For nearly six decades, the three-time GRAMMY® Award-winning Nitty Gritty Dirt Band has entertained
audiences with their top-shelf musicianship and timeless hits. Now the time has come for the band who has
carried a torch for American country and roots music to say so long to the highways and byways they’ve
crossed an unimaginable number of times throughout their career.
The Nitty Gritty Dirt Band trades on a mix of reimagined classics and compelling newer works. The group formed
in 1966 as a Long Beach, California jug band, scored its first charting single in 1967, and embarked on a self
propelled ride through folk, country, rock ‘n’ roll, pop, blue- grass, and the amalgam now known as “Americana.”
The first major hit came in 1971 with the epic “Mr. Bojangles,” which, along with insistent support from banjo
master Earl Scruggs, opened doors in Nashville. Behind those doors were Earl Scruggs, Roy Acuff, Doc Watson,
Mother Maybelle Carter, Jimmy Martin, and others who would collaborate on a multi-artist, multi-generational,
three-disc 1972 masterpiece: Will the Circle Be Unbroken went triple Platinum, spawned two later volumes, and
wound up in the Grammy Hall of Fame.
In the 1980s, the Dirt Band reeled off 15 straight Top 10 country hits, including chart-toppers “Long
Hard Road (The Sharecropper’s Dream),” “Modern Day Romance,” and “Fishin’ in the Dark” (co-written by Jim
Photoglo, who would join the band in the second decade of the new century). 1989 brought a second Circle
album, this one featuring singer-songwriter talents including John Prine, Rosanne Cash, and John Hiatt and
garnering two Grammy awards for the band (it later won another, for a collaboration with Earl Scruggs and other
fine folks). Circle II also won the Country Music Association’s Album of the Year prize. Circle III was released in
2003, featuring collaborations with Johnny Cash, Dwight Yoakam, Emmylou Harris, Taj Mahal, and more.
The latest Dirt Band lineup is expanded to six members for the first time since 1968. Today’s group consists of founding member Jeff Hanna, harp master Jimmie Fadden (who joined in 1966), and soulful-voiced Bob Carpenter, who
has more than 40 years of service in the ensemble. Those veterans are now joined by singer-songwriter-bass
man Jim Photoglo, fiddle and mandolin wizard Ross Holmes, and Hanna’s son, the preternaturally talented
singer and guitarist Jaime Hanna.
