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The Nitty Gritty Dirt Band was already making waves in the newly established country rock genre during the 1960s when they decided to record an homage to the country legends of the 1930s and 1940s.
It was a risk at a time when the music industry was rapidly changing. And it paid off.
The first album, “Will the Circle Be Unbroken, Volume One,” would later earn the band a Grammy nod, and its second volume would go on to win three Grammy Awards and the Country Music Association Awards Album of the Year.
More than four decades later, the band is still touring—and making an unexpected stop at the Westhampton Beach Performing Arts Center on Saturday night, a departure from their primarily western- and southern-bound routes—outlasting generational changes in the country music world despite all odds.
In 1966, Jeff Hanna and Bruce Kunkel, both singers and guitarists, founded the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band out of Long Beach, California, as a way to avoid traditional jobs, they happily acknowledge. Members have come and gone over the years, changing at least a dozen times, eventually settling into a core of four: multi-instrumentalist John McEuen, who plays banjo, fiddle, guitar and mandolin; drummer Jimmie Fadden; keyboardist Bob Carpenter; and the only original left, Mr. Hanna.
“Most bands that started when we did are long gone,” Mr. Hanna said on Monday during a telephone interview from his home in Nashville, Tennessee. “We love what we do, and this is also how we make our living.”
Originally playing jug band music—using instruments like a washtub bass—and relying solely on acoustics, the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band started off touring California nightclubs and colleges in pinstripe suits and tall hats.
“I guess we’re just lucky ... we really kind of stayed with what we do,” he said of the band’s longevity. “The music that we were playing in 1969 is very closely related to what we’re doing now.”
“Will the Circle Be Unbroken, Volume One” was a collaboration with the original movers in country—including Hank Williams Sr., Merle Travis and Earl Scruggs—alongside the long-haired, 20-somethings of the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band during the “hippie” era.
“We were kids sort of bringing our musical identity into play,” Mr. Hanna said. “In our case, we had the influences of Cajun music and bluegrass to it as well, but in ’69 there weren’t a lot of bands doing what was referred to as country rock, or even California country rock.”
The band helped country music progress into the next era, influencing Jackson Browne, James Taylor and the Eagles. Today, country music has seen a resurgence in the mainstream music industry, with the release of popular crossover party anthems such as “My Kinda Party” by Jason Aldean and Brantley Gilbert’s “Small Town Throwdown.”
“Like any genre of music, there’s stuff that’s great and there’s stuff that is not so great, and any period of music, as well,” according to Mr. Hanna, who is a fan of Keith Urban, Miranda Lambert, and the newest singer and songwriter to make waves, Kacey Musgraves. “I think you gotta find what you’re drawn to. We’ve been fortunate that our fans keep passing their albums down to their kids, so we have these generations of fans now—which is really, really cool for us.”
The Nitty Gritty Dirt Band will play the Westhampton Beach Performing Arts Center on Saturday, August 23, at 8 p.m. Tickets range from $75 to $100. For more information, call (631) 288-1500, or visit whbpac.org.
Maggy Kilroy on Aug 19, 2014