Lester Flatt

Lester Raymond Flatt was born on 19 June 1914 at Duncan’s Chapel in Overton County, Tennessee, one of nine children of Isaac Columbus Flatt and Nannie Mae Haney, a sharecropping family near Sparta. Both his parents played clawhammer banjo and his father fiddled as well. Lester started on the banjo, switched to guitar at seven and sang in church, and he left school at twelve. Like most country guitarists of the 1930s and 1940s he played with a thumb pick and a finger pick, in a style that owed something to Charlie Monroe and Clyde Moody. From 1931 he worked in textile mills in Sparta and in Covington, Virginia, playing music on the side, and by 1939 he was on the radio in Roanoke with Charlie Scott’s Harmonizers. Around 1940–41 he sang tenor with Clyde Moody’s Happy-Go-Lucky Boys in Burlington, North Carolina, and in the early 1940s he also worked there with Jim Hall and the Crazy Mountaineers.

In 1943 he joined Charlie Monroe’s Kentucky Pardners in Winston-Salem, singing tenor and playing mandolin as well as guitar. Two years later Charlie’s brother Bill hired him for the Blue Grass Boys, and he moved to lead singing for good. With Monroe he sang lead, played rhythm guitar and emceed the shows, and he was featured as a crooning vocalist much as big bands of the day featured their singers. The run he used to close phrases was, he said later, a “time setter” for the band’s fast tempos; the phrase was common in country guitar, but he used it so often that it came to be called the “Lester Flatt G-run.”

When the banjo player David “Stringbean” Akeman left, Flatt was in no hurry to replace him, until Earl Scruggs auditioned backstage late in 1945; Flatt then urged Monroe to hire him “no matter what it costs.” With fiddler Chubby Wise and bassist Howard Watts, the band recorded for Columbia in Chicago in September 1946 and October 1947, cutting “Heavy Traffic Ahead,” “Blue Moon of Kentucky,” “Molly and Tenbrooks” and the Flatt–Monroe song “Little Cabin Home on the Hill.”

Flatt and Scruggs left Monroe early in 1948 and that spring formed the Foggy Mountain Boys. Their first Mercury session, around November 1948 at WROL in Knoxville, with Jim Shumate on fiddle and Mac Wiseman singing, included their own “My Cabin in Caroline” along with “We’ll Meet Again Sweetheart.” “Foggy Mountain Breakdown” followed in Cincinnati on 11 December 1949, and their last Mercury session, at WDAE in Tampa on 20 October 1950, produced “Rollin’ in My Sweet Baby’s Arms” and “Salty Dog Blues.” In 1950 they signed with Columbia, where they stayed for the rest of the partnership; “Don’t Get Above Your Raisin’” was cut at a Columbia session in Nashville on 9 May 1951. Martha White Flour began sponsoring their program on WSM in 1953, a fifteen-minute slot at 5:45 in the morning called Martha White Biscuit Time. A television show followed two years later and was carried in other Southern markets; it is counted as the first widely syndicated bluegrass television show, and since the technology of the time meant the band had to be at each station, they fitted out a bus and traveled more than any other Opry act. In 1955 the sponsor pressed for them to join the Grand Ole Opry, and Flatt remained a member until his death. Monroe tried to block the move, and he did not speak to Flatt again until a reconciliation at Bean Blossom in 1973. By then the band had settled into a long-serving core: Curly Seckler on mandolin and tenor from 1949, bassist Jake Tullock from 1953, fiddler Paul Warren from 1954 and Josh Graves on Dobro from 1955.

Flatt wrote or co-wrote more than 150 songs. Those that reached the charts include “Sweetheart You Done Me Wrong” and “When You Are Lonely” for Monroe (1948–49), “Cabin on the Hill” (1959) and “The Legend of the Johnson Boys” (1962) for Flatt & Scruggs, and “Don’t Get Above Your Raising,” a hit for Ricky Skaggs in 1981. The early 1960s brought the duo’s widest audience. They played the Newport Folk Festival in July 1960 and again in 1966. “The Ballad of Jed Clampett,” recorded on 24 September 1962 as the theme of The Beverly Hillbillies and sung by Jerry Scoggins, was their only number one country single, and they appeared on the show as themselves; “Pearl, Pearl, Pearl,” which they performed there, reached number 8 in 1963. Their concert at Carnegie Hall on 8 December 1962, with Merle Travis also on guitar, was issued by Columbia in 1963 as Flatt & Scruggs at Carnegie Hall!, and a concert at Vanderbilt University on 2 May 1963 became an album the following year. Their 1949 “Foggy Mountain Breakdown” was used in the 1967 film Bonnie and Clyde, and the instrumental won them the Grammy for Best Country Performance, Duo or Group, at the 1969 ceremony.

By then the partners were pulling apart. Late-1960s Columbia sessions brought in Bob Dylan songs, which Flatt was uncomfortable singing, while Scruggs wanted to play newer music with his sons, and musical and business differences ended the act early in 1969. Flatt kept most of the band and named it the Nashville Grass, the winning entry in a Martha White contest and a play on the name of Danny Davis and the Nashville Brass. He recorded for Columbia in 1969, sessions issued on the album Flatt Out (1970), for Nugget in 1970 and for RCA Victor from November 1970, with Bob Ferguson producing. The RCA years brought Flatt on Victor (1971) and Kentucky Ridgerunner (1972), three albums of duets with Mac Wiseman—Lester ’n’ Mac (1971), On the South Bound (1972) and Over the Hills to the Poorhouse (1973)—and a live concert with Bill Monroe at Vanderbilt University on 19 March 1974.

In August 1972 Roland White brought thirteen-year-old Marty Stuart to a Nashville Grass festival date, and by the end of the weekend Flatt had asked him to join. Stuart played fiddle, guitar and mandolin on Flatt’s records from 1972 until 1978. Curly Seckler came back to the band, and the later albums were made for CMH in Charlotte, North Carolina, up to October 1978, with a gospel album, Flatt Gospel, for Canaan in 1975. Failing health cut back his touring, and early in 1979 he retired, asking Seckler to carry on the Nashville Grass. Shortly before he died, after ten years in which the two had not spoken, Scruggs made an unannounced visit to his hospital bedside and they talked for more than an hour. He died of heart failure in Nashville on 11 May 1979, aged sixty-four, and was buried at Oaklawn Cemetery outside Sparta. Claire Lynch later wrote “The Day That Lester Died.” Sparta holds an annual Liberty Square: A Lester Flatt Celebration, and in October 2014, for his centenary, a historical marker in his honor was unveiled there, an idea brought to the county commissioners by Blake and Kimberly Williams; Blake Williams had played in the Nashville Grass.

• 1955: Grand Ole Opry member (until 1979)
• 1985: Flatt & Scruggs elected to the Country Music Hall of Fame
• 1989: IBMA Distinguished Achievement Award
• 1991: IBMA Hall of Honor, inaugural class
• 1999: Grammy Hall of Fame, Flatt & Scruggs’s “Foggy Mountain Breakdown” (followed by Foggy Mountain Jamboree in 2012 and Foggy Mountain Banjo in 2013)
• 2005: “Foggy Mountain Breakdown” added to the National Recording Registry
• 2007: Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame, with Earl Scruggs