Nitty Gritty Dirt Band To Celebrate 50 Years With PBS Taping at Ryman

Nitty Gritty Dirt Band

The Nitty Gritty Dirt Band will celebrate its 50th anniversary of making music together with a special Ryman Auditorium show Sept. 14 that will be filmed for a PBS special. The band will be joined by a host of special guests, including Sam Bush, Jerry Douglas, Byron House, Vince Gill, John Prine, Rodney Crowell, Jerry Jeff Walker, Rock and Roll Hall of Famer and original Dirt Band member Jackson Browne, and former NGDB band member Jimmy Ibbotson.

“We’re humbled to have all of these amazing artists, who happen to be our friends, come out to honor this legacy,” says the Dirt Band’s Jeff Hanna of the upcoming celebration.

The show will be a homecoming of sorts for many of the band’s longtime friends. Prine contributed “Grandpa Was A Carpenter” on the band’s second Will The Circle Be Unbroken album, a project that featured Douglas, Bush, Johnny Cash, and others and won three Grammys and a CMA Album of the Year award. Gill contributed “All Prayed Up” to the third Circle project, an album that won a Grammy for the instrumental “Earl’s Breakdown.” And Crowell penned the Dirt Band hits “Long Hard Road (The Sharecropper’s Dream)” and “An American Dream.”

Tickets to show, which will kick off this year’s Americana Music Fest, are $45 and $55, and will be available beginning July 31 at all Ticketmaster locations, the Ryman Auditorium box office, and www.ryman.com. The PBS concert special is set to air during the network’s national pledge drive, March 5–20, 2016.