Will the Circle Be Unbroken: Volume Two (also Circle II) is the nineteenth studio album by American country folk group Nitty Gritty Dirt Band, released on May 1, 1989. The album follows the same concept as the band's 1972 album, Will the Circle Be Unbroken, which featured guest performances from many notable country music stars.
Circle II features largely acoustic, bluegrass music instrumentation with a line-up of contemporary country music artists that includes Johnny Cash, Rosanne Cash, Emmylou Harris, Michael Martin Murphey and Ricky Skaggs. Returnees from the first Circle are bluegrass musician Jimmy Martin, banjoistEarl Scruggs, fiddlerVassar Clements and singer Roy Acuff.
Other artists represent the rock, folk and pop genres, including Levon Helm from The Band, John Denver, John Prine, John Hiatt and Bruce Hornsby.
Among the tracks is the Bob Dylan composition, "You Ain't Goin' Nowhere", sung as a duet by former members of The Byrds, Roger McGuinn and Chris Hillman, their first reunion in many years. The appearance of McGuinn and Hillman on an album dominated by Grand Ole Opry members represented a reconciliation of sorts between them, after the Byrds had received a cold reception at their lone appearance on the Opry in 1968;[1] the song itself was one that Ralph Emery had famously dissed during the Byrds' brief Nashville residency in the same era.[2]
The roster of session musicians for the album featured many notable performers, including fiddler Mark O'Connor, resonator guitaristJerry Douglas, banjoist Béla Fleck, guitarist Chet Atkins and bassist Roy Huskey, Jr., son of bassist Junior Huskey, who had played on the first Circle.[3]
Like the first Circle, the album features snippets of studio chatter. In the lead-in to John Denver's song, "And So It Goes", someone asks, "Is this practice?" Denver replies: "They're all practice."
In an intro to the song "Riding Alone", Emmylou Harris summed up her thoughts about relaxed atmosphere of the recording sessions, saying: "Years ago I had the experience of sitting around in a living room with a bunch of people and singing and playing, and it was like a spiritual experience, it was wonderful. And I decided then that was what I was going to do with my life was play music, do music. In the making of records, I think over the years we've all gotten a little too technical, a little too hung up on getting things perfect. We've lost the living room. The living room has gone out of the music, but today I feel like we got it back."
