John McEuen
John McEuen is a banjo player and multi-instrumentalist, also playing guitar, mandolin and fiddle, who joined the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band in its first months in 1966 and played with it, with one long break, until 2017. He set the band’s three-record Will the Circle Be Unbroken in motion by asking Earl Scruggs and Doc Watson to record with them, and he produced Steve Martin’s banjo album The Crow, which won the Grammy for Best Bluegrass Album in 2010.
He was born in Oakland, California, on 19 December 1945, and his family moved to Orange County, where he went to high school in Garden Grove. In 1963, at 16, he and his high-school friend Steve Martin both worked in a magic shop, and McEuen later gave Martin occasional banjo lessons. Seeing the Missouri band the Dillards in an Orange County club turned him toward music; he learned the banjo, taking Doug Dillard as his model, and then took up fiddle and mandolin.
The Nitty Gritty Dirt Band had been formed in Long Beach in 1966, and McEuen came in on banjo, mandolin and guitar when Jackson Browne left in its first months. His older brother William managed the band and got it signed with Liberty Records, and as producer he made Uncle Charlie & His Dog Teddy (1970), whose cover of Jerry Jeff Walker’s “Mr. Bojangles” became the group’s first hit, reaching No. 9.
Will the Circle Be Unbroken began when McEuen, in Colorado, asked Earl Scruggs and Doc Watson whether they would record with the band; William then asked Merle Travis, and the cast grew to include Maybelle Carter, Roy Acuff, Jimmy Martin, Pete “Oswald” Kirby, Vassar Clements, Norman Blake and Roy “Junior” Huskey. The sessions took place at Woodland Sound Studios in Nashville in August 1971, and United Artists issued the set in November 1972 with William McEuen as producer. John played banjo behind Jimmy Martin, Roy Acuff, Merle Travis and Doc Watson, mandolin behind Maybelle Carter, and traded “Soldier’s Joy” with Earl Scruggs as a banjo duet, playing an instrument that had belonged to Uncle Dave Macon. The album went platinum and was later added to the Library of Congress’s National Recording Registry. McEuen kept the master tapes at his home for twenty-five years and remastered them for the thirtieth-anniversary reissue in 2002.
In 1978 the Dirt Band, recording as the Toot Uncommons, backed Steve Martin on his novelty song “King Tut.” McEuen also took outside work: he played banjo on Red Allen’s Family & Friends (Folkways, 1981), cut at Scruggs Sound Studio in Nashville with Marty Stuart and Vassar Clements, and Warner Bros. issued his first solo album, John McEuen, in 1985, on which he played banjo, lap steel, fiddle, mandolin and guitar. During the promotion of the band’s album Hold On, at the turn of 1987, he left after twenty years, and Bernie Leadon took his place.
On his own he made four albums for Vanguard between 1991 and 1997, beginning with String Wizards (1991). String Wizards II (1993), nominated for a Grammy, brought in Tony Rice, David Grisman, Sam Bush, Jerry Douglas, Josh Graves, Byron Berline, Stuart Duncan and José Feliciano, along with his old bandmates Jeff Hanna and Jimmie Fadden; Acoustic Traveler (1996), recorded in Santa Barbara with his son Jonathan on guitar, followed, and Vanguard closed the run with Best of String Wizard’s Picks (1997). He also wrote music for film and television and appeared on five albums by Michael Martin Murphey.
McEuen rejoined the Dirt Band in 2001, shortly before Will the Circle Be Unbroken, Volume III (2002). In October 2009 he presented the Dillards with their induction into the International Bluegrass Music Hall of Fame. That year Rounder released Steve Martin’s The Crow: New Songs for the 5-String Banjo, which McEuen produced and on which he played guitar, banjo, mandolin, bass and bowed guitar; on 31 January 2010 it won the Grammy for Best Bluegrass Album. He produced his own Roots Music Made in Brooklyn (Chesky, 2016), with guests including Martin, John Cowan, David Amram, John Carter Cash and Jay Ungar, which won the Independent Music Award for Best Americana Album.
The American Banjo Museum inducted him into its Hall of Fame in 2017. He left the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band for the second time at the end of its fiftieth-anniversary tour, after the final show in Fargo, North Dakota, on 22 October 2017. His memoir, The Life I’ve Picked: A Banjo Player’s Nitty Gritty Journey, came out from Chicago Review Press in April 2018, and a second book, on the making of Will the Circle Be Unbroken, is built around his brother William’s photographs from the sessions.
