The Nitty Gritty Dirt Band played the last concert of their Farewell Tour on Thursday night in Denver. Sixty years later, pushing 80 years old, they’ve decided to sell the tour bus. It sounds like they are not giving up music, just the nomadic life. We do have a need to call some place “home” and settle there when our roaming days are done. “Sit. Rest a spell.”
Part of me wishes they would keep the name alive. Maybe it’s just because I’m a fan boy, but “The Nitty Gritty Dirt Band” has come to mean more than the four, five or six musicians who play the music at any given time. The Glenn Miller Orchestra is still touring, the Lovin’ Spoonful plans to play Green Bay next week, etc. — if they are true to the sound, why not? I would not be offended if Jaime Hanna and Ross Holmes, the “young’uns” in the current lineup, maintained the name.
I hope someone captured the night with a worthy recording. I do see a camera guy or two wandering the stage in the YouTube videos that have emerged from Thursday night. Or maybe the memory is enough — scattered around the universe are people who were there in 1966 when a bunch of kids took a stage in California and started to play some old-time music, but that first show itself is tucked away in their hearts.
The group probably thought “The Nitty Gritty Dirt Band” was an appropriately goofy name for those silly old songs, and maybe they started out making fun of songs like “I Wish I Could Shimmy Like My Sister Kate,” but somewhere along the line they began to respect the music — or maybe they respected it all along.
I know they taught generations to respect the music, especially through their legendary Will The Circle Be Unbroken project that celebrated traditional country, or bluegrass, or Americana, whatever you want to call it. They have always found amazing songs and amazing songwriters — for example, Uncle Charlie and His Dog Teddy in 1970 features four songs by a young man named Kenny Loggins, who went on to make a bit of a name for himself.
They set out to honor the legends of the genre and grew to become legends themselves. I’ve attended more concerts by the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band than any other artist, and they have not just aged gracefully, they get better all the time.
You never know, when you first turn your head and pay attention, where something might lead. Back in 1967 I heard a song called “Buy For Me the Rain” coming out of a transistor radio, and something connected and made me listen. Nearly 60 darn years later, they still have my attention, an unbroken circle.
