John McEuen on 50 Years of The Circle

John McEuen is a founding member of the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band, the group he formed with his friend Jeff Hanna in Los Angeles in the mid-1960s. The band had several hit singles on the radio in the late 1960s, but in 1972 they made an album in Nashville. They weren’t the first rock band to record there, but they were the first band to make a record that people in the country music community listened to. The album Will The Circle be Unbroken brought the members of this hippie country rock band from Southern California together with some of the stars from the Grand Ole Opry in the 1940s and 1950s. At the time it was a meeting of two very different communities—as unlikely as Richard Nixon and Richard Pryor making a record together. But the “dirty boys,” as Mama Maybelle Carter called them, had a deep love and respect for the music made by their elders, and the resulting album now celebrating its fiftieth anniversary had an impact very few people expected in the early 1970s. More than one person has pointed to it as the beginning of what’s now called Americana music.