
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