Join free

Lester Flatt

Musician · 1914–1979 · Duncan's Chapel, Tennessee · Also a recording artist
Best known for Guitar Lead Vocals Songwriter

Lester Flatt was the warm, unforced voice and steady rhythm guitar of bluegrass music’s most iconic partnership, the twenty-one-year alliance with banjoist Earl Scruggs that carried the young genre from Southern radio barns to Carnegie Hall and network television. His relaxed baritone lead, his songwriting, and the bass-run guitar lick still called the “Lester Flatt G-run” became load-bearing elements of the bluegrass vocabulary. After the celebrated split with Scruggs in 1969 he led the Nashville Grass through the 1970s, a working custodian of the traditional style he had helped invent.

Assisted by AI. Spot something off? Help us fix it.
  • Born June 19, 1914 in Duncan’s Chapel, Overton County, Tennessee, in the hill country of the Upper Cumberland; he learned to play on an inexpensive guitar his father bought him and, like many of his generation, spent his young adulthood working in textile mills across Virginia and Tennessee while performing at night.
  • His first wife, Gladys Stacey Flatt, performed alongside him as a singing duo in the Roanoke, Virginia area in the late 1930s and early 1940s; she took the stage name Bobbie Jean and worked with him in Charlie Monroe’s band before stepping away from music when he joined Bill Monroe in 1945.
  • In 1943 he joined Charlie Monroe’s Kentucky Pardners as mandolinist and tenor vocalist, his first steady footing in a professional band.
  • In March 1945 Bill Monroe hired him into the Blue Grass Boys as guitarist and lead singer; that December a young North Carolina banjoist named Earl Scruggs joined, completing what is now regarded as the classic, genre-defining edition of Monroe’s band.
  • The 1946–47 Columbia recordings by that lineup—Monroe, Flatt, Scruggs, fiddler Chubby Wise, and bassist Howard “Cedric Rainwater” Watts—codified the high-lonesome ensemble sound that would be recognized as bluegrass, a distinct genre rather than a regional flavor of country.
  • Both Flatt and Scruggs left Monroe early in 1948; that spring the two formed Lester Flatt and Earl Scruggs and the Foggy Mountain Boys, the first bluegrass act to achieve sustained national and eventually international prominence.
  • They recorded for Mercury from 1948 to 1950, cutting the instrumental “Foggy Mountain Breakdown” in December 1949—a Scruggs showcase that became one of the most famous tunes in American music—alongside Flatt-associated staples such as “Roll in My Sweet Baby’s Arms” and “Salty Dog Blues.”
  • The band moved to Columbia Records in 1950 and stayed for the remainder of its life, through 1969, building the catalog on which the duo’s reputation rests.
  • Their working band set a standard for the genre and included longtime sidemen Curly Seckler on mandolin and tenor, fiddler Paul Warren, and—from 1955—Burkett “Josh” (Uncle Josh) Graves, whose Scruggs-style resonator guitar brought the Dobro into bluegrass as a lead instrument.
  • A 1953 sponsorship by Martha White Flour underwrote their daily WSM radio show and touring, a commercial relationship that anchored the act for years; they became members of the Grand Ole Opry in 1955.
  • Flatt wrote or co-wrote a body of standards sung across the tradition, among them “Cabin in Caroline,” “We’ll Meet Again Sweetheart,” “Don’t Get Above Your Raisin’,” and “Little Cabin Home on the Hill,” the last co-written with Bill Monroe during his Blue Grass Boys years.
  • He sang lead on “The Ballad of Jed Clampett,” the theme to the CBS series The Beverly Hillbillies, which reached number one on the Billboard country chart in early 1963 and made the duo household names far beyond the bluegrass audience.
  • The use of “Foggy Mountain Breakdown” in the 1967 film Bonnie and Clyde touched off a national revival of the tune and drew a new generation to the pair’s music.
  • That exposure helped earn Flatt and Scruggs a Grammy Award for Best Country Performance, Duo or Group, Vocal or Instrumental for “Foggy Mountain Breakdown” at the 1969 ceremony, a rare mainstream honor for a bluegrass recording of the era.
  • Landmark albums from the partnership include Foggy Mountain Jamboree (Columbia, 1957) and the live Flatt & Scruggs at Carnegie Hall (recorded 1962), documents that helped carry bluegrass to folk-revival and urban concert audiences.
  • His rhythm playing gave the genre one of its most durable fixtures: the ascending bass-run turnaround known as the “Lester Flatt G-run,” among the most widely imitated rhythm-guitar figures in bluegrass.
  • Flatt and Scruggs disbanded in 1969 amid disagreement over musical direction—Flatt held to the traditional repertoire while Scruggs moved toward folk-rock and contemporary material—ending the most influential band the genre had produced.
  • He formed Lester Flatt and the Nashville Grass in 1969, keeping the traditional style before the public throughout the 1970s on the Opry, at festivals, and on records for labels including RCA, Nugget, and CMH; a teenaged Marty Stuart joined the band in 1972 at age thirteen.
  • Through the Nashville Grass he mentored a rising cohort—Stuart, mandolinist and singer Roland White, and banjoist Blake Williams among them—passing the traditional idiom directly to musicians who carried it into later decades.
  • His honors include induction into the Country Music Hall of Fame in 1985 (with Scruggs) and, as part of its inaugural class, the International Bluegrass Music Association’s Hall of Honor in 1991; Flatt and Scruggs were later elected to the Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame in 2007.
  • Lester Flatt died of heart failure in Nashville on May 11, 1979, at age sixty-four, and was buried at Oaklawn Memorial Cemetery in Sparta, Tennessee, the White County town where he had long made his home; Sparta continues to honor him with its annual Liberty Square celebration.

Roulette Settings

Calculating…
Popularity
Type
Genres
Bluegrass
Folk
Country
Old-Time
Other
Popularity
Difficulty
Type
Key
Featured Instruments
Origin

Share Playlist