“Foggy Mountain Breakdown” was written by Earl Scruggs and first recorded on December 11, 1949, by Lester Flatt & Earl Scruggs and the Foggy Mountain Boys for Mercury Records, with Scruggs’s three-finger banjo style at the center of the arrangement. Released in 1950, the recording quickly became one of the genre-defining instrumentals of bluegrass — a showcase piece for the rolling banjo technique that Scruggs had developed and that would define the sound of the music for the next half-century.
The tune broke beyond the bluegrass audience after its prominent use in the 1967 film Bonnie and Clyde, where it scored the film’s car-chase sequences and anchored the soundtrack’s evocation of rural America. A re-recorded Columbia Records version released to capitalize on the film’s success reached number 55 on the Billboard Hot 100 in 1968, and the tune’s association with cinematic pursuit scenes has carried through countless film and television uses since.
“Foggy Mountain Breakdown” took the Grammy for Best Country Performance, Duo or Group, in 1969, and the original 1950 Mercury recording was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame in 1999. Scruggs won a second Grammy for a 2001 re-recording of the tune. It shares its opening double hammer-on with Bill Monroe’s “Bluegrass Breakdown” — both tunes are unavoidable reference points in the bluegrass instrumental canon — though the two diverge harmonically, with Monroe’s piece settling into a major key while Foggy Mountain Breakdown’s chord progression lives in a minor mode.