News and Opinion from Sisters, Oregon
News and Opinion from Sisters, Oregon
The Nitty Gritty Dirt Band closed their show with "Wil
The Nitty Gritty Dirt Band “kept on the sunny side” in Saturday night’s Starry Nights concert, offering a warm performance that became a celebration of family andfriendship.
The band, soon to mark its 40th anniversary, welcomed second-generation performers Jamie Hanna and Jonathan McEuen as their opening act. Hanna and McEuen are a rising duo and they showed the Sisters crowd the reason Nashville considers them one of the most promising new acts in guitar town.
Their fathers, Dirt Band founders Jeff Hanna and John McEuen, introduced them after a short, comic set by the elder and younger McEuen.
“We’re not passing the torch, right?” John McEuen quipped to his band-mate. “They’re making their own torch, right?”
The band demonstrated that they can still bear the torch of their own unique blend of country, bluegrass and rock, serving up a set that ranged across the years from their first hits through their chart-topping 1980s run to new material from their recently released “Welcome to Woody Creek.”
The band also lit a torch in some young hands.
Sisters Elementary School students Chelsey Davidson, Shannon Fouts, Jordan Williams, Wyatt Houghman, Emily Christen and Kayti Schlatter performed the A.P. Carter classic “Keep on the Sunny Side of Life,” accompanied by the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band with Amity Calvin on fiddle.
Jeff Hanna joked that they now call Calvin — a stand-out violinist — “Jammity.”
Elementary school teacher Debbie Schlatter directed the students.
The band — Jeff Hanna (guitar, vocals), John McEuen (banjo, fiddle, guitar, mandolin, funny-bone) Jimmy Fadden (drums, harmonica, vocals) and BobCarpenter (keyboards, accordion, vocals) — was joined by songwriters Matraca Berg (Hanna’s wife) and Kim Carnes (who was visiting family in Eugene) and the younger Hanna and McEuen to close the set with “Will the Circle Be Unbroken.”
And they completed that circle with the full Sisters High School auditorium singing along.
Jim Cornelius is editor in chief of The Nugget and author of “Warriors of the Wildlands: True Tales of the Frontier Partisans.” A history buff, he explores frontier history across three centuries and several continents on his podcast, The Frontier Partisans. For more information visit www.frontierpartisans.com.
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