Earl Scruggs

Earl Eugene Scruggs was born on 6 January 1924 in the Flint Hill community of Cleveland County, near Shelby, North Carolina. His father, George Elam Scruggs, was a banjo player and fiddler who died when Earl was four; his mother, Lula, played the pump organ. His brothers Junie and Horace and his sisters Eula Mae and Ruby all played banjo and guitar, and as a small boy he picked Junie’s banjo sitting on the floor, sliding the instrument around to reach the part of the neck he wanted. At six he heard the blind banjo player Mack Woolbright, a finger-style picker who had recorded for Columbia, at an uncle’s house, but his main early model was a relative, the banjo player Smith Hammett. His brother Horace on guitar and a neighbour, the fiddler Dennis Butler, were his first jamming partners. By ten he had worked out the syncopated roll that, laid over the older North Carolina three-finger picking, became known as Scruggs style; he later recalled realizing, while idly playing “Reuben,” that he was picking with three fingers instead of two. He had bought a banjo of his own by thirteen, and by fifteen he was performing on the radio.

In 1939 he played with the Carolina Wildcats in Gastonia and briefly with the Morris Brothers in Spartanburg, South Carolina. Music then alternated with work in the Lily textile mill, where he made thread to support his widowed mother; for the same reason he was deferred from military service during the war. In 1942 he played with Carl Story’s Rambling Mountaineers in Asheville. At the end of the war he went back to music full time with “Lost” John Miller and the Allied Kentuckians, on WNOX in Knoxville and then in Nashville, until Miller gave up touring. David “Stringbean” Akeman had just left Bill Monroe’s band, and the fiddler Jim Shumate, who knew Scruggs from North Carolina, recommended him. He auditioned and joined the Blue Grass Boys around Christmas 1945, at fifty dollars a week, alongside Lester Flatt and bassist Howard Watts; the fiddler Chubby Wise rejoined in March 1946. The Opry announcer George D. Hay began billing “Earl Scruggs and his fancy banjo” alongside Monroe himself, and the band’s Columbia records included “Blue Moon of Kentucky,” cut in September 1946. Between Saturday nights on the Opry the band toured movie theaters across the South, sometimes playing six shows a day.

Tired of the touring, he quit early in 1948. Within weeks Flatt also left, followed by Watts, and the pair formed the Foggy Mountain Boys, named after the Carter Family’s “Foggy Mountain Top” and staffed mostly with former Blue Grass Boys. Their first Mercury session, around November 1948 at WROL in Knoxville, had Jim Shumate on fiddle and Mac Wiseman singing. The band moved from one radio market to the next, among them Danville and Roanoke, Virginia; Hickory and Raleigh, North Carolina; Bristol, where they broadcast on WCBY; Knoxville; Tampa; and Lexington, Kentucky, where the young J. D. Crowe sat in the front row at WVLK to study Scruggs’s playing. On gospel and Carter Family numbers Scruggs fingerpicked the guitar instead of playing banjo, partly to set the group apart from Monroe’s. They cut “Foggy Mountain Breakdown” in Cincinnati on 11 December 1949, and Mercury released it in March 1950. Their last Mercury session, at WDAE in Tampa on 20 October 1950, produced “Rollin’ in My Sweet Baby’s Arms” and “Salty Dog Blues.”

Columbia signed them in 1950. At a session on 24 October 1951 Scruggs recorded “Earl’s Breakdown,” using a cam device he had fitted to the banjo to detune the second and third strings in mid-performance, an idea he and his brother Horace had tried out as boys. He had drilled holes in the peghead to mount it and later covered them with a metal plate, which shows on the cover of Foggy Mountain Jamboree. He is credited with inventing the Scruggs tuners, pegs that change a string’s pitch quickly during a performance; Bill Keith later refined the design, and Scruggs’s original tuners are on display at the Earl Scruggs Center in Shelby. “Flint Hill Special” followed at a Nashville session on 9 November 1952.

Martha White Flour sponsored the band’s early-morning program on WSM from 1953, and a television show that followed two years later was carried in other Southern markets; before taped syndication the band had to travel to each station, and they toured more than any other Opry act of the 1950s. In 1955 the sponsor’s chief, Cohen Williams, threatened to pull his advertising from WSM unless the band was given a place on the Grand Ole Opry, and they joined the cast that year. Josh Graves brought his Dobro into the band in 1955; other members over the years included Curly Seckler and Everett Lilly on mandolin, Benny Sims, Benny Martin and Paul Warren on fiddle, Jody Rainwater and Jake Tullock on bass, and Jim Eanes and Mac Wiseman on guitar. His wife Louise, whom he had married in April 1948, became the act’s manager and booking agent in 1956. He wrote “Randy Lynn Rag” for the birth of their son Randy in 1953, and from 1957 he flew his own plane to distant dates. In the late 1950s he signed with the Vega company to design and endorse an Earl Scruggs model banjo, though he kept playing his Gibson Granada.

Columbia issued Foggy Mountain Jamboree in October 1957 and, in February 1961, the all-instrumental Foggy Mountain Banjo, twelve instrumentals running from “Ground Speed” to “Cumberland Gap,” recorded between January 1959 and September 1960 with Graves on Dobro, Warren on fiddle and Tullock on bass. The band played the Newport Folk Festival in July 1960 and again in 1966, and in February 1961 recorded an album of Carter Family songs with Maybelle Carter on autoharp and guitar. Songs Scruggs wrote or co-wrote reached the country charts for the duo, among them “Cabin on the Hill” (number 9, 1959), “The Legend of the Johnson Boys” (number 27, 1962) and “My Saro Jane” (number 40, 1964).

“The Ballad of Jed Clampett,” recorded on 24 September 1962 as the theme of The Beverly Hillbillies and sung by Jerry Scoggins, became the duo’s only number one country single; it spent twenty weeks on the country chart and reached number 44 on the pop chart. Flatt and Scruggs appeared on the show as themselves, performing the theme and “Pearl, Pearl, Pearl,” which they recorded in February 1963 and took to number 8 on the country chart, and in January 1964 they recorded the theme of Petticoat Junction. Their concert at Carnegie Hall on 8 December 1962, with Merle Travis also on guitar, was issued by Columbia in August 1963, and a concert at Vanderbilt University on 2 May 1963 followed on record in March 1964.

In December 1966 he and Flatt recorded the album Strictly Instrumental with Doc Watson; Columbia issued it in April 1967. Columbia then replaced their long-time producer Don Law with Bob Johnston, who had produced Bob Dylan, and the albums Changin’ Times, Nashville Airplane and The Story of Bonnie and Clyde drew on songs by Dylan, Johnny Cash, Tom T. Hall and Utah Phillips. For the 1967 film Bonnie and Clyde, Warren Beatty chose the band’s original 1949 Mercury recording of “Foggy Mountain Breakdown”; the instrumental reached number 58 on the country chart in 1968 and won Flatt & Scruggs a Grammy at the 1969 ceremony. His instruction book, Earl Scruggs and the 5-String Banjo, appeared in 1968 and later earned a Gold Book Award for selling more than a million copies.

His interest in newer music, and in playing with his sons, led to the split with Flatt in 1969. The Earl Scruggs Revue began with Gary on bass and vocals, Randy on guitar, Bob Wilson on piano and Jody Maphis on drums; Steve Scruggs later joined on piano and other keyboards, and Vassar Clements, Josh Graves and Charlie Daniels played with the group at times. It worked mostly for young audiences, played scores of college dates and shared bills with Steppenwolf, the Byrds and James Taylor. His first album after the split, Nashville’s Rock, came out on Columbia in 1970. Earl Scruggs Performing with His Family and Friends (October 1971) was recorded with the Byrds, Doc Watson, Joan Baez and Bob Dylan, who played “Nashville Skyline Rag” with him in December 1970 at the illustrator Thomas B. Allen’s home in Carmel, New York. Linda Ronstadt, Arlo Guthrie, Tracy Nelson and the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band guested on I Saw the Light with Some Help from My Friends (1972), and that collaboration led to the Dirt Band’s Will the Circle Be Unbroken: in 1971 Earl and Louise Scruggs telephoned Roy Acuff and Maybelle Carter, among others, to bring them to the sessions. Live at Kansas State followed in 1972, and a tribute concert held for him in Manhattan, Kansas, in January 1973, with Baez, the Byrds, Doc and Merle Watson and others, became the 1975 documentary Banjoman. The Revue recorded for Columbia into the 1980s. Back trouble took him off the road in 1980, and the group ended in 1982, the year he made The Storyteller and the Banjo Man with Tom T. Hall.

Through the 1980s and 1990s he played at informal jam sessions at his home and made occasional guest appearances on record. In 1994 BMI gave him a Million-Air award for one million broadcasts of “Foggy Mountain Breakdown,” and he, his son Randy and Doc Watson recorded “Keep on the Sunny Side” for the benefit album Red Hot + Country. From 1997 he again accepted a limited number of concert and recording dates. His 2001 album Earl Scruggs and Friends, his first in seventeen years, brought in guests such as Elton John, Sting, Johnny Cash and Steve Martin, and its “Foggy Mountain Breakdown,” with Martin, Vince Gill, Albert Lee, Jerry Douglas and Marty Stuart among others, won the Grammy for Best Country Instrumental Performance in 2002. The Three Pickers, with Doc Watson and Ricky Skaggs, was recorded live in Winston-Salem in December 2002 and released by Rounder in 2003, and in 2005 “Earl’s Breakdown,” credited to the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band featuring Scruggs, Randy Scruggs, Vassar Clements and Jerry Douglas, won the same Grammy category. On 13 September 2006, 239 banjo players at Turner Field in Atlanta played “Foggy Mountain Breakdown” together in his honor, a world record. He died of natural causes in a Nashville hospital on 28 March 2012, aged 88. His funeral, open to the public, was held at the Ryman Auditorium on 1 April 2012, and he was buried at Spring Hill Cemetery.

In 1984 Gibson issued the Earl Scruggs Standard, a replica of his 1934 Gibson Granada Mastertone, a banjo that had passed from Snuffy Jenkins to Don Reno before Scruggs bought it; his family gave the original to the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum in May 2023. The Earl Scruggs Center, a museum and education center in the renovated county courthouse in Shelby, opened on 11 January 2014, and a centennial concert for him was held at the Ryman on 6 January 2024.

• 1985: Flatt & Scruggs elected to the Country Music Hall of Fame
• 1988: IBMA Distinguished Achievement Award
• 1989: National Heritage Fellowship
• 1991: International Bluegrass Music Hall of Honor, first class
• 1992: National Medal of Arts
• 1998–2013: Grammy Hall of Fame for Bill Monroe’s “Blue Moon of Kentucky” (1998), “Foggy Mountain Breakdown” (1999), Foggy Mountain Jamboree (2012) and Foggy Mountain Banjo (2013)
• 2003: star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame (13 February)
• 2005: “Foggy Mountain Breakdown” added to the National Recording Registry; honorary doctorate, Berklee College of Music
• 2007: Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame, with Lester Flatt
• 2008: Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award
• 2009: North Carolina Music Hall of Fame