“Earl’s Breakdown” is a banjo instrumental by Earl Scruggs. Lester Flatt, Earl Scruggs and the Foggy Mountain Boys first recorded it for Columbia on the afternoon of 24 October 1951, at Castle Studio in the Tulane Hotel in Nashville. Scruggs played banjo and Flatt guitar, with Everett Lilly on mandolin, Howdy Forrester on fiddle and Jody Rainwater on bass. Columbia released it on 30 November 1951 on 4-20886, with “’Tis Sweet to Be Remembered” on the other side. In October 1954 it was coupled with Scruggs’s “Flint Hill Special” on Columbia 52010. Peer published the tune.
Its hook is a sudden drop in pitch in the middle of a break. Scruggs detuned strings while they were still sounding and then brought them back up, a trick he and his brother Horace had tried out as boys. To do it accurately he built cam-type pegs of his own. He drilled holes in the banjo’s peghead to fit them and chipped the pearl inlay, then covered the holes with a metal plate, which shows on the cover of Foggy Mountain Jamboree.
That album (Columbia CL 1019), released on 7 October 1957, collected the 1951 recording along with “Flint Hill Special,” “Foggy Mountain Chimes” and “Randy Lynn Rag,” three more instrumentals that use Scruggs’s cam tuners. The album entered the Grammy Hall of Fame in 2012. Those four tunes inspired Bill Keith, who with Dan Bump drew up a streamlined version of Scruggs’s tuners in 1963. They began making them in 1964, and Scruggs was a co-owner of the business until around 1970. The “Keith tuners” let players change pitch accurately while playing.
Scruggs’s sons Gary and Randy recorded the tune at Woodland Sound Studios in Nashville for All the Way Home (Vanguard, 1970), with Randy on banjo. In 1980 Carl Jackson recorded it for Banjo Man: A Tribute to Earl Scruggs (Sugar Hill), with Marty Stuart, Vassar Clements, Jerry Douglas and Jim Brock Jr.
