Pike County Breakdown · Old Salty Dog Blues

Lester Flatt and Earl Scruggs walked out of Bill Monroe's Blue Grass Boys early in 1948 — Flatt the guitarist and lead singer, Scruggs the banjo player whose three-finger roll had reinvented the instrument barely a year before. Within months they had their own band, the Foggy Mountain Boys, and their own records.

The first sessions, in the fall of 1948, were cut for Mercury at radio station WROL in Knoxville, with Jim Shumate on fiddle and Howard Watts — "Cedric Rainwater" on the labels — on bass. It was at a Mercury session in Cincinnati on December 11, 1949 that Scruggs recorded "Foggy Mountain Breakdown," the banjo instrumental that would one day score a getaway car in Bonnie and Clyde and carry his name around the world.

In November 1950 the band moved to Columbia, where it would stay for the rest of the singles era. Most of those records were made at Castle Studio, set up in the Tulane Hotel in Nashville, and later at Owen Bradley's studios. With Curly Seckler's mandolin and tenor harmony beside Flatt, and a run of fine fiddlers — Benny Sims, Howdy Forrester, Everett Lilly — the Foggy Mountain sound tightened into something crisp and commercial. "Don't Get Above Your Raising," "Earl's Breakdown," "Flint Hill Special": the Columbia singles of the early 1950s defined the band.

What set Flatt & Scruggs apart was ambition off the bandstand as much as on it. Backed by Martha White Flour and a punishing schedule of radio and television, they turned bluegrass into a touring business — and by the time the singles gave way to LPs, they were the most famous act the music had produced.

Session details drawn in part from the Bluegrass Discography.