50 Years of Dirt Helps Launch Americana Fest!

The iconic Nitty Gritty Dirt Band will help kick off Americana Fest 2015 while simultaneously celebrating the band's 50th anniversary!

Country Music Hall of Famer Vince Gill, Nashville Songwriters Hall of Famers John Prine and Rodney Crowell, legendary gypsy troubadour Jerry Jeff Walker, Rock and Roll Hall of Famer Jackson Browne, and master musicians Jerry Douglas, Sam Bush, and Byron House will join the Grammy-winning Nitty Gritty Dirt Band at the Ryman Auditorium on September 14, for a concert celebrating the Dirt Band’s fifty years of making vital American roots music and the beginning of Americana Fest 2015.

This show will be taped for PBS to air during the network’s national pledge drive in March 2016.

Former Dirt Band member Jimmy Ibbotson will be among the guests onstage as the NGDB—Jeff Hanna, Jimmie Fadden, Bob Carpenter, and John McEuen—plays music from a career that has garnered multiple Grammy Awards and chart-topping hits.

The Nitty Gritty Dirt Band’s three Will the Circle Be Unbroken volumes featured the band in conjunction with legends including Johnny Cash, Earl Scruggs, and Mother Maybelle Carter, and it has recorded such enduring hits as “Mr. Bojangles,” “Fishin’ in the Dark,” and the Crowell-penned “Long Hard Road (The Sharecropper’s Dream).”