1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die: 267. Nitty Gritty Dirt Band – Will The Circle Be Unbroken (1972)

I’ve mentioned before that I love a bit of Americana, and this album is an absolute feast. The Nitty Gritty Dirt Band are a Californian country band centred on father and son team Jeff and Jaime Hanna, but on this album they largely play back-seat, being instead the catalytic surface for a collaboration with legendary figures from American folk, country, and bluegrass. 

I’m ashamed to say that I’d never heard of these people before, but when you think of, for example, the fast banjo picking style of bluegrass, these are the people that invented it, players from the Grand Ole Oprey, figures from the Thirties and Forties, whose musical style had fallen out of favour by this stage, and the goal of the project was to bring them to a wider, modern, audience, and to preserve the music for the future. 

Figures like singer Roy Acuff, seventy years old when this album was recorded, or blind guitarist “Doc” Watson, banjo player Earl Scruggs, guitarist Merle Travis, Jimmy “King of Bluegrass” Martin, “Bashful Brother Oswald” Kirby on dobro, “Mother” Maybelle Carter (mother of June Carter and therefore mother-in-law to Johnny Cash) and Vassar Williams on fiddle.

Some of these people have picking styles named after them – Scruggs and Carter for example. Kirby learned the dobro, a resonant guitar, from a Hawaiian called Ray Waikiki, which is a detail too wonderful not to share. True to his nickname, he remains a background feature rather than taking centre stage like most of the rest of the artists take turns doing, but his playing sounds like birdsong embellishments and adds some lovely detail. 

The double album is jammed full of tunes and songs, covering the folk/country gamut of songs about sweethearts, spirituality, the life of the working man, and trains. Lots of trains, especially Side Three which is largely a collection of tunes with titles like Flint Hill Special, Orange Blossom Special, and Wabash Cannonball.

The songs led by Carter, generally written by her husband and part of the repertoire of The Carter Family, tend more towards gospel and spiritual, including the singalong at the end featuring all of the participants, Will The Circle Be Unbroken. Others are “breakdowns”, which instrumentals that usually show off a musician’s skill, such as Clements on Lonesome Fiddle Blues, which seems to have been “borrowed” by Charlie Daniels for The Devil Went Down To Georgia. 

Taken as a whole, you can sometimes get a bit overwhelmed with fast banjo picking, but each track is short, and it’s very addictive. There are captures of between-tracks banter and chatter, lending the whole album the feel of people that love music getting together to celebrate what they do; there’s lots of mutual appreciation going on, it’s really moving in many ways, and what an amazing feat to bring all of these people together. Loved it. 

One caveat though - I bring up Spinal Tap a lot when talking about hard rock/heavy metal albums - this one will evoke memories of another film from the same team, A Mighty Wind.