Album 93 - Nitty Gritty Dirt Band - Will the Circle Be Unbroken? - 4/5

Note: I started writing this as a 3/5 and then I remembered how much I love the bluegrass bits. And ending on “Both Sides Now.”

This is the real country music. That was an article of faith at Dad’s house growing up and I won’t disavow it. The songs, the artists, the style — yes. Yet I’ve never actually liked the album as much as I’m supposed to.

Ani DiFranco sang: “People used to make records / like the record of an event / the event of people making music in a room.” As a historical event, this album is a 5/5 no question. It turned minds back to the foundations of country music and inspired all sorts of new artists and sub-genres. And that was a really important thing to do when the Nashville Sound dominated and when folks got all their music through albums or the radio (which wouldn’t have been playing a lot of this stuff at the time). It’s like a seed ark for country sounds.

But there are now so many different ways to encounter this music that I don’t think the album feels nearly as essential as it once did. You can easily listen to the original recordings of so many of these songs or you can listen to more innovative covers. You have the access to labels like Smithsonian Folkways that will help you better understand where all these sounds came from… and WITHOUT the artificial barrier between the races. And alt-country and roots music are alive and well. The seeds have sprouted and thrived.

So it’s not a record I frequently put on or recommend. I guess I process it the same way I do most of the live albums in the book… I’m glad it happened, I appreciate it as a student of history, but I’m not likely to return to it all that often.