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The Nitty Gritty Dirt Band Remaster The Circle

Did listening to the remastered Circle album remind you of the difference experiences during the original recording?

There is not much that I have forgotten about that, to tell you the truth. Hearing it all in context is great. I have a tendency to put on a certain track and listen to it. Or listen to all [Doc Watson’s] stuff instead of diving into a two-hour experience with the entire record. But hearing it all front to back is quite an experience.

But to answer your question, it is bittersweet to hear it now. Especially in the last year when we lost Doc and Earl Scruggs.

You know, you hear a lot about Brad Paisley bringing Little Jimmy Dickens out on stage at this concerts, and working with Alabama.

That is great!

Well, yes, but you were the first band to really honor past artists in that way. I’m guessing a lot of younger fans don’t know that.

I think in retrospect we were partly responsible for exposing some of these great artists to a younger generation and we are all extremely proud of that. But from a selfish standpoint, we got to play with them and hang out with them and be on a first-name basis with them throughout the years.

And while so many bands that were contemporary then have long since broken up, you are still with the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band.

Well Jimmie too, and John for most of it.

John told me that some people predicted the band’s demise at various times through the years including when he left. And he told me that the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band would go on because of you, that you are such a fine musician and a fine leader, he knew you’d handle the transition incredibly well and continue to lead the band forward.

Really? He never told me that. That’s very nice —

And you really have had a fairly stable line up through the years.

That’s true. If you go to our Wikipedia page, because we didn’t edit that page, it lists a lot of guys that were support musicians over the years that weren’t actually in the band. All of them were great guys but there really have only been a few of us.

What do you — not the band but you — want to do musically in the years ahead? Are there things you haven’t done that you’d like to pursue?

You know, on my bucket list a solo album is part of it. That is in there somewhere. I get to do so much with what I do with our band. It’s still so fun to make this music. I do have these opportunities to play and sing [on side projects] including my wife’s records, which are great. But I got to play on Johnny Cash record, got to play on Don Henley’s track of Desperado even though he and I weren’t in the same room. But all those experiences are great!

I mean, there are a thousands ways a record could go. Let’s see, I sang duets with all of the women I love. I am kidding, of course, but I do love singing with women including [my wife Matraca Berg]. That is always great. I love to sing with my son Jamie, who is a terrific musician. Maybe the two of us would even do a whole album. But I don’t know — I still have a lot of fun with this band.

What I find impressive is that you’ve never become, for lack of a better term, your own tribute band. You continually write and perform new music and you seem to have a lot of energy with the older songs. Singing [Jerry Jeff Walker’s] “Mr. Bojangles” has to be difficult after all of these years.

There are two things that keep it fresh for us. One is the audience. You play a song like “Bojangles,” that you have never really left out of a show, and you get a great response. It is easy for us to put ourselves in the place of audience members who might think ‘Man, I just threw dollars at them, they had better play this one song.’ It’s also essential for us to have newer music make its way into the set. It’s fun and you still feel like you’re still growing.

Do you see a new Circle album in the band’s future?

Maybe there is another ‘Circle’ record in the cards. I don’t know. We’ll see.