DIRTHEADS ! - NITTY GRITTY DIRT BAND is what it's all about.

Down to the Nitty Gritty
Home to the country.

By Michael Long - December 20, 2002

With its mixture of traditional styles and non-traditional musicians, the release of Will The Circle Be Unbroken Vol. III is a reminder that the history of country music occasions a few surprises. In particular, one would not have expected that a country-rock band formed in the detritus of '60s country music would leave a legacy, much less a legacy worth remembering, even less one that continues to grow and thrive. Yet that is just the legacy of the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band (NGDB), a group of ultra-sharp country-oriented musicians who, one day in 1972, decided to pay homage to their favorite acoustic and bluegrass musicians by persuading them to play with the band in the landmark recording "Will The Circle Be Unbroken."

The record was sorely needed and has been greatly appreciated in the intervening years, as it collected performances from Mother Maybelle Carter, Earl Scruggs, Doc Watson, Roy Acuff, and many others, all founders of the church of traditional country music. The sessions represented a passing of the torch from founders to a new generation of recording artists. Such music does not generally sell well with mainstream audiences (thought why not is a mystery); to keep this or any other part of American music history alive, it was vital to find young people who loved the form enough to carry it on. Not only did the Dirt Band take up the music, they also expanded on it and contributed to its living on, ultimately growing the canon to include the expressions of later generations, and creating new sounds that both respect and grow tradition. In that same vein, the album also exposed the music to others who would eventually find their own musical inspiration in the dobro and the fiddle, and in primitive Lyrics cast over stellar musicianship.

In 1989, as folk-country entered a minor renaissance, NGDB followed up with a second volume, this time focusing less on recording the voices of the aging masters and more on introducing genre performers of that day to a wider audience. This year, the band has released a third volume, bringing in more musicians from an even broader range than the second record, and hitching a ride on the new surge for "old-timey" music spawned by the evergreen-bestseller soundtrack to O Brother, Where Art Thou?

Simply put, it's a great set. The first volume was history, but volumes I and II are history in the making. Del McCoury, arguably the greatest bluegrass musician alive, soars in "Take Me In Your Lifeboat," kicking off the package. Iris DeMent also delivers, with her composition "Mama's Opry." Among the most memorable cuts on the record is NGDB's own delicate performance and arrangement of Gary Scruggs's reminiscence of hardship, "The Lowlands."

There are clinkers here and there. "Goodnight, Irene" performed by Tom Petty and Willie Nelson feels out of place — Willie Nelson long ago reduced himself from a serious musician and songwriter to a cultural artifact; here, he delivers a disinterested reading that sounds obligatory at best. Similarly, Taj Mahal's "Fishin' Blues" with Vassar Clemens seems out of the spirit of the project, and feels almost like a novelty song compared to the earnest offerings on the rest of the two-disc set.

The first disc closes with a bittersweet moment, Johnny Cash's "Tears In The Holston River," in memory of Maybelle and Sara Carter. Cash's once vigorous and full voice is uncertain here, and not yet thin but certainly thinning; it is difficult to hear such a vital instrument begin to fade. For a better memory of the great Johnny Cash, the kickoff of Vol. II of the series, with Cash singing "Life's Mountain Railway," is a great place to turn — and as good a reason as any to own the record, which offers other classics such as John Prine's "Grandpa Was A Carpenter," Bob Dylan's "You Ain't Going Nowhere" covered by the song's subject, ex-Byrd Roger McGuinn, and a fierce, fast bluegrass treatment of "The Valley Road" with Bruce Hornsby.

Fortunately, the pure experience of Johnny Cash is also coming available once more from Columbia Records, which is celebrating 70 years of The Man in Black with the reissue of his catalog, many titles from which have not been commercially available for years. From 1969, Johnny Cash At Madison Square Garden, previously unreleased, is a greatest hits package recorded before an appreciative audience. Memorable moment: early in the show, Cash refers to the war in Vietnam, which was in full bloody swing at that moment. The man who wrote "I Walk The Line" walks a fascinating line himself. He mentions that he and his wife June had been playing for soldiers near Saigon, and that a reporter had said to him, "That makes you a hawk." Cash replied that he wasn't a hawk, but that after seeing all the injured boys, he might be "a dove with claws." The audience cheered until Cash started singing again.

Three other Cash discs are out now as well: Johnny Cash Sings The Ballads of The True West; Songs of Our Soul; and Silver. The records feature, respectively, cowboy songs, folk tunes, and compositions that reflected the landscape of country music just after the Outlaw phase and just before the Urban Cowboy craze began. The quality of the work varies; classics such as "Five Feet High and Rising" never age, while many of the other tunes carry no more than the gravity of the radio demands of the time. Still, even with the occasionally cluttered arrangements and overdone background vocals so common to various eras, Cash's voice makes every song worth hearing. These recordings, cleaned up nicely for reissue, are showcases for Cash's rumbling bass and expressive, direct baritone. He's the sort of man who could sing scales and still let you know what he was feeling, and he is a true treasure in American music and popular culture itself.