Ken Burns reaches into his front-right jeans pocket to retrieve a small, burnished silver heart, then a coin awarded to learning-disabled students who memorize The Gettysburg Address. Next he pulls out a button from the uniform of a soldier who landed at Normandy on D-Day and, finally, a Minié ball fired from a musket at Gettysburg.

The Emmy Award-winning documentarian travels every day with these four mementos, gifts from fans of his more than 30 films. They represent a tiny fraction of the tokens he has received — reminders of the impact his documentaries, from 1981’s Brooklyn Bridge to 2017’s The Vietnam War, have had on generations of viewers. “The hardest part is [carrying] the abutment to the Brooklyn Bridge,” jokes Dayton Duncan, his longtime collaborator.

For nearly four decades, Burns has been telling the story of America one topic at a time. For the past eight years, he has focused on country music, resulting in — simply and definitively named, like so many of his films — Country Music, a sprawling 16-and-a-half-hour, eight-part, $30 million budget film airing on PBS’ 350 member stations starting Sept. 15. Burns’ team interviewed over 100 people, including Dolly Parton, Loretta Lynn, Garth Brooks, Willie Nelson, Reba McEntire, Rhiannon Giddens and, in one of his last sit-downs, Merle Haggard. (Nearly 20 of Burns’ subjects have since died, making his plan to donate 175 hours of interviews and transcripts to the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum all the more resonant.) [READ MORE]

“The three students from the University of Cambridge, wearing black suits and clutching sheaves of papers, stepped onto the wooden auditorium stage under the warm yellow lights. As members of a storied debate team, they had competed the world over but never in a place like this — a stripped-down hall in a maximum-security prison in Upstate New York that looms among the Catskill Mountains like a medieval castle.” [READ MORE]

Vince Gill was having some trouble with the teleprompter during the taping of Ken Burns’ all-star “Country Music: Live at the Ryman” concert in Nashville on Wednesday night.

“That’s why I didn’t go to college — I suck at reading,” he joked with characteristic self-deprecating humor after flubbing one of his lines. The show was taped for broadcast on PBS stations at a later date.

Fortunately, the Oklahoma native was in peak form doing everything else during an evening that celebrated a type of music that routinely reconnects with its roots and, as Burns put it, “has never been one style.” Throughout an evening that interspersed brief clips of Burns’ upcoming eight-part historical documentary Country Music — premiering September 15th on PBS — with live performances of songs discussed in the documentary, Gill frequently sat in the background with his Telecaster, guiding a band of session pros through tunes that touched on many different styles and eras of country sounds. [READ MORE]

Ken Burns was in his element Wednesday night at Nashville’s Ryman Auditorium.

When the filmmaker took the stage at country music’s mother church, he was greeted with a standing ovation — from a room filled, clearly, with fans of American history, public television, and “Country Music.” [READ MORE]