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Earl Scruggs

Musician · 1924–2012 · Flint Hill, North Carolina · Also a recording artist
Best known for Banjo Composer

Earl Scruggs was one of the two irreplaceable founders of bluegrass music, the banjo player whose three-finger picking style—perfected by 1945—created the rapid, driving instrumental sound that set bluegrass apart from every form of country music that came before it. Where Bill Monroe supplied the vision and the repertoire, Scruggs supplied the sound, transforming the five-string banjo from a rhythm and novelty instrument into a lead voice capable of astonishing speed and clarity. No single innovation did more to define the genre, and no banjoist since has escaped his shadow.

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  • Born Earl Eugene Scruggs on January 6, 1924, in the Flint Hill community of Cleveland County, North Carolina, the youngest of five children. His father, George Elam Scruggs—a farmer, bookkeeper, and five-string banjo player—died of a lingering illness when Earl was four, leaving his mother, Georgia Lula Ruppe, to raise the family on the farm. Music surrounded him: older brothers Junie and Horace and his sisters all played banjo and guitar.
  • At age ten, idly playing the old tune “Reuben” in his room after a quarrel with his brother, Scruggs realized he was picking with three fingers rather than two—and ran through the house shouting that he had it. He did not invent three-finger banjo, which was common among western North Carolina players such as his relative Smith Hammett and DeWitt “Snuffy” Jenkins; his breakthrough was the cleanliness, speed, and systematic application of the roll across every song, giving the instrument a smooth, syncopated drive no one had matched.
  • As a teenager he played with the Carolina Wildcats, and in 1945 he toured briefly with Lost John Miller and His Allied Kentuckians. During World War II he worked in a Shelby textile mill making thread, exempted from service as the sole support of his widowed mother, before deciding to try music full time.
  • In December 1945 Scruggs auditioned for Bill Monroe backstage at the Grand Ole Opry and was hired on the spot. His arrival in Monroe’s Blue Grass Boys—alongside guitarist and lead singer Lester Flatt, fiddler Chubby Wise, and bassist Howard “Cedric Rainwater” Watts—produced what many consider the first true bluegrass band, and it was Scruggs’ banjo that electrified Opry audiences and set the template for the genre.
  • Scruggs left Monroe in early 1948, and later that year he and Lester Flatt formed the Foggy Mountain Boys, launching a twenty-year partnership that rivaled Monroe’s own band. They recorded first for Mercury Records (1948–1950), then moved to Columbia Records, where they remained until the act dissolved in 1969.
  • The band’s signature instrumental, “Foggy Mountain Breakdown,” was cut for Mercury on December 11, 1949, and became the definitive showcase for Scruggs-style banjo—a piece so identified with him that it would resurface repeatedly across his career and win two Grammy Awards decades apart.
  • Beginning in 1953 the Foggy Mountain Boys were sponsored by Martha White Flour, whose backing carried them onto WSM radio and, in 1955, into full membership in the Grand Ole Opry. Syndicated television and Martha White broadcasts made Flatt & Scruggs one of the most widely seen acts in country music.
  • Scruggs continued to invent. On “Earl’s Breakdown” and “Flint Hill Special” he introduced the cam-driven tuning pegs—now called Scruggs tuners—that let him bend strings up and down to pitch mid-tune, adding a vocal, sliding effect to the instrument.
  • The band’s Columbia albums Foggy Mountain Jamboree (1957) and the all-instrumental Foggy Mountain Banjo (1961) became touchstones for a generation of pickers. On the latter, Scruggs traded lines with Dobro master Josh Graves and fiddler Paul Warren; its twelve instrumentals are widely regarded among the most influential banjo recordings ever made.
  • Dobroist Josh Graves, who joined in the mid-1950s, adapted Scruggs’ rolls to the resonator guitar and effectively established the modern bluegrass Dobro style, one of many ways Scruggs’ approach rippled outward to other instruments.
  • “The Ballad of Jed Clampett,” recorded September 24, 1962, as the theme to the television series The Beverly Hillbillies, reached number one on the country chart and carried Flatt & Scruggs to a national mainstream audience few bluegrass acts ever reached. Later hits included “Petticoat Junction.”
  • In 1967 “Foggy Mountain Breakdown” was featured prominently in the film Bonnie and Clyde, winning a Grammy and introducing Scruggs-style banjo to a vast folk-rock and rock audience that had never encountered bluegrass.
  • His instructional book, Earl Scruggs and the 5-String Banjo (1968), codified his technique in tablature for the first time and sold more than a million copies, teaching Scruggs style to aspiring banjoists around the world and remaining the standard method for decades.
  • Flatt and Scruggs split in early 1969 over musical direction: Scruggs wanted to embrace rock, folk, and country-rock with his sons, while Flatt held to a traditional approach. The two never performed together again.
  • Scruggs promptly formed the Earl Scruggs Revue (1969–1980) with his sons Gary (bass), Randy (guitar), and Steve, often joined by fiddler Vassar Clements. The Revue recorded and performed with Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, the Byrds, and Doc Watson, cementing Scruggs as the more progressive figure to emerge from the partnership.
  • He remained active into his eighties. Earl Scruggs and Friends (2001) paired him with Sting, Elton John, Don Henley, Johnny Cash, and Billy Bob Thornton, and a re-recording of “Foggy Mountain Breakdown” with Steve Martin, Vince Gill, and Albert Lee won a Grammy—a second award for the same tune more than fifty years after he wrote it.
  • The album The Three Pickers (2003), recorded live with Doc Watson and Ricky Skaggs, brought another Grammy, its version of “Earl’s Breakdown” taking Best Country Instrumental Performance—part of a career total of four Grammy wins spanning six decades.
  • Honors accumulated across his life: Flatt & Scruggs were inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame in 1985; Scruggs received a National Heritage Fellowship in 1989, entered the inaugural class of the International Bluegrass Music Hall of Fame in 1991, and received the National Medal of Arts in 1992. He was given a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in 2003, and the Recording Academy awarded him a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award in 2008.
  • His influence is nearly total: virtually every bluegrass banjoist who followed—from J.D. Crowe and Sonny Osborne to Béla Fleck, Tony Trischka, and Steve Martin—built on the Scruggs style, and the phrase itself became shorthand for the three-finger roll that defines the instrument in bluegrass.
  • Earl Scruggs died of natural causes in Nashville, Tennessee, on March 28, 2012, at age 88. He was buried at Spring Hill Cemetery in Madison, Tennessee, remembered as the man whose banjo gave bluegrass its unmistakable sound.

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