David McCullough

The voice arrives over a photograph. A dust storm, a soup kitchen, a bridge half built, and then a level baritone telling us, without any hurry, what year it is and what it cost. David McCullough narrated documentaries from 1981, when Ken Burns hired him for Brooklyn Bridge, and the sound of him became a kind of guarantee. Whatever followed would be true, and it would be told in order.

He was a historian before he was a narrator, and it shows. He wrote and edited at magazines, published The Johnstown Flood in 1968, and from 1970 wrote history full time, so by the time Burns came calling he had spent a decade working out what a plain sentence about the past should sound like. He hosted American Experience from 1988 to 1999 and narrated The Civil War in 1990, and over six films with Burns the voice and the method fused. Burns's films rest on still images, and they need someone to hold the frame while the words do the work. McCullough held it.

What he did was refuse to perform. He did not raise his voice for a battle or drop it for a death; he read the facts as if the facts were enough, and over archive footage they usually were. The one feature we have reviewed him in shows the limit. In Gary Ross's Seabiscuit (2003) he narrates over black-and-white pictures of dust storms and soup kitchens, and every time the film gathers speed it cuts back to him to tell us the country needed something to believe in. We had understood, and we sat there willing the horse to run, and it could not, because the history lesson had the floor. The fault is Ross's, not his. The voice does exactly what it always did; it is simply the wrong instrument for a drama that has actors to carry the meaning.

He once said he loved to tell a story, and particularly a true one, and that is the whole of it. Seek him out where the pictures cannot speak for themselves. In a documentary he is the steadiest thing on the screen. In a feature he is the reason it keeps stopping.