To Dixie, by Way of California
Going Southern with the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band
To “Northern” ears like mine, Mother Maybelle Carter’s got a drawl that’s almost inscrutable, and when Doc Watson and Merle Travis talk to one another, I have to shut out the rest of the world in order to understand a word they’re saying. When they start playing and singing, it’s a different story.
Strumming guitars and twanging banjos fill my head with sound, and I can feel the washtub bass deep in my gut. Even their singing speaks to me in a way I don’t think spoken word can.
This idea, that music can somehow communicate the incommunicable, is nothing new. People have been preaching the gospel of music’s ability to overcome and transcend, the limitations of words for centuries. Heinrich Heine, a German-Jew and literary type of the 19th Century, once wrote, “Where words leave off, music begins.” Though a long-dead German man may seem to bear no connection with bluegrass, for me the two are surprisingly entwined.
“The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”
As someone outside of it, I had long seen the South as an unfathomable part of this country. In my mind, the South was a vine-like knot of contradictions, one I was not keen to hack through, let alone untangle. Call it an excuse, but I don’t think this unwillingness to examine the South with anything finer than the naked eye is unique, nor do I think it’s simply another manifestation of Northern derision toward the South. Willful ignorance is just the easiest way of coping with the South’s tangled past, and in the South the past plays a role in the present. As the unofficial spokesman of the South, William Faulkner, wrote, “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”
If one thing’s for certain, the past isn’t hard to come by in the South. Go to a town in Georgia, Alabama, or Mississippi, and you’re bound to find at least one monument dedicated to a Confederate solider or general, and if you happen to be in Virginia, that general will be General Lee himself — no, not that one.
Robert E. Lee serves well as not only a symbol of the persistence of the past in the Southern present but also of its many contradictions. To some, Lee remains a demigod, the model soldier fighting for the Lost Cause. To others, by his participation in the Confederacy, Lee has become a symbol of a past marred by racism in its various ugly forms—slavery, Jim Crow, segregation— and his continued memorialization is troubling proof of the institutionalized racism that persists today.
Robert E. Lee was not a hero, not a villain, but a man with conflicting values. In some ways, Lee’s conflict reflects the contradictions of the South. On one hand, it was Lee who decried that “slavery as an institution, is a moral and political evil in any country.” Yet, it was the same man who owned slaves and led an army defending the institution of slavery in the South. As Faulkner wrote, in order to begin to understand the South, much like understanding Lee, one must not forget “the problems of the human heart in conflict with itself.” That’s to say, if you want to decipher, you have to learn a language of gray areas. But what sort of language is that?
“Come and listen to my story, if you will, I’m gonna tell
About a gang of fellers from down at Nashville.”
Music is that language. A few weeks ago, I was in a record store called Sidetracks—you know, because it’s beside the railroad tracks and “tracks” are on records—browsing without much of a plan to purchase. While thumbing through the records, one cover in particular caught my eye. Staring at me from the record rack was a Civil-War-looking officer, flanked by the Stars and Stripes on one side and the Stars and Bars on the other. I picked the album up, less interested in buying it than in examining it as historical artifact, when the owner of the store, Cal Glattfelder Jr., called out from across the room, “oh, that’s a great one, even if you don’t think you like Bluegrass.”
I didn’t think I liked Bluegrass, but Cal had never led me astray before, so not only did I buy an album that day, but I bought one loudly adorned with the symbols of the Old South, an album called Will the Circle be Unbroken.
To those with ears accustomed to Southern music, Will the Circle be Unbroken is convincingly Southern. Familiar Southern voices—Roy Acuff, Jimmy Martin, Maybelle Carter, Earl Scruggs, and Doc Watson—sing familiar Southern songs accompanied by familiar Southern instruments: steel guitars, banjos, washtub basses, and washboards. But, sounds can deceive. As a matter of fact, the story of Circle begins not in the Capital of Southern Music—Nashville, Tennessee—but thousands of miles to the west, in the surfers’ paradise of Long Beach, California.
There, the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band, “a bunch of long-haired West Coast boys” as Roy Acuff called them, had found themselves a good deal of fame and success by adopting a Country sound in their Rock music. In 1971, their song “Mr. Bojangles” had reached the Top 10. But, in spite of its ostensible Country influence, “Mr. Bojangles” sounded about as authentically country as the Beatles’ Country-Western-styled “Rocky Raccoon.” Try as they might, it seemed the Dirt Band could not learn the musical language they wanted to.
Meanwhile, back in the South, the generation of musicians who had originally created that Bluegrass, Country sound, which the Dirt Band was trying to riff on, were being put out to pasture by Nashville’s musical establishment. Older musicians like Doc Watson (born in 1923), Mother Maybelle Carter (born in 1909), and Earl Scruggs (born in 1924) found it hard to compete with the commercial success of the younger generation of musicians, like Glen Campbell and Donna Fargo, who had adapted the popular sounds of Rock and Pop music into their recordings. In the 1970s, the Southern music scene, like the South, was changing.
It was in that world and those times that the idea for Will the Circle be Unbroken came about. In 1971, at an impromptu jam session in Boulder, Colorado between the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band and Earl Scruggs, Jeff Hanna of the Dirt Band asked Earl what he thought about collaborating on an album. Earl told Jeff he was on board, and when he set off back to Nashville he began to recruit a who’s-who list of Southern musical stars, who, once high, had since started to fall.
Later that year, in August, the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band flew to Nashville to begin recording at Woodland Studio. There “the long-haired West Coast boys” of the Dirt Band—Jeff Hanna, Bruce Kunke, Ralph Barr, Les Thompson, Jimmie Fadden, and John McEuen—met many of their more down-home heroes for the first time. Although they came from different generations and different worlds, the chemistry was undeniably good, like a family reunion where city-dwelling grandchildren go to the country to visit their rocking-chair-bound grandparents. Fortunately for us, this reunion was recorded on vinyl.
Besides the music itself, which is good, I mean really good, as authentic as it is approachable, one of the best parts of the recording is the studio chatter and dialogue accompanying it. The conversations give the listener a sense of the characters singing the songs. Roy Acuff, like a crotchety-but-wise grandpa, shares his recording studio credo with the young’ns in the Dirt Band, “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.” Doc Watson tells it like it is to his fellow musicians with some homespun advice “that’s a horse’s foot in the gravel, man,—that ain’t a train—running through a ford in a creek.” Doc Watson and Merle Travis talk, like two good, old friends who haven’t seen each other in years. “I named my son for you… I figure that good guitar pick’n might rub off on him,” Doc tells Merle. “Look who’s talk’n,” Merle responds. The chatter draws you in and makes you appreciate the music all the more, because you know real people with real stories are playing it. You know how happy those people are to be sharing their stories.
Will the Circle be Unbroken is a long album with a lot of good songs. Some, like “Foggy Mountain Breakdown” are purely instrumental numbers, with washboards clacking beneath banjos, fiddles, and harmonicas that somehow sound like Southern voices singing. Songs like “Foggy Mountain” are so authentic, they sound like they were recorded on the front porch of someone’s home. The songs that do have vocals combine simple, sincere lyrics with warm, earthy voices that can raise listeners to the heights of joy or plunge them into the depths of sadness. When Merle Travis sings “Dark as a Dungeon” with his soft, tenor voice, it’s hard not to be transported to the grim, coal-mining world he sings of:
“Like a fiend with his dope and a drunkard his wine,
A man will have lust for the lure of the mine.
I hope when I’m gone, and the ages shall roll,
My body will blacken and turn into coal,
Then I’ll look from the door of my heavenly home,
And I’ll pity the man who’s diggin’ my bones…”
The purpose of the album, if there is one (and I do think there is), becomes clear in the title track. A cover of an old Southern hymn by A.P. Carter, this track takes on a moving call-and-response form. Mother Maybelle Carter sings the first verse:
“I was standing by the window
On one cold and cloudy day
When I saw the hearse come rolling
For to carry my mother away.”
In the chorus, everyone responds together, like a church choir:
“Will the circle be unbroken,
Bye and bye, Lord, bye and bye?
There’s a better home awaiting
In the sky, Lord, in the sky.”
Jimmy Martin takes the next verse:
“I said to the undertaker,
Undertaker, please drive slow,
For this lady you are carrying,
Lord, I hate to see her go.”
Again, everyone responds:
“Will the circle be unbroken,
Bye and bye, Lord, bye and bye?
There’s a better home awaiting
In the sky, Lord, in the sky.”
Roy Acuff takes the song’s final verse:
“Oh, I followed close behind her,
Tried to hold up and be brave,
But I could not hide my sorrow
When they laid her in the grave.”
When the last chorus comes around and the choir-like ensemble asks in song, “Will the circle be unbroken,” you can’t help but feel it in your heart. You too want to know. The subtitle on the album offers us an answer: “Music forms a new circle.” The past might be full of broken circles, and the past might never leave us, but still new circles can be formed. This is the power of music.
You can’t become a Southerner through Southern music. Being Southern requires roots that reach deep into a troubled past. But you can begin to understand that world by listening to its music, which transmits the feelings of the South better than any words could. The songs of the South have been sung by many voices, and those voices are singing the same songs, but they’ve all experienced different Souths. You can get to Dixie by way of California.
