Will the Circle Be Unbroken

De aquí seguramente salga un muy buen disco de bluegrass pero DIOS SANTO QUE COSA MÁS LARGA SE ME HA HECHO ETERNO LO HE TENIDO QUE ESCUCHAR EN CUATRO VECES.

Lo siento, pero no. ¿Más de dos horas de country? No, gracias.

Bleh

Good country music. I’ve been waiting for something interesting for a while now. 4 stars, minus one for being over 90 minutes.

We should get 2 days to listen to a 2 hour album…. Listened to most of it and enjoyed it from a musical history perspective/ novelty point of view.

I’ll come back to this review when I finish the album

2 hours of a genre I do not relate to not being from the US.

I should hate this.

But I don’t. At all. Quite the opposite.

Added to library and will 100% listen again.

It's full of classics that I respect but wouldn't really sing along with and it is over two hours long. I respect it as long as it never comes over for beers again.

This is what I wish country music was. Not really my thing, but the music wasn’t bad. Too much talking and random bs which disrupted the flow and an otherwise decent bluegrass album. Very long, which without the random talking bits, would’ve been more reasonable. 2.5/5

ok. entendo que eh um album importante pq chama mto véio da música country pra tocar umas música tradicional e tal

mas eu não CONSIGO ME IMPORTAR com country, sério mesmo. só serviu pra me deixar puto hoje mesmo.

Es ist eine schnörkellose Countryscheibe im besten Sinne: warm, erdig, traditionsbewusst. Die Nitty Gritty Dirt Band bringt hier Alt‑ und Jungstars der Country‑ und Bluegrass‑Szene zusammen und lässt sie ohne Studiozirkus einfach spielen. Das Ergebnis klingt wie ein lebendiger Dialog zwischen Generationen – voller Respekt, Spielfreude und countrystile.

What a hootin’ and hollerin’ good time. A lot of really great songs and great playing to be found here. Everyone just sounds like they had a great time making this. Definitely something you should hear before you die. Love bluegrass.

Syns dette er finfin musikk. CD 2 i Tidal er et stort knepp opp fra CD 1. Synd plata er en halvannen time for lang

I'm not familiar with this group at all.

I like this, but I do enjoy bluegrass, and there's a lot of standards on this. I'm adding this to my list of albums to listen to again.

Country can be nice in small doses. Not in an album of a 2 hours and 9 minutes lenght.

Facing 38 tracks on this project is never a positive experIence. I am however a sucker for Banjo, so ‘Grand Ole Opey Song’ raises my optimism around how much of a slog this will be.this is somewhat dashed by the unnecessary chatter at thr start of track 2, but again once it gets going its quite pleasant.

I enjoyed the sudden handbrake turn in Lonesome Fiddle Blues where it feels like it’s suddenly become a country sea shanty of a tune.
I’m also a good 5 tracks into disc two, before i realise vocals are long gone. Unfortunately this exacerbates the increasingly ‘samey’ feel to the music.
Suddenly we hit Lost Highway and the vocalist is back from his break.

Whilst i appreciate the talky bits are supposed to the whole record as live ethos on such a long album they are unnecessary and annoying.

If this album had been shorter and certainly confined to a single disc it would have probably been 4.5/5 but as it is it the duration drags the overall enjoyment down.

The whiplash change of emotions during the first 5 minutes:

- Oh, bluegrass! I should enjoy this!
- 2 HOURS, 10 MINUTES! FFS!
- Why is this song starting with a lady rambling about playing a song on the autoharp for so long?
- Oh! It's Keep On The Sunny Side! I like this song.

I am one of the people who went to see O Brother, Where Art Thou? and immediately went to buy the soundtrack when the credits started rolling. My Uncle, once retired, bought multiple banjos, taught himself how to play and would play bluegrass standards for us whenever we went to see him. I have seen Hayseed Dixie live multiple times. This is definitely My Kinda Thing...

... But not for over two hours on a weekday. I could have very happily listened to this while cooking Sunday lunch or doing housework at the weekend - it would have put a pep in my step! - but it outstayed its welcome on a Wednesday morning (and afternoon as it covered both my journey to and from work).

There's a very good chance this could have been a 5, but the length and random chats from bluegrass stars knocked this down to a 4.

4/5

Just not for me

This is hard to rate, because about twenty minutes of this is great, lots of fun, relatively easy four stars. But two hours; come on. Nobody needs that much bluegrass.

Note: I started writing this as a 3/5 and then I remembered how much I love the bluegrass bits. And ending on “Both Sides Now.”

This is the real country music. That was an article of faith at Dad’s house growing up and I won’t disavow it. The songs, the artists, the style — yes. Yet I’ve never actually liked the album as much as I’m supposed to.

Ani DiFranco sang: “People used to make records / like the record of an event / the event of people making music in a room.” As a historical event, this album is a 5/5 no question. It turned minds back to the foundations of country music and inspired all sorts of new artists and sub-genres. And that was a really important thing to do when the Nashville Sound dominated and when folks got all their music through albums or the radio (which wouldn’t have been playing a lot of this stuff at the time). It’s like a seed ark for country sounds.

But there are now so many different ways to encounter this music that I don’t think the album feels nearly as essential as it once did. You can easily listen to the original recordings of so many of these songs or you can listen to more innovative covers. You have the access to labels like Smithsonian Folkways that will help you better understand where all these sounds came from… and WITHOUT the artificial barrier between the races. And alt-country and roots music are alive and well. The seeds have sprouted and thrived.

So it’s not a record I frequently put on or recommend. I guess I process it the same way I do most of the live albums in the book… I’m glad it happened, I appreciate it as a student of history, but I’m not likely to return to it all that often.

What a box of treasures.

Perhaps not an album to play from start to finish. Better to dip into it and see what comes up.

But as a library of Americana greatness its irreplaceable.