A certain well-known online source of information would have you believe that Jackson Browne was a founding member of the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band, and that he was soon replaced by banjo/guitar player John McEuen.

Nope, McEuen said in a recent telephone call.

“That’s been a very strange thing,” he said. “Jackson and I get a kick out of that.”
He said eventual members of the band and Browne were all teenagers when they played some coffee house shows.

“Jackson was using them to back him up on his music. They were all like 17, 18, 19,” McEuen said. “They were in their formative years, before they had recorded and before my brother (William McEuen) started managing them. Jackson never got a check. He was never in a publicity picture. He never recorded with the band. Yet for the past 50 years, I replaced Jackson Browne.

“So how do we deal with it? We say Jackson Browne played with them briefly before they actually formed into the group that made their first album (The Nitty Gritty Dirt Band, 1967),” McEuen said.

Listening to that first record and the sophomore release Ricochet, also from 1967, it’s not easy to see how this would be the band that just five years later brought the world the magnificent, groundbreaking three-record Will the Circle Be Unbroken, featuring the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band longhairs playing alongside masters of country music. 

Those first two records were definitely of their time, with aspects of jug band and nostalgia for the megaphone singers of the 1920s and ‘30s (ala the New Vaudeville Band and their 1966 novelty hit “Winchester Cathedral”).

In 1970 the band had its biggest hit covering Jerry Jeff Walker’s “Mr. Bojangles.”

McEuen is happy to share all this history in his current show in a multimedia presentation that includes 8mm film of the band playing in a parking lot in 1967, filmed by McKeuen’s mother. Or you’ll see shots of Maybelle Carter, Roy Acuff, Doc Watson, Earl Scruggs, Merle Travis and others from the Will the Circle Be Unbroken sessions.

“It’s really fun to do,” he said of the presentation.

McEuen is a natural storyteller, and he’s got a million of them. One began at the age of 16 when he and another fellow tried to get a job at Disneyland’s Merlin’s Magic Shop.

“It was Steve Martin,” McEuen said. “We’re both 16 years old and we both got jobs there. We sold magic tricks for three years. And then he starts trying to be funny, and he is occasionally funny. He’s nice enough to say I taught him how to play the banjo. I didn’t really. He would come over to my house after work, two or three nights a week. I played him a couple licks I learned off a record and he tried a couple jokes out. He’d be there for 10 minutes and say, ‘I gotta go.’ He was always known as having a short attention span.”

McEuen’s brother William went on to produce five Steve Martin films and four albums.
The band accompanying Martin on his 1978 hit “King Tut” was the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band performing as Toot Uncommons.

In 2009 McEuen played on and produced Martin’s 2009 Grammy-winning The Crow: New Songs for the 5-String Banjo.

“Now, Steve’s in the stratosphere, and I’m playing Duluth,” McEuen joked.

Expect also to see shots from the band’s groundbreaking 1977 tour of the Soviet Union (now known as Russia). McEuen is currently working on a book about that trip that he says will be out in 2026. 

“We were the first American group to go to Russia – 28 shows, all sold out,” he said, adding that a guy in the State Department’s cultural affairs office championed them for the gig.

“They were very specific about an American band that makes their own decisions, records their own music, not a star with a band, but a band,” he said. “They looked at a lot of different American groups. Grateful Dead was one. It was quite an experience”

His book on the Russian tour will be his fourth book, including his 2018 autobiography The Life I’ve Picked: A Banjo Player’s Nitty Gritty Journey and the 2022 Will the Circle Be Unbroken: The Making of a Landmark Album, 50th Anniversary.

McEuen promises during the show to tell the story of how that magnificent record came to be. Don’t want to spill the beans here, but, essentially, McEuen just wanted to play with Earl Scruggs.

“I knew it was good from when we were doing ‘Tennessee Stud’ with Doc Watson. One take on that one. One take on 22 of the songs, man. But when we were doing ‘Tennessee Stud’ with Doc, it was magical. It felt like I was in an old record. It was so much fun.”

You’ll have to hear the rest from him in what will be his very first time playing in Duluth when he appears at the West Theatre the night before Halloween.

“I’ve been to Duluth many times on the way to Bayfield (to perform at Big Top Chautauqua), and I stayed in Duluth just because it’s close to the airport. I think of young Bob Dylan hanging out in Duluth, not Hibbing.”

McEuen said he’s bringing some fine pickers with him, billed as The Circle Band.

“I’ve got Justin David on guitar and fiddle. He sings great, too. And Danny Knicely. You ever heard of the Winfield contest (national flat-picking competition held annually during the Walnut Valley Festival in Winfield, Kansas)? It’s one of the big ones in the acoustic music world. Danny’s taken first place in guitar and mandolin both. His brother, David Knicely, is going to be playing bass. Boy, these guys can pick. I just don’t know why I take them out. It’s depressing. Oh yeah, I thought I could play that, and I can’t play that.”