There's no escaping it. Internet archaeologists, 2,500 years from now, will peg the last couple of years as being under the total cultural domination of the O Brother, Where Art Thou? soundtrack. It's getting mentions in vapid celebrity gossip columns, everyone in Nashville is scratching their heads, wondering what the hell they've been doing for the last decade, and this very album, five-out-of-five perfect since 1972, has been rereleased because of it. The band even admits that.

That means 30 years this thing has been sitting around, and any of you could have bought it in all that time. The scariest fact, of course, is it's generally a better album than the soundtrack (except for those deadly proto-blues parts picked by the Cohen brothers, no one ever talks about them for some reason).

Long before you and me went fishin' in the dark, the concept was this: tie together the longhaired '71 generation of country music with the more conservative previous, older roster with songs they had in common. Namely, those that had been around long enough to make everyone feel they were doing something that mined deeply into country music's history. Lots of bluegrass, Herculean banjo picking and singing about God.

The results were phenomenal, spanning 42 songs ranging from Keep on the Sunny Side to Orange Blossom Special to Honky Tonk Blues to Foggy Mountain Breakdown to Wreck on the Highway to I Am a Pilgrim to ... Keeping in list mode, the players assembled, besides the now legendary Dirt Band, included Mother Maybelle Carter, Roy Acuff, Doc Watson, Earl Scruggs (and sons) and Merle Travis. The photo session alone is wondrous, like a bunch of hippies and their dads getting completely along, speaking a common vernacular known only to the mountains.

Highlights are a Doc Watson take of Tennessee Stud which hog-ties Johnny Cash's, Jimmy Martin sighing through Losin' You (Might Be the Best Thing Yet) and, from the NGDB, Jimmy Fadden doing a laid-back Honky Tonkin'. And those are just songs on the first disc. Just go get it. (More on: The Nitty Gritty Dirt Band).

Track Listing