This is an excerpt from the print edition of Dirty Linen Magazine #99 (April / May 2002). The magazine is available on newsstands and by subscription.

"Music is very, very, very important to Ken Burns," said multi-instrumentalist Bobby Horton. Horton should know: Working out of his home studio in a spare bedroom of his Alabama home, he contributed 11 tracks for award-winning filmmaker Burns' latest project, Mark Twain, and he has collaborated with the creator of The Civil War, Baseball, and Lewis and Clark for more than a decade. Along with pianist Jacqueline Schwab, another longtime Burns collaborator, Horton created music that, Burns said, formed the heartbeat ("the emotional metronome," in his words) of the film. "He likes to let the music carry — or create — the emotion of a scene," Horton explained.

Schwab and Horton work at different ends of the country — she's in New England — and in very different ways with the director while he's creating a soundtrack. But Schwab agreed with Horton's assessment. Burns and Schwab schedule a day to meet at a studio in Vermont, and "when we get to the studio, Ken sits by the piano and talks with me about the scenes he wants to use the themes for," Schwab explained. "Sometimes he'll use a theme many times during the film in many different ways. So we'll go through it scene by scene, sometimes in an organized way and sometimes free-form, and sometimes we'll come up with a piece neither of us has thought of, and many times he will want different time signatures, or different registers on the piano for each one. So I think he uses me as an improviser. "

The music on the Mark Twain soundtrack is a combination of songs from Twain's own lifetime (1835-1910) and modern compositions that capture the spirit and emotion of the era. Schwab and Horton created the majority of the cuts used during the four-hour film, and Fiddlin' Johnny, Ed Gerhard, Peter Ostroushko, and Al Petteway also contribute. Selections range from "Sweet Betsy from Pike" and "Hard Times" to "Rosin the Bow," "Maple Leaf Rag," and "How Can I Keep from Singing?" This diversity originally surprised Horton. "When I was first called to send in demos, they just told me it was a film about Mark Twain," he recalled, "and so I thought, Mark Twain, riverboats, and that's what I sent. They called back and said, 'Maybe we'd better send you a script.' I didn't realize that Twain was on the river for really only a brief part of his life."