In The Vietnam War, the latest documentary project by Ken Burns and Lynn Novick, Burns’ creative use of music remains a trademark of his work.

An article by the Harvard Gazette emphasized this aspect of Burns’ series, noting how “one montage of soldiers’ first arrival in Vietnam was set to Bob Dylan’s ‘A Hard Rain’s a-Gonna Fall,’ while Stephen Stills’ voice singing ‘There’s something happening here, what it is ain’t exactly clear’ from Buffalo Springfield’s ‘For What It’s Worth’ rang out during the Chicago sequence.”

One of the great challenges of incorporating sound into the film was that fact that there was very little work with in the first place. In an interview with Vanity Fair, we learned that most of the footage that Burns, Novick, and their crew had to work with was soundless. The article goes on to state that “to make up for this, they layered certain battle scenes with up to 150 tracks of sound. (As Burns recalled, ‘We went out in the woods with AK-47s and M16s and shot up pumpkins and squash and stuff.’)” And as WHRO has previously mentioned, Vanity Fair also highlighted how the filmmakers additionally “commissioned blipping, pulsing electronic mood music from Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross, which they complemented with more organic contributions from the cellist Yo-Yo Ma and the Silk Road Ensemble,” to help create the musical landscape of the series.

Other music featured in the film was composed by David Cieri and Doug Wamble, both of whom are longtime collaborators with Florentine Films. In addition to the original music, the series features more than 120 popular songs that define the era and actually soundtracked the times, including tracks from The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, Bob Dylan, Jimi Hendrix, Simon & Garfunkel, Janis Joplin, Ben E. King, Phil Ochs, Donovan, Johnny Cash, Barry McGuire, Buffalo Springfield, The Byrds, Otis Redding, Santana, Joni Mitchell, Nina Simone, The Temptations, Booker T. and the M.G.s, Pete Seeger and more.

Producer Sarah Botstein worked closely with record companies and music publishers to license the music. “We have never made a film with such a diverse soundtrack, and everyone in the industry was extremely collaborative,” Botstein said. “Ken, Lynn, and I knew we could not do justice to this complicated subject…without the iconic music from the time. Even now, more than 40 years later, these recordings remain the most evocative popular music of the 20th century, and are the essential complement to the extraordinary music Trent and Atticus and The [Silk Road Ensemble] recorded for the project.”

Listen to a sampling from “The Vietnam War” here:

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