Site Presented By
Saturday, Jul 11, 2009
Thirty years before "O Brother, Where Art Thou?" the scruffy hippies of the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band persuaded skeptical country legends to join them in the studio -- and created bluegrass' greatest moment.
May 6, 2002 | In 1972, there was nothing on the planet as unhip as country music.
Trippy artists such as the Grateful Dead were "Truckin'" to banjos in California, but the music of the South, by the South and for the South was about maintaining the status quo -- with shotgun authority. Country music stars loved God, Mama, the flag and pork sausage. They were pro-Nixon and pro-war. As Merle Haggard reminded us, they didn't smoke marijuana in Muskogee or take their trips on LSD. Country fans were equally conservative, protectors of a Waltons version of America invented during the Depression and cemented in the paranoia and prosperity of the Cold War. Southern children were supposed to mind their parents, dress nice for church, and go to work at Daddy's car dealership when they graduated from high school.
Like arrogant Custers, most Nashville music execs were oblivious to anything that was happening on the mammoth rock scene just over the generational horizon. In reality, lots of Southern teenagers and college students were smoking dope in the back of the family's Impala on Saturday night, then spraying it down with Lysol so the smell wouldn't be there on the trip to Sunday school the next morning. But the good ol' boys who ran Music Row adjusted their white belts and dismissed the counterculture as some kind of evil beast seducing America's youth to an altar call of sex, drugs and (even worse) long hair. The Nashville establishment was recording tunes such as Donna Fargo's "Happiest Girl in the Whole U.S.A.": "Shine on me sunshine/ Walk with me world/ It's a zippy-dee doodah day."
That's why "Will the Circle Be Unbroken" was so utterly weird when it arrived in music stores that October. It's also why, on its rerelease 30 years later, it remains one of country music's most richly authentic and significant albums.
Lined up on display racks next to LPs with hippie-mystic covers, such as "Led Zeppelin IV" or the Moody Blues' bombastic "Days of Future Past," the three-record set looked like something off the wall of a Cracker Barrel restaurant. A stiff portrait of a Civil War officer stared out from the front, surrounded by battle flags and artists' names scrawled out in beautiful 19th-century penmanship. The album was officially by the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band, a shaggy group of West Coast musicians who had a Top 10 pop hit in 1971 with the sentimental vaudeville ballad "Mr. Bojangles." The rest of the acts on the album were people most baby boomers outside the South had never heard of: wailing mountain singer Roy Acuff, Mother Maybelle Carter (of the legendary Carter family), banjo innovator Earl Scruggs, guitarists Doc Watson and Merle Travis, and bluegrass king Jimmy Martin. Below the Mason-Dixon line, the musicians were known, but mostly considered old geezers by young people trying desperately to escape the Saturday-afternoon dreariness of "The Porter Wagoner Show" for something cool, like "Where the Action Is."
By 1972, these salt-of-the-earth artists had largely been edited out of the commercial country music scene. To a Southern population trying desperately to climb its way from the outhouse into kitchens lined with new appliances, they were uncomfortable reminders of a not-so-distant hillbilly past. Unsophisticated. Tacky. Too hick. The arrival of "Circle," and its eclectic collection of original bluegrass artists -- the folks who actually invented much of the genre -- was like having Cousin Woodrow show up for dinner and stuff his napkin under his collar. Music Row looked askance. Radio didn't touch it.
What the Dirt Band knew (and we were soon to learn) was that the elder acts on "Will the Circle Be Unbroken" were our forgotten birthright, the authenticity the youth culture seemed to be so desperately seeking at the time. With their Brylcreem hair, short-sleeved dress shirts and ties, these traditional music icons were as back-to-the-garden as granola and cotton skirts made in India.
As a result, "Circle" became bluegrass music's first million-selling album. In an era where more people knew what patchouli smelled like than a smokehouse, it turned out to be a watershed moment for country music as thousands of suburban teenagers and college students stacked the three records on their turntables and were converted to bluegrass. As "O Brother, Where Art Thou?" would do 30 years later, it introduced a new generation to the genre.
