Nitty Gritty Dirt Band

Will the Circle Be Unbroken (Capitol)

Playing a 7:30 p.m. in-store, Oct. 18 at Tower Records, Opry Mills

In July of 1927, 35-year-old A&R man Ralph Peer rented two upper floors of the Taylor-Christian hat factory on the Tennessee side of Bristol, an Appalachian town straddling the Tennessee-Virginia state line. According to the pundits, what transpired over the next 12 days would give birth to country music as we’ve come to know it. No academic or folklorist, Peer was in fact working under contract to the Victor Talking Machine Company. His assignment was to capture the sounds of folk and mountain music (some of which later became bluegrass once Bill Monroe got hold of it), taking advantage of newfangled, portable recording gear.

Peer had done some “field” recording before; in 1924, he’d recorded Fiddlin’ John Carson in Atlanta. That same year, operatic singer Vernon Dalhart cut a few sides for Victor, including “The Wreck of the Old 97,” which, backed with “The Prisoner’s Song,” went on to become the first “country” million-seller. Clearly, there was an audience for this hillbilly stuff, and the prospect of exploiting it further prompted Victor to send Peer to Bristol in hopes that lightning would strike again.

The ads Peer placed in the local papers spurred little response, but when a journalist interviewed Ernest “Pop” Stoneman in the studio and reported that the carpenter-autoharpist was earning a whopping $100 a day for his recordings, Bristol was suddenly teeming with aspiring musicians. Working night and day alongside his wife and assistants, Peer churned out dozens of heavy wax cylinders, including records by Jimmie Rodgers, The Carter Family and, of course, Stoneman, the patriarch of The Stoneman Family.

Fast forward to 1971, when a gang of longhaired California musicians called The Nitty Gritty Dirt Band convened in a recording studio in conservative Nashville. Their mission—just as ballsy as Peer’s 44 years earlier—was to create an album of bluegrass and country standards working with the giants of those genres. What made this brainstorm all the more audacious was the fact that the Dirt Band were best known in pop circles, largely for their hit rendition of Jerry Jeff Walker’s “Mr. Bojangles,” and that this was a time when even country-obsessed stoners like Gram Parsons were likely to be sniffed at as “dirty hippies” by Opry stalwarts.

Somehow the plan worked. When Will the Circle Be Unbroken, a three-LP set brimming with notes and photos, came out in 1972, it achieved classic status almost instantly. In 1989, the Dirt Band, proving again that in America every success begets a franchise, released Circle, Vol. II, and now, 13 years later, Circle, Vol. III is in stores. Each successive collection has faithfully followed the template established 30 years ago when the Dirt Band’s fans were introduced to the electrifying banjo runs of Earl Scruggs, the quicksilver picking of guitarists Merle Travis and Doc Watson, Vassar Clements’ soulful fiddle and Pete “Bashful Brother Oswald” Kirby’s spiraling Dobro.

The vocal offerings on that first volume were just as captivating, including the homely strains of Mother Maybelle Carter, Jimmy Martin’s feisty tenor and Roy Acuff’s mournful melodrama. Included among the album’s 38 numbers were “Wildwood Flower,” “Wabash Cannonball,” “Dark As a Dungeon,” “Nine Pound Hammer” and, of course, the title track, sung by a chorus of dozens—standards that many people recognize today because of the efforts of the Dirt Band and their new friends. Conversely, country and bluegrass loyalists learned, to their surprise, that these scraggly Californians were stellar musicians who treated this tradition-steeped music, and its elders, with respect bordering on reverence.

The lineup on Circle, Vol. II was, naturally, different from that of its predecessor. Mother Maybelle had passed on, as had bass player Junior Huskey (though his son Roy Jr. proved an apt replacement). Acuff, three years from his death and sounding tired, appeared on only one verse of the title track (again rendered by all). There were fewer old-time songs, although traditional-sounding material from the likes of John Prine, Bob Dylan and Bruce Hornsby seemed to ensure that the “circle” would remain intact, if flexibly so.

Now, with the release of Will the Circle Be Unbroken, Vol. III, we find Iris Dement, Taj Mahal, Vince Gill, Alison Krauss and Tom Petty among those joining the fold. Acuff is gone. Johnny Cash appears, a mere ghost of his former oaken sturdiness, while his wife June—the most direct link to the original Carter Family that recorded for Peer—sounds even more ravaged by time. But Jimmy Martin still attacks every song like it deserves a good whuppin’, and Doc Watson still picks and sings as though impervious to the fleeting decades. Scruggs plays with his usual fire and finesse, and Emmylou Harris, despite a tonal scratchiness at times, still sings as though surrounded by a silvery aura.

This time around, standard fiddle tunes meld with originals by Gill, Marcus Hummon and Bob McDill. Doubtless, purists will charge that the pristine lineage leading from the Bristol recordings through the Nashville sessions of ’71 has been polluted by these contemporary, MTV-era contributions. It’s worth remembering, though, that Peer, dismayed at Jimmie Rodgers’ penchant for contemporary pop songs, had to urge the Blue Yodeler to reach further back to find the kind of rootsy material he was after. (Even “Lovesick Blues,” a hit for both Rodgers and Hank Williams, began life as a pop creation.) For every folk song that comes to us from the bogs of Ireland, the cotton fields of slavery or the Protestant hymnals of days gone by, we find another borrowed from minstrel shows, the marching band repertory and the trunks of Tin Pan Alley. What matters isn’t so much the origins of the sound as the sound itself—the compelling symphony of wood, wire and human voice—and the spirit that ignites it.

Emmylou Harris’ words, captured on an interlude from Circle, Vol. II back in ’89, ring even truer in these technology-obsessed times: “Years ago, I had the experience of sitting around in a living room with a bunch of people and singing and playing, and it was like a spiritual experience,” she said. “It was wonderful, and I decided then that that’s what I wanted to do with my life, was to play music. In the making of records, I think over the years we’ve all gotten a little too technical, a little too hung up on getting things perfect. And we’ve lost the 'living room,’ the living room has gone out of the music. But today I feel like we got it back.”

Indeed, and listening to Will the Circle Be Unbroken, Vol. III places us in that living room once again.