Randy Scruggs

Randy Lynn Scruggs was born in Nashville on 3 August 1953; his father marked the birth with “Randy Lynn Rag.” He grew up with his older brother Gary and younger brother Steve. He was a guest on the Flatt & Scruggs television series at nine and played his first recording session at thirteen. Around 1967 he and Gary backed the singer Elmer Hinton on an album for the Georgie label, with Randy on banjo and twelve-string guitar.

The brothers then made two albums for Vanguard as a rock-leaning duo: All the Way Home, recorded at Woodland Sound in Nashville in 1969 with Charlie Daniels producing, and The Scruggs Brothers (1972), on which their father played banjo. When Earl Scruggs split from Lester Flatt in 1969, the sons became the core of his new band, the Earl Scruggs Revue. Randy played guitar and banjo and sang on the Columbia sessions of April 1971 that brought in the Byrds and Doc Watson, played bass on John Hartford’s Aereo-Plain the same year, and was on guitar for the Revue’s live recording of August 1972, with Josh Graves and Vassar Clements in the band. The Revue placed several singles and albums on the charts through the 1970s, the highest a Top 30 country single in 1979, “I Could Sure Use the Feeling.”

After the family band wound down he became a first-call session guitarist, working early on with Linda Ronstadt, Marty Robbins and Willie Nelson, and over the next decades with Dolly Parton, Johnny Cash, George Strait, George Jones, Tammy Wynette, Vince Gill, Ricky Skaggs, Tom T. Hall, Rosanne Cash, Marty Stuart, the Dixie Chicks, Miranda Lambert and Wilco. Around 1980 he opened his own studio, Scruggs Sound, on Azalea Place in Berry Hill, and the Revue cut part of its last Columbia album there in May 1980, with Earl, Gary and Randy producing. He produced and played guitar and mandolin on The Storyteller and the Banjoman (1982), his father’s album with Tom T. Hall.

As a songwriter he had more than 100 songs recorded in the 1980s and 1990s. With Earl Thomas Conley he wrote “Your Love’s on the Line,” “Don’t Make It Easy for Me,” “Angel in Disguise,” “Chance of Lovin’ You” and “Love Don’t Care (Whose Heart It Breaks),” hits for Conley between 1983 and 1985; he also co-wrote Sawyer Brown’s “Shakin’” and “Out Goin’ Cattin’” (1986), Billy Joe Royal’s “Love Has No Right” (1989) and Deana Carter’s “We Danced Anyway” (1997).

His production list ran from Waylon Jennings, Emmylou Harris, John Denver and Levon Helm to Alison Krauss, New Grass Revival, Diamond Rio, Toby Keith and Leftover Salmon. He produced the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band’s Will the Circle Be Unbroken: Volume Two at Scruggs Sound, and it was named the CMA’s Album of the Year; his “Amazing Grace” from it won his first Grammy, at the 1990 ceremony. He also produced the Keith Whitley tribute album (1994) and the AIDS benefit Red Hot + Country, to which he, his father and Doc Watson contributed “Keep on the Sunny Side.”

His only solo album, Crown of Jewels, came out on Warner Bros. in June 1998, a set of duets cut at his own studio with Vince Gill, Mary Chapin Carpenter, Trisha Yearwood, Travis Tritt, John Prine, Emmylou Harris and Iris DeMent, Rosanne Cash and others; “It’s Only Love,” with Carpenter, reached the country chart, and “A Soldier’s Joy,” with Gill, won the Grammy in 1999. He produced his father’s Earl Scruggs and Friends (MCA Nashville, 2001), whose all-star “Foggy Mountain Breakdown” won the Grammy in 2002, and he played on the Dirt Band’s Will the Circle Be Unbroken, Volume III (2002), whose “Earl’s Breakdown” brought his fourth Grammy in 2005.

In his last years he played on Johnny Cash: Forever Words and on records by Loretta Lynn, Bobby Bare, Kellie Pickler, Mo Pitney, Elizabeth Cook and the Pistol Annies. Shortly before his death he sold Scruggs Sound to the Canadian singer-songwriter Johnny Reid, who reopened it as Soultrain Sound Studios in 2020. Randy Scruggs died on 17 April 2018, aged 64.