100 VINYLZ: #60 - Will the Circle Be Unbroken 3xLP by The Nitty Gritty Dirt Band

(1972, EMI Records)
If you have a friend who thinks they might like bluegrass, buy them this. Never has a more perfect genre starter collection been made. It features everybody who defined bluegrass music before bluegrass music meant college kids drinking PBRs and doing Pink Floyd covers on mandolins. I’m not even hating on that whole newgrass movement either, because it has a good purpose (mostly for being played over any city’s trendy hipster breakfast joint sound system), but there’s something about bonafide bluegrass music, the kind that old guys who wear suits to sing about Jesus at riverside funerals play, that’s lost by younger folks who’d never go to church playing it or weird-looking kinda New York-seeming dudes like Marty Stuart or Tony Rice doing it. All of that is too far removed from the mountains, and, for me, bluegrass music is a quasi-religious way of expressing the immense trapped frustration of being a broke ass on the side of a mountain where you get all crazy from the steep hills all the time. Seriously. Mountain people are crazy, and that’s why they made the world’s only thrash metal acoustic gospel music. It’s the same reason they handled snakes, drank strychnine, and love the smell of crushed oxycontins.