Country Music

“Country music is a different way to look at who we are as people and what our shared history is," says Dayton Duncan, the writer and producer of Ken Burns's upcoming eight-part Country Music documentary series. "It is uniquely American in its origin."

Chicago is well-known for music: electric blues, gospel, jazz, house. For a couple decades, it was also home to one of the United States' most popular country music radio shows, a program that launched the careers of stars and may have inspired the Grand Ole Opry.

He has already explored the history of jazz, and now Ken Burns turns his lens towards America's other great homegrown music in an eight-part, sixteen-hour documentary series coming this fall that explores country's history and people in Burns's trademark exhaustive manner.