They shortened it for a while to just The Dirt Band and then returned to Nitty Gritty Dirt Band. June Carter Cash simply referred to them as "them dirty boys."  Then, she said, "If you ever consider it, John and I would love to take part in it."

"It" was the second "Will The Circle Be Unbroken" album, a reunion of sorts between a bunch of Southern California hippies and the senior cadre of the Grand Ole Opry. It turned Jeff Hanna around.  He's the band founder/lead guitarist and vocalist, and originally he didn't want to do a follow-up to the 1972 defining "Circle" album for the group.
In a phone interview, he explains, "It was also the endorsement of the Carters and the Cashes. It no longer looked like a crass commercial venture to us.  "I think if you're a musician, you gotta be allowed to stretch a little bit," continues Hanna, "and certainly what we did on the 'Circle' records will probably go on our permanent record as the most important thing that we've done.  "The first (of three, so far) 'Circle' record (will be considered 'important' to both the mass public and academicians both, because in addition to being a really great record, I think it was a generation gap. It sort of crossed generations. There's a cross-generation, cross-cultural record."

At a time when the late Johnny Cash recorded with avante garde rock producer Rick Ruben and jam band audiences accept Del McCoury in the same breath as The String Cheese Incident, it's hard to imagine a world where "Americana" included statues of plastic eagles landing on waving star spangled banners but didn't include hippie music by "them dirty boys."

By 1972, The Byrds, Buffalo Springfield, The Flying Burrito Brothers and Poco were all mining traditional country music for long haired youngsters, but Merle Haggard was declaring that in his world,they didn't smoke "mary-wannie in Muskogie." And Roy Acuff was not at all sure he wanted to blow his voice out singing with these kids if they hadn't learned the song right.  "We had met with him down at the Acuff-Rose Publishing Company," recalls Hana. "He walked out of there saying, 'Well, I'm not sure I wanna record with these guys. I'm not sure what my fans would think.'

"Here, we looked like The Grateful Dead. So we were doing our sessions with Merle Travis, and he (Acuff) kinda just sneaked in the back door, walked into the control room, and (producer) Bill McEuen played back some of the stuff we'd done with Merle, and he said, 'Well, that ain't nuthin' but country.' He was great. I think it added a lot to that record to have Roy's presence."

The album went platinum and so far has spawned two follow-ups, with such country bedrock artists as Doc Watson, Vassar Clements, Mother Maybelle Carter, Vince Gill, Ricky Skaggs, Willie Nelson, June Carter and Johnny Cash.
The idea sprang from a chance meeting between the group and Earl Scruggs at a Vanderbilt University Nitty Gritty Dirt Band concert in Nashville.

"It turns out that Earl and his sons were fans of the band, the boys for different reasons than Earl. Earl kinda appreciated the bluegrass, and the kids were like fans of the more rockin' stuff. So we started talking about, well, maybe on the next record we could get together and do something in the studio."

It was particularly fascinating for me to talk to Hanna, a Southern California surfer who liked Dave Van Ronk more than he did The Beach Boys. I was hanging out in Harvard Square as a college student at the height of the folk movement while he was making 25-mile jaunts in Daddy's truck to see the Greenbrier Boys, Mississippi John Hurt and the Jim Kweskin Jug Band at The Ash Grove in L.A.

At the time (1965-66), there was a good deal of regional pride in the music scene on both coasts. We in Harvard Square and Greenwich Village thought we owned the ethnic folk scene and that the newly emerging psychedelic West Coast thing was a drugged-out aberration that never would survive the test of time.  Time would prove that "We" were stuck in an academic box and "They" ran away with East Coast influences such as Kweskin and Van Ronk, the uncrowned mayor of Greenwich Village, and developed those influences into sounds that would capture several succeeding generations.

The Nitty Gritty Dirt Band's 38-year-career is loaded with examples of Hanna's open-ended attitude when he says simply, "I don't like one flavor" of music. He took the East Coast folk and Southern Country ethos and expanded on it.
"The East Coast equivalent, The Band, influenced us," he says. "The accordion and mandolin on 'Mr. Bojangles' (The Nitty Gritty Dirt Band's first top-10 hit, in 1970) was a direct rip - a direct lift - from "Old Rockin' Chair" on The Band's second album."

It all started with Hanna's listening to his older brother's Kingston Trio albums and reading about this other world of folk on Vanguard Records' inner-sleeve advertisements for people on the order of Joan Baez and the Greenbrier Boys.
As the Illegitimate Jug Band, Hanna's group had an East and West Coast hit in 1967 with "Buy for Me The Rain," influenced by the Jim Kweskin Jug Band. It never made it to the heartland, because the B side was a cover of Rev. Gary Davis' "Candy Man," which was then considered a drug song.

They toured the East Coast as opening act for The Doors.  "A jug band!  I saw Jimi Hendrix and The Who walking down Bleeker St. in full video-ready regalia, which was pretty amazing," says Hanna. "It was really the kind of stuff people talk about, and they don't believe you. There was Jimi Hendrix in a Sgt. Pepper coat walking down Bleeker St."
Hanna says the group was "a couple of car lengths behind" The Byrds, Poco and The Flying Burrito Brothers as country rockers in the '70s. When they changed their name to The Dirt Band in the '80s, they enjoyed mainstream hits in what we now call Triple-A format with "An American Dream" and "Make A Little Magic."

They have the distinction of being the first American rock act to tour The Soviet Union, back in 1984. They continued to record into the '90s and have a new album, their first for Nashville's progressive Dualtone label, called "Welcome to Woody Creek." The mostly original CD is a pervasively laid-back and positive album with a strong traditional element supplied by banjos, mandolins, fiddles and accordions, in addition to the obligatory guitars and drums.

The themes are all reflective endorsements of old-fashioned love, and their "Deliverance"-on-speed rendition of the Beatles' "Get Back" defines the group's almost 40 years of eclecticism.  "This (CD) was much more of a loose situation," reflects Hanna, "and making music that was more like when we started, when a bunch of guys are sitting around a living room or a porch somewhere playing, although albeit with electric guitars and drums and other stuff that we like that's not necessarily acoustic, but it is, I think, a good balance and blend between those two worlds."

The idea of a band as counter cultural as The Nitty Gritty Dirt Band playing the prestigious Troy Music Hall would have been outrageous in the '70s. I'm reminded of the time I saw The New Riders of the Purple Sage play Proctor's. A stoned-out gaggle of hippies walked out of the theatre after the show squinting into the light, only to face a line at the box office waiting to buy tickets and get barf bags for a midnight horror movie marathon.  How times change.