Featured Musicians: The Nitty Gritty Dirt Band

     Growing up, my dad made it something of a crime to say you liked country music. Given the overabundance of artists like Billy Ray Cyrus, LeAnnn Rhymes, and Clint Black, I can’t say I blame him, but to condemn the genre categorically would mandate, among other tragedies, the loss of the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band, which specialized in building bridges between markedly divergent musical tastes.
     The incredible popularity of their landmark 1974 release Will the Circle Be Unbroken pulled off the unlikely feat of spanning the gulf between Nasvhille and Woodstock. Devotees of Led Zeppelin and Jefferson Airplane found new targets of idolatry in the likes of Hank Williams and the Carter Family, and this at a time when the cultural bases associated with the respective genres had become as polarized as any liberal/conservative divide before and after.
     Indeed, the band became less renowned as a musical unit than an excuse for some of the greatest artists in America to get together and play, a trend that continued with two subsequent volumes of Circle, the first released in 1989, and the second in 2002.
     By virtue of its being the first recording I discovered, Volume III is the album closest to my heart, conjoining the classically diverse talents of Willie Nelson, Taj Mahal, Alison Krauss, Johnny Cash, and Tom Petty, not to mention folk legend and repeat performer Doc Watson, and banjo virtuoso Earl Scruggs.
     Writing in the record jacket for Volume III, music critic Jack Hurst makes an interesting observation:
     “In startling contrast to the period of the first album, though, the post-Sept. 11 era of this new third one is a time of national unity rather than division. The chasm increasingly to be faced now is one of years, those decades and epochs that stretch ever further between country music’s present and a past fading into the mists of history. Yet again, the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band has built a bridge.”
     Needless to say, the unity Mr. Hurst perceived in 2002 would quickly disintegrate, with liberals and conservatives again staking such wildly disparate territories that they’ve created whole cultures of mutual exclusion. It leads me to wonder if perhaps a Volume IV might be in order, one that could prove, as the first volume did, America’s ability to cohabit the grooves of a record.