Jeff Hanna

Jeffrey R. Hanna was born on 11 July 1947 in Detroit, Michigan, and moved with his family to Long Beach in 1962. In high school there he played in a duo, the New Coast Two, with his friend Bruce Kunkel, and the two gathered the first Dirt Band at jam sessions at McCabe’s Guitar Shop: Fadden, Ralph Barr, Les Thompson and, for a few months, Jackson Browne, whose place went to John McEuen. The band’s first public show was at the Paradox Club in Orange County on 13 May 1966. In the early jug-band lineups Hanna played guitar, mandolin and washboard and sang, and the band’s Liberty records of 1967 and 1968 included the single “Buy for Me the Rain.” When the group broke up for a few months at the end of 1968, he and Chris Darrow joined Linda Ronstadt’s touring band, the Corvettes.

The band re-formed in 1969, moved to Colorado and had its first big hit with Jerry Jeff Walker’s “Mr. Bojangles” from Uncle Charlie & His Dog Teddy. In August 1971 it went to Nashville to record Will the Circle Be Unbroken (United Artists, 1972) with Roy Acuff, Maybelle Carter, Earl Scruggs, Doc Watson, Merle Travis, Jimmy Martin and Vassar Clements. Hanna’s part on those sessions was mostly as a harmony singer behind the guests, among them Carter, Acuff, Martin on “My Walkin’ Shoes” and Travis on “Dark as a Dungeon,” along with washboard on several tracks and drums on “Lost Highway.”

Through the 1970s he played guitars, drums, washboard and percussion as the band moved toward rock; it shortened its name to the Dirt Band, and “An American Dream,” with Linda Ronstadt, reached No. 13 on the pop chart. He co-produced Jealousy (Liberty, 1981). When the band turned to country in the early 1980s, with Jimmy Ibbotson back in the lineup, Hanna and Ibbotson shared the lead vocals, and on Warner Bros. the band reached No. 1 on the country chart with “Long Hard Road (The Sharecropper’s Dream)” (1984), “Modern Day Romance” (1985) and “Fishin’ in the Dark” (1987). Hanna co-wrote, with Ibbotson, the top-ten title song of Partners, Brothers and Friends (1985), and co-wrote “I’ve Been Lookin’” and “Down That Road Tonight,” both top-ten singles from Workin’ Band (1988). Will the Circle Be Unbroken: Volume Two (1989) won the Country Music Association’s Album of the Year and a Grammy for Best Country Performance by a Duo or Group with Vocal.

In 1994 he and Marcus Hummon wrote “Bless the Broken Road,” with Bobby Boyd, building on a song Hummon had begun; the Dirt Band recorded it first, on Acoustic (1994), and Hummon recorded it in 1995 with Hanna and Matraca Berg singing harmony. Rascal Flatts’ version went to No. 1 on the Billboard country chart in 2005 and won the three writers the Grammy for Best Country Song. Hanna married Berg, a Nashville songwriter, in 1993; she sang lead with Emmylou Harris on one track of the band’s third Circle album.

On Will the Circle Be Unbroken, Volume III (Capitol, 2002) he sang lead on “Roll the Stone Away” and harmony behind Johnny Cash, Del McCoury, Jimmy Martin, Dwight Yoakam, Alison Krauss and Vince Gill, and played guitar, mandolin, National slide guitar and washboard; the album was IBMA’s Recorded Event of the Year in 2003. Its companion PBS concert produced “Earl’s Breakdown,” the band’s Grammy winner for Best Country Instrumental Performance in 2005. After McEuen left in 2017, Hanna’s son Jaime, the fiddler Ross Holmes and Jim Photoglo joined in 2018, and that lineup recorded Dirt Does Dylan (2022), a project Hanna had wanted to make for years. The band began a farewell tour in January 2024 and, as of July 2026, had played its last shows as a touring act the month before, sixty years after it started; Hanna said the band would keep making music.