Earl Scruggs, 1924–2012

Bill Monroe, the father of bluegrass music, was hunting for a new banjo player when a young musician appeared backstage at a Nashville concert hall, asking to audition. Monroe and his guitarist, Lester Flatt, listened with amazement as the 21-year-old Earl Scruggs picked out lightning-fast runs on his instrument. “If you can, hire him,” Flatt told Monroe, “whatever the cost.” He agreed to pay Scruggs $50 a week, and the young virtuoso soon became the band’s star attraction. When Scruggs stepped up to play a solo, said Monroe biographer Richard D. Smith, audiences “would physically come out of their seats in excitement.”

Born to a musical family in rural Cleveland County, N.C., Scruggs and his two banjo-playing brothers taught one another musical timing “by starting a song and then walking in opposite directions as they played,” said The Washington Post. “They would do this until they played in time with one another when they regrouped.” At age 10, Scruggs began developing a three-finger picking style (most players then used two fingers) that “elevated the five-string banjo from a part of the rhythm section—or a comedian’s prop—to a lead or solo instrument,” said The New York Times.

Scruggs joined Monroe’s Blue Grass Boys in 1945 and played on classic recordings including “Blue Moon of Kentucky” and “Blue Grass Breakdown.” But in 1948 he and Flatt, tired of low pay and exhausting travel, set out on their own as the Foggy Mountain Boys. The group made sparkling recordings, such as the Grammy winning “Foggy Mountain Breakdown,” used in the 1967 film Bonnie and Clyde, and “The Ballad of Jed Clampett,” the theme tune of TV show The Beverly Hillbillies.

Subscribe to The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up

But Scruggs became, as he said later, “bored and unhappy doing the same things for over 20 years,” said The Guardian (U.K.), and in 1969 split with Flatt to form the Earl Scruggs Revue with his three sons. The group used amplified instruments, and collaborated with artists as diverse as Bob Dylan, Elton John, and Ravi Shankar. This experimentation cost Scruggs some of his original audience, but it “opened the ears of many rock fans to connections with earlier forms.”