3/25/2023 0 Comments Will the circle be unbroken![]() Around the same time, the Band was recording “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down,” an ode to the Confederacy that was an enormous hit for Joan Baez, just to give you an idea of how pervasive it was. But in the ’70s, there was still quite a bit of Confederate nostalgia infecting the culture, and the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band - a country-rock band from Southern California - was not immune. The album cover is a real period piece, depicting the American and Confederate flags and a picture of an unnamed military officer. Many of the songs are instrumentals, and the musicianship is so stunning that it sounds like bebop from an alternate universe. By contrast, there is a real sense of authenticity to “Circle,” an album of traditional music about God, death and heartbreak, with a backdrop of virtuoso playing by guitarist Doc Watson, banjo player Earl Scruggs and fiddler Vassar Clements. As this Wikipedia article explains, many of these folks’ careers were on the decline, supplanted by the slick Nashville sound that eventually morphed into (God help us) contemporary country music. That led me to check out the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band’s 1972 album “Will the Circle Be Unbroken,” a 38-song compilation starring some of the great bluegrass and old-time country stars of the 1940s, ’50s and ’60s. After I got back home, I started listening to the WAMU internet stream on occasion. But as I was driving around from interview to interview, I started to enjoy what I was listening to. During a long reporting trip to Washington and Baltimore in 2002, I began listening to WAMU, which at that time played a lot of bluegrass - not the sort of thing I normally liked (or so I thought).
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