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Monday, Nov 23, 2009
Recorded live on two tracks at Nashville's Woodland Studios, "Circle" sounds like an intimate picking session on the front porch after supper. It's also as close to the earthy roots of country music as any commercial recording has ever gotten before or since. ("O Brother, Where Art Thou?" only occasionally comes this close).
Producer William McEuen let the tape roll as the members of the Dirt Band chat, swap stories and coax their idols to sing and run their fingers over acoustic instruments with a spontaneous joy and virtuosity that had largely been abandoned by Top 40 country. Fiddles cry. Dobros wail. There's the click-clack sound of finger picks on a washboard. Jaunty banjos race around 37 traditional mountain tunes that breathed new life into ancient melodies: "Tennessee Stud," "Soldier's Joy," "I Saw the Light" and the A.P. Carter song that has become country music's mantra (it's actually carved in stone in the atrium of the new Country Music Hall of Fame & Museum), "Will the Circle Be Unbroken."
In accents as country as a baying hound dog, the veterans casually -- and sometimes skeptically -- chat with the Dirt Band about their craft. "Pick the banjer solid, John. You've picked one for 15 years, ain't ya?," Jimmy Martin says, tossing out a challenge to bushy-haired John McEuen on how to kick off the made-for-clogging opener, "Grand Ole Opry Song."
Acuff, sounding like a crusty church deacon, says, "I believe it's true: Whenever you once decide you're going to record a number, put everything you got into it. So let's do it the first time -- and to hell with the rest of it."
Blind North Carolina flat picker Doc Watson (whose college-circuit career was launched by this album) hears the Dirt Band's Jimmie Fadden saw on a harmonica, then coaches him: "That's a horse's foot in gravel, man, that ain't trains. Runnin' through a fordin' creek." Then you can close your eyes and hear the Tennessee Stud race across the Rio Grande into Mexico, Watson's hands tapping on the hollow guitar as if he were plucking your eardrums.
Throughout the sessions, the Dirt Band -- McEuen, Fadden, Jeff Hanna and Jim Ibbotson -- seem to drink it all in like starstruck students at the foot of Socrates. Perhaps it was their wide-eyed worship that pulled such brilliant performances out of the aging entertainers. Ironically, when the album was recorded, most of the country artists on "Circle" didn't know who the heck the Dirt Band was.
When the group arrived in Nashville in August of 1971, they looked more like a bunch of guys likely to be run out of town in a flashing patrol car. Coming from the California jug-band scene, the group's mellow members wore clothes straight out of a giveaway bag -- nubby flannel shirts, torn jeans, mismatched socks. They sported untamed beards and mustaches, grown in the shaggy anti-establishment mood of the West Coast. In a time when Southerners judged each other by how high hair was piled up on their heads, these guys looked like they hadn't been to a barber since grade school.
So it's no surprise that the conservative country music community thought it a bit sketchy when the Dirt Band made its proposal: Come make an album with us. The father of bluegrass, Bill Monroe, flat out said no way. Acuff called them a bunch of longhaired boys. It seems kind of quaint now, but when the album came out, as much was written about this clash of cultures as the music they made together.
Looking back on the recording, "Circle" has survived the transience of fashion, political views and class distinctions and all that goofy, dated press about hippies and long hair. Many of the legendary stylists featured on the album are dead now (Roy Acuff, Mother Maybelle). The members of the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band are way on the backside of middle age. You're now more likely to see their shaggy 1972 hairstyles on truck drivers than on college kids. And the soundtrack to "O Brother, Where Art Thou?" fueled by a rubber-faced actor (George Clooney) and the fictional Soggy Bottom Boys, has surpassed "Circle" in sales and awards.
Yet when it comes to originality and pure musical craftsmanship, "Will the Circle Be Unbroken" is every bit as vibrant as when it was recorded in 1971. It leaps across space and time to seduce even the most urbane listener to enjoy heartfelt mountain music created in the souls of ordinary folks. It's country music at its best: intimate, uncontrived and joyous. Hand me that washboard, will you, son?
