EARL SCRUGGS
Earl Scruggs (January 6, 1924 – March 28, 2012) was an American musician noted for popularizing a three-finger banjo picking style, now called “Scruggs style”, that is a defining characteristic of bluegrass music. He popularized the instrument in several genres of music and elevated the banjo from its role as a background rhythm instrument, or a comedian’s prop, into featured solo status. The Flatt and Scruggs instrumental called “Foggy Mountain Breakdown”, released in 1949, became an enduring hit, and had a rebirth of popularity to a younger generation when it was featured in the 1967 film Bonnie and Clyde. Flatt and Scruggs brought bluegrass music into mainstream popularity in the early 1960s with their country hit, “The Ballad of Jed Clampett” (the theme music for the television sitcom The Beverly Hillbillies), the first bluegrass recording to reach number one on the Billboard charts. Scruggs received four Grammy awards, a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award and a National Medal of Arts. (More from Wikipedia)
This would be a good time to relate my recent purchase of a one-of-a-kind, three-disc album called Will the Circle be Unbroken (1972). Unlike nearly all of the other rock and country collaborations that I know about, in this case the rockers hand the keys off to country music legends and let them drive. Ostensibly (or even technically) a Nitty Gritty Dirt Band album, Wikipedia calls the album a “collaboration from many famous bluegrass and country-western players, including Roy Acuff, ‘Mother’ Maybelle Carter, Doc Watson, Earl Scruggs, Merle Travis, Pete ‘Oswald’ Kirby, Norman Blake, Jimmy Martin, and others. It also introduced fiddler Vassar Clements to a wider audience.”
(February 2015)
