I always loved Lester Flatt and Earl Scruggs, and I just went after ’em and saw that they didn’t have anybody to produce ’em, so I went and asked ’em if I could produce ’em, and they said, “Yeah,” and they loved it. So I was doing Dylan, and Simon and Garfunkel, and Cohen, and Cash, and all those people, and I figured, hell, I might as well do them too.
—Bob Johnston, retired producer, Columbia Records
Immediately following the success of The Beverly Hillbillies, Flatt and Scruggs were well on their way to soaring heights. The first major milestone to emerge was Carnegie Hall on December 8, 1962. Even though Earl Taylor and the Stoney Mountain Boys predated Flatt and Scruggs at Carnegie, their appearance was part of Alan Lomax’s musical production Folksong ’59 and not as a headline attraction under their own name.[1] Thus Flatt and Scruggs hold the distinguished honor of becoming the first bluegrass band to headline at the prestigious concert hall in New York City. According to liner notes written by Earl Scruggs for The Essential Earl Scruggs album, Louise Scruggs telephoned Columbia producer Don Law several days before the group’s date to make arrangements for the concert to be recorded. With the aid of the record company’s New York office, the thirty-two-song recital was successfully taped. However, when the vinyl release of At Carnegie Hall! landed in stores nearly a year later in October 1963, only thirteen tracks made the grooves as there were no plans to press a three-record set for the event.
Regardless of the number of songs left off the album, the product did contain material by the band that had not been previously recorded in studio for consumer release, such as their famous “Martha White Theme” jingle and Earl’s long-running novelty “Mama Blues.” The latter interestingly dispelled an allegation once made by Uncle Dave Macon that Earl Scruggs wasn’t funny. He wrote “Mama Blues” several years earlier as a short, humorous little tune where he talks to his banjo and chokes the second string in a way that mimics a little boy conversing with his daddy. Years after the initial At Carnegie Hall! release, Columbia Records issued a CD containing the entire thirty-two-song set list, subtitled “The Complete Concert.”
Even though another studio recording, Hard Travelin’, was issued before At Carnegie Hall!, the live album was the first Flatt and Scruggs record to feature their newest addition to the Foggy Mountain Boys, rhythm guitarist Billy Powers, who remained with the group until a serious motorcycle accident put him out of commission in 1964 and he was replaced by Johnny Johnson. Mandolinists Monroe Fields, Everett Lilly, and Earl Taylor also took brief turns in the band during the 1960s.
Carnegie Hall would soon be followed up by another historic feat in May 1963—a Flatt and Scruggs concert at Vanderbilt University. Regardless of the fact that its campus is located in Nashville, the school was typically hostile toward acts associated with the Grand Ole Opry.[2] Nonetheless, its negative attitude didn’t deter Louise from orchestrating another live album. Vanderbilt captured the mood of the youth of America in full swing with the growing folk boom. Though Flatt and Scruggs had been touring the college/university circuit since 1961, none of their campus performances had ever been recorded. Distributed in 1964, Recorded Live at Vanderbilt University was not only the duo’s second concert album (stamped with thirteen tracks); it would also be their last concert recorded by Columbia.
Soon after Vanderbilt, Flatt and Scruggs traveled to George Washington University in Washington, DC, for the taping of ABC’s short-lived Saturday night series Hootenanny, a folk music variety show that broadcasted from a different college each week. Their videotaped appearance would air on the program’s season finale on June 15, 1963.[3] In an interview on WLOE radio in late May of that year, Scruggs commented to disc jockey Ernie Knight that he and Lester were already booked out for the next twenty-eight weeks, with scattered dates as far as two years in advance. All of this on top of their ongoing tapings for their daily radio show and their weekly television program. In midsummer on July 14, they played to an estimated crowd of more than twenty thousand at Nashville’s Centennial Park.[4]
In the midst of all this activity, Earl embarked on an idea that he had for an instruction book to teach beginners how to play the banjo. Ever so generous to show aspiring banjoists his tricks of the trade, Earl’s idea sprang from his previous “Suggestions for Banjo Beginners,” a page that first appeared in the Flatt and Scruggs Picture Album Song Books in the midfifties. Since Scruggs didn’t read music or tablature, he would need assistance in executing this ambitious task. His help arrived most unexpectedly from a “Yankee” five-string picker who was in sheer awe of Earl’s full utilization of the banjo’s resources. Noted developer of the melodic style of banjo playing Bill Keith illustrates the evolution of the tablature for Earl Scruggs and the 5-String Banjo:
I started transcribing Earl’s material and putting it in tablature form. I learned the tablature system through Pete Seeger, who was the author of the first book I had on how to play the five-string banjo, and he was using tablature as well as music notation. So I picked up the tablature system, which I find is an excellent way to represent the music. I had basically written out all of Earl Scruggs’s instrumentals and a few vocals during the latter part of 1962. I was living in Washington, DC, and apprenticing [for] a banjo builder named Tom Morgan and also playing with Red Allen and Frank Wakefield. During the day, I would be transcribing and annotating the recordings that I had available.
Then, in December of ’62, Tom Morgan and I noticed that Earl and his band [the Foggy Mountain Boys] would be appearing in Baltimore, which was a short hop from Washington, DC. That event was organized, or promoted, by a fellow named Manny Greenhill, who was from the Boston area. Tom and I decided to drive up to Baltimore to see the show, and Manny was producing it, so I took along my book of transcriptions and after the show I asked Manny if we could get into the greenroom to visit with Earl—Louise was there too—and he said, “Sure,” so we went in there.
I also had brought a book published by Peer International that had representations of Earl’s instrumentals, some of them, in music notation. But they weren’t anything like what Earl was doing—they weren’t correct at all. So when we got into talking about Earl’s music, I made the remark that these were not accurate at all. And [Earl] said he couldn’t read music, so he couldn’t ever really tell if it was right or wrong. And I said, “Well, here’s what they have written,” and I played [on Earl’s banjo] one of the transcriptions. Then I pulled out my book [of tablature] and opened it up to the same tune and played it, and [Earl] said, “Yes, that’s correct.”
So he tested me by choosing a tune in the book and opening up to that page and had me play it. While his head was turned toward the book, his eyes were shifted over to watch my right hand. I think that tune was “Home Sweet Home.” I played it just like it was on the record—and he said, “Yes, that was right.” And then he opened up to “Sally Goodin” and asked me to play that, and I did. He said that was largely correct also. He said there was one mistake I was making and that was holding down the E at the ninth fret constantly instead of just fretting when the note should be heard. That was easy enough to correct. He checked me on one or two other things, and he then consulted [with] Louise and they asked me to come down to Nashville to work on Earl’s book—and yes, I agreed.
In early ’63, I flew to Nashville and was staying at Earl’s house and occasionally jamming with him and working more on the book, testing each of my transcriptions by playing them for him and seeing if there were any corrections to make—and, by and large, there were very few corrections. A lot of the text was generated by Burt Brent, who also wrote “How to Build a Banjo” [near] the end of the instruction book.
After Bill Keith’s contribution came to an end in 1963, there was still much more work to be done before the project was finished. Gary Scruggs discusses Burt Brent’s participation that led to the manuscript’s completion:
The tablatures Bill Keith had produced lay dormant for well over a year as no attempt was made to write instructional chapters. In the autumn of 1964, Dad met Dr. Burt Brent, who was serving as a medical officer in the 101st Airborne Division at Fort Campbell, Kentucky, which is just sixty miles or so from where we lived at that time. Burt had been learning Scruggs-style banjo with the help of a banjo-picking friend of his named Warren Kennison Jr., who taught Burt how to play some of Dad’s material.
Burt was a meticulous banjo student and had, as he said, “dissected” Dad’s different right-hand roll patterns and other banjo-picking techniques. He convinced Dad that it would be possible to write a step-by-step instructional book outlining how to play Scruggs-style banjo and Dad agreed to give it a try. Dad and Burt worked together on writing teaching chapters regarding details of both Scruggs-style picking and the five-string banjo itself. The instructional chapters were finished within the next several months while Burt was still stationed in Fort Campbell. Bill Keith was then contacted, and he got on board with his tablatures that were incorporated into the book. Burt’s friend, Warren Kennison Jr., also provided some tablatures he had previously written out.
The final product wasn’t published by Peer International Corporation until 1968. There was an earlier promise of its release that never came to fruition, as indicated in Flatt and Scruggs ’66, which detailed the book’s contents and accompanying album to be available on March 1 of that year.[5] The two-year delay would actually be a blessing in disguise, as Earl was afforded the luxury of promoting his new book on national television via The Beverly Hillbillies, as previously mentioned.
Another little side venture that supported his desire to help banjo enthusiasts, also advertised in the Picture Album Song Books, was Earl’s reselling of old Gibson banjos. Genuinely caring about the economic plight of struggling musicians wishing for a quality instrument, Scruggs offered an affordable solution. One such individual who purchased a used Gibson from Earl was Bernie Leadon, an up-and-coming banjo player and guitarist who later cofounded pop music supergroup the Eagles. Leadon revisits his excursion to the Scruggs residence:
I first met Earl in person when a friend of mine from Gainesville, Florida, decided to take up the banjo, and he thought, in order to get a good one, he would call up Earl and ask his advice. We didn’t know that Earl had a sort of sideline of work, buying and reselling banjos to folks like us. So my friend and I were soon driving up to Madison, Tennessee, in about 1965. We visited Earl and Louise and their home in Madison, and I remember they showed us around the house, and Gary and Randy were still in school and living at home. Louise and Earl worked out of a den office in the house. The office was filled with photos of Flatt and Scruggs awards and on one wall Uncle Dave Macon’s open-back banjo [hung] over a couch. Earl brought out his Granada for us to play, and he patiently showed us how he scored the back of his plastic thumb pick with his pocket knife, so it would stay on his thumb better. He played a bit also, but after a couple hours, cash was exchanged for the banjo he was selling, which as far as I can remember, was not an original flathead. But it came from Earl!
In 1964, a relatively unknown songwriter with a knack for composing “storied” songs arrived in town and soon became a dear friend to Earl and Louise. Tom T. Hall emerged as an important fixture in the Flatt and Scruggs camp by way of the compositions he penned for them, such as “A Stone the Builders Refused” in 1966, “California Uptight Band” in 1967, and his multiple songs (including the title track) for The Story of Bonnie & Clyde album in 1968. The storyteller reminisces about his introduction to the Scruggs family:
I got to Nashville in 1964, on January 1, in case anyone ever asks me, because I’m so terrible with dates, but I can remember that. When I got to Nashville, I was on Music Row, writing songs and pitching them to people, and Jim and Jesse, and Jimmy Martin, and Flatt and Scruggs, and the bluegrass acts around town started recording my songs, and I’m sure it was because they could tell by the demo and the way I played the guitar on the little demo, they could [tell] by listening that I knew what I was doing when I was writing a bluegrass song.
Louise Scruggs really liked my songwriting, and she got Flatt and Scruggs to do a lot of my songs, and, of course, I got to know Earl, and sometimes I’d go out to where they lived in Madison. They rehearsed all these things [at Earl’s house]. They would stand around and work out every note in the song, eleven or twelve songs. They’d rehearse these songs and then they’d go in the studio and they could just cut one after the other. Earl didn’t like the idea of changing anything, once you got an arrangement on it, [and] they made their records pretty quick.
I got to know them because they recorded a lot of my tunes, and that’s how we got to be acquaintances at that time. I did play some television shows with Lester and Earl, because, when I started making records, my first song was “I Washed My Face in the Morning Dew,” which was a bluegrass tune with a folk attitude, and Louise really liked that song, and I’d already recorded it for Mercury, but she invited me to be on [their] TV show, and I did the TV several times. That’s when I [really] got to pick with Earl.
That same year, Detroit-based country music promoter Victor Lewis, along with local filmmaker Victor Duncan, organized a rare concert event for the big screen in partnership with Marathon Pictures Corporation. Filmed in New York City, Flatt and Scruggs joined company with such artists as Buck Owens, Skeeter Davis, George Jones, Wilma Lee and Stoney Cooper, and Hank Williams Jr. in the first-ever country-themed motion picture, Country Music on Broadway. Introduced onscreen by emcee Ralph Emery as “just about the best” act in bluegrass, the boys open with their cover of Woody Guthrie’s “New York Town,” appropriately chosen, given the location (not to mention its lyrics depicting the struggles of being an outsider in the Big Apple), yet it was followed up, in contrast, by the joyfully spirited tune bearing the name of Earl’s rural birthplace, “Flint Hill Special.”[6]
Before the close of 1964, Flatt and Scruggs incorporated the harmonica of Nashville session musician Charlie McCoy (the future music director for Hee Haw, among his many credits), who previously worked with Roy Orbison on his hit song “Candy Man” and was quickly becoming one of the most sought-after studio musicians. McCoy’s presence gave the duo’s arrangements a richer, more up-to-date sound that kept them on their course away from the traditional style of bluegrass. His participation wouldn’t be noticed until after two more Flatt and Scruggs albums came to light: The Fabulous Sound of Flatt and Scruggs (Columbia, 1964) and Kings of Bluegrass—Great Original Recordings Volume 1 (Harmony, 1965). McCoy is first introduced on the back cover of Columbia’s The Versatile Flatt and Scruggs—Pickin’, Strummin’ and Singin’, a concept album from 1965 about broken love and regrets as depicted in “You’re Gonna Miss Me When I’m Gone,” “I Still Miss Someone,” and “The Soldier’s Return.”
In keeping with the spirit of thematic albums, Flatt and Scruggs recorded Town and Country in September 1965, where all but one song title contains the name of a real place, such as “Jackson” and “Detroit City,” or as in Earl’s original bluesy lonesome-sounding composition “Nashville Blues.” And yet, at least one fictitious landmark appears, a newly arranged version of “Foggy Mountain Breakdown,” complete with a harmonica break. The album hit the streets in January 1966, which marked the beginning of a commercial onslaught of Flatt and Scruggs LPs throughout the next two years: When the Saints Go Marching In (Columbia, 1966), Greatest Hits (Columbia, 1966), Strictly Instrumental with guest artist Doc Watson (Columbia, 1967), Hear the Whistles Blow: Lester Flatt and Earl Scruggs Sing Songs of Rivers and Rails (Columbia, 1967), and Sacred Songs (Harmony, 1967), their final gospel release.
Despite the saturation of Flatt and Scruggs products from Columbia, sales were beginning to decline as the preferences of record consumers had moved into a more counterculture state of mind. However, a positive explosion was on the brink from Hollywood that would resurrect a classic recording of Earl’s and bring forth accolades that were unattainable to him decades earlier.
In August 1967, Warner Bros. released their blockbuster motion picture Bonnie and Clyde. The film was a romanticized depiction of outlaws Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow, whose two-year crime spree of bank robbing and murder spread from Texas all the way up to Minnesota during the Great Depression. With Faye Dunaway cast as Bonnie Parker and Warren Beatty as Clyde Barrow, the film sparked a gangster fad across the country and was Oscar nominated for the year’s Best Picture. And cruising along for the ride were Lester Flatt and Earl Scruggs with a renewed interest in their eighteen-year-old instrumental “Foggy Mountain Breakdown.”
Beatty, who also produced the Hollywood box office hit, was barely thirty years old when the project went into production. Desiring a musical number that would complement some of the fast-paced action sequences, the young producer instinctively thought of Earl Scruggs. In his 2003 interview on NPR’s Fresh Air, Scruggs depicted how his initial involvement ended with an unexpected twist. “[Warren Beatty] called and wanted me to write a tune. So [then] he called back, I think I’m quoting this exactly the way it was, in a few days, and said he didn’t want me to write anything because he found a tune that he thought fit what he wanted.”
The tune Beatty found within his music library took root from a seed that was planted in his ear when he was a high school senior in Arlington, Virginia. As part of a civics class assignment at Washington-Lee High School, Warren’s classmate Pete Kuykendall (the future editor of Bluegrass Unlimited) recalls how he made an everlasting impression on the school’s star football jock, who had never spoken a word to him until this one particular day:
I wanted to be a hillbilly disc jockey. So we had a “What do you want to do when you get out of high school?” And so one day I brought in two or three records from my collection to illustrate what I was going to play when I became a hillbilly disc jockey—one of which was “Foggy Mountain Breakdown,” the original 1949 cut of the thing. I played them and didn’t pay any attention to it as far as Warren was concerned other than he was in my class. And he kept me after class quizzing me about this music that I had played. And that was the gist of the reason that he apparently heard it either for the first time or at least it stood out to him. And he kept it in his mind when it came to the soundtrack for Bonnie and Clyde. I was as surprised as most people were when he used it.
Though Flatt and Scruggs already had an updated version of “Foggy Mountain Breakdown” completed for Columbia in 1965, it was that 1949 recording that Beatty heard over a decade earlier that resonated with him. Earl Scruggs elaborated on the rustic quality of that late-forties recording in his 2003 NPR interview:
See, we recorded that tune before they got, what I say, good equipment. I mean, just plain everyday microphones in a radio station with no [way] to start making tunes sound fuller or something. It was just raw material. By that, I mean it didn’t have no echo chamber or anything on it, so that’s what Warren Beatty heard in that tune. So he didn’t want to try to record another tune because he thought the equipment they had then [in 1967] was probably—would give it a more modern tune than what we had recorded, which turned out to be “Foggy Mountain Breakdown” and the sound that we got then. He took the Mercury recording and that was it.
Edited variations of “Foggy Mountain Breakdown” appear in three different spots of the movie. Immediately following Clyde’s looting of a grocery store shortly after he and Bonnie meet, “Foggy Mountain Breakdown” chimes in as the lawless couple steals a car to flee the scene of their crime. Earl’s opening break is all that’s used before two obvious edit points appear to sync up the tune’s ending with the car’s abrupt halt in a remote countryside hideaway. The second installment of the song is its longest, but still heavily edited in a disjointed arrangement. Just as the Barrow Gang escapes from a bank heist, “Foggy Mountain Breakdown” fades up in the middle of its first fiddle break. When the car chase progresses from the city to the rural fields, the fiddle segues into Scruggs’s opening notes. The song plays most of the way through with a couple of “talking head” dialog shots intercut that momentarily disrupt the energy of the tune before it climaxes toward its “edited” ending.
And as Faye Dunaway’s character finishes reciting Bonnie Parker’s poem from a newspaper about their adventures to Beatty’s Clyde, the two begin to kiss passionately when a gust of wind blows their paper away. At that moment, “Foggy Mountain Breakdown” whisks in for the last time in the midst of Earl’s down-the-neck licks before going slightly up the neck leading into the song’s second fiddle break. The balance of the song flows naturally, with the exception of the “shave-and-a-haircut” ending that’s dumped by the sound effect of a car engine to coincide with the shot of a passing vehicle, thus ending the music.
Bonnie and Clyde’s murderous mayhem ran amok from 1932 to 1934, long before “Foggy Mountain Breakdown” was ever written, well before bluegrass was ever considered a musical genre, and certainly before anyone outside the Carolinas ever heard the three-finger roll on the banjo, yet Beatty’s implementation of the signature Scruggs tune worked to enhance the car chase sequences without notice from the general popcorn-eating audience. Not only was the period of the music undetectably inaccurate, so was the spelling of the song during the opening credits, appearing as
FLATT AND SCRUGGS
“FOGGIE MOUNTAIN BREAKDOWN”
COURTESY OF MERCURY RECORDS
According to a liner note written by Louise Scruggs for her husband’s 2001 CD Earl Scruggs and Friends, Warren Beatty claimed that Earl would get a hit record from his film. In the week of March 2, 1968, “Foggy Mountain Breakdown” popped up on Billboard’s Hot 100 for the next twelve weeks. On April 20, it peaked at number 55, which is an amazing feat for a nearly twenty-year-old bluegrass instrumental, especially when the top five songs in the country were “Honey” by Bobby Goldsboro, “Young Girl” by the Union Gap, “Cry Like a Baby” by the Box Tops, “Lady Madonna” by the Beatles, and “(Sweet Baby) Since You’ve Been Gone” by Aretha Franklin.[7] The following year Flatt and Scruggs won a Grammy for Best Country Performance, Duo or Group, Vocal or Instrumental with their 1949 recording of Earl’s composition “Foggy Mountain Breakdown.” It would be the first and only Grammy for Lester, but not for Earl himself, as more Grammy Awards and nominations would come his way in subsequent years, including an unprecedented second win involving “Foggy Mountain Breakdown” in 2002 for Best Country Instrumental Performance.[8] Given the commercial success of Bonnie and Clyde, the Flatt and Scruggs team was quick to capitalize on the movie’s pop-cultural craze with an album of their own in 1968, The Story of Bonnie & Clyde, showcasing Earl, Lester, and the Foggy Mountain Boys in full gangster motif on the front cover. Tom T. Hall would be asked to lend his storytelling abilities for the creation of the LP’s title track, in addition to five other Bonnie and Clyde–themed songs. Hall reveals just how far he had to go to find the right inspiration for the project:
Columbia Records, Louise, Lester, and Earl decided to do an album, and so I got on a plane and went down to Denton, Texas. I used to go on these trips and just walk around and talk to people, and sit in little beer joints and cafés, and nobody knew who I was in those days. I’d just ask questions about the town, tell them I was passing through, and they didn’t really have a very good attitude about Bonnie and Clyde. Most of them were kind of, “Ah, we’re tired of hearing about Bonnie and Clyde. They were a bunch of crooks,” and stuff like that, you know. So Bonnie and Clyde, at the time I was there, were not big heroes in Denton, Texas, I’ll tell you that, but Bonnie and Clyde were not from Denton, Texas; they were from a town a little ways on down the road, which I found out is now a part of Dallas, Texas. Denton is its own town.
It seems to me at one of these places I saw a car, the Bonnie and Clyde car, it was either behind glass, or maybe I was looking outside through a window, but I saw the Bonnie and Clyde car, and it was all shot up and full of bullet holes. I don’t know how much the car weighed originally, but I was standing there thinking of all the lead that’s in that thing, it probably weighs twice as much as it did when they bought it, or stole it, or whatever [laughs]. I roamed around town, and I got some ideas about Bonnie and Clyde and some atmosphere, and I had a little tape recorder on the seat by me, and [if] I came up with a line, or an idea, for a song when I was driving, I’d hit the button and mostly talk about the song, and maybe later, if I had a little melody line, I’d hum it in there. I went down there for about a week and a half, traveling around in that area looking for Bonnie and Clyde stuff. I never did find out where they buried them, or I didn’t ask. I don’t remember.
I had a lot of fun writing the album, and they had a good record on it. Louise always told me that her favorite song on that album was “Bang, You’re Alive,” and I feel embarrassed that I have no idea what that song sounds like now.
The balance of the album’s compositions, with the exception of “Foggy Mountain Breakdown,” would be filled with instrumentals written by Earl’s fourteen-year-old son Randy. The Scruggs’s middle son would play lead guitar on the record and cowrite “Reunion” with his dad and Lester Flatt. Earl’s eldest son, Gary, also appeared on the vocal tracks singing backup.
Years later in 2008, Earl and his Family & Friends band became an added ingredient in the American Film Institute’s tribute to Warren Beatty when Beatty received AFI’s Life Achievement Award (the tribute later aired on the USA cable network). Before a night of speeches honoring the screen legend by Hollywood’s elite began, and immediately following an opening montage of film clips in which he had appeared, Beatty made his grand entrance to Earl’s spirited live performance of—you guessed it, “Foggy Mountain Breakdown.”
Not only did 1967 produce Bonnie and Clyde; it also gave America’s hippie movement its Summer of Love. And just like all of the social change around them that year, Lester and Earl were in for a series of transitions themselves—beginning with their health. Still in his early fifties, Flatt experienced a mild heart attack that was potent enough to trigger a series of chronic cardio issues that plagued him for the remainder of his life. Scruggs, on the other hand, was still suffering from hip problems sustained from his car accident in 1955.[9] The time came for him to undergo in-patient surgery while the band was still playing tour dates. With his usual standby, Curtis McPeake, unavailable, Earl needed a replacement fast.
Herb Pedersen was a little-known banjoist out of Berkeley, California, in 1967. His recent move to Nashville while working with Vern Williams and Ray Park (known as Vern & Ray) landed him a spot on The Early Morning Show, a local program hosted by country singer Smilin’ Eddie Hill. Pedersen remembers how his brief stint on the series led to a meeting with Scruggs that seemed almost surreal:
Earl saw me on that TV show. After he had heard me, he called me up—he got my number from the Musician’s Union—and I thought it was a joke. I thought it was somebody from out here playing a trick on me. So I said, “C’mon, who is this?” and he said, “No, it’s Earl Scruggs,” and I said, “Oh my gosh, it does sound like him.” He said, “I’d like to get together with you if you have some time,” and I said, “Of course I do.”
So he invited me over to his house, and he said, “Bring your banjo with you,” so I said, “Okay,” so I did, and you know, at twenty-three years old, you know, I’m just kind of numb by this invitation. So I get there and he said, “Come on into the music room.” The thing that I remember walking in the front door was I saw a couple of the portraits that Thomas Allen had painted of their album covers and one of the pictures was the Foggy Mountain Banjo cover. It was an oil painting hanging up on the wall and I thought, oh my gosh, this is too unreal.
So we sat and played music. He played guitar and he said, “Let’s pick a couple of tunes,” so we did, and he said, “Do you know this one?” and I said, “I think I do,” so we played and stumbled through some stuff. When we got done he said, “Well, I kind of got you over here under false pretenses.” I remember him saying that, and I said, “What do you mean?” He said, “Well, I have to go in the hospital. My hip has been giving me problems. You know I had a wreck in 1955, and there’s some bone fragments in there that haven’t come out, and I’ve got to get in there and take care of it, and I’m going to be hung up for a couple of weeks. I was wondering if you’d care to sit in with Lester and play banjo.” My reaction was dead silence. I said, “Are you sure?” He said, “Well, yeah—I’ve seen you on TV, and you play really well, and you seem to know the tunes, even the Martha White theme, so it would really help me out.” I said, “I’d be honored to do that.” So Louise came in and we talked business a little bit.
So the following weekend I came over to Earl’s and he drove me down to the Opry in his Cadillac and introduced me to Flatt and the rest of the guys at the Ryman. After I met them, I think I played a couple of tunes with them on the show and then got in the [Flatt and Scruggs] bus, and we took off for West Virginia right from the Opry. It was pretty unreal.
I remember coming back, and I would have to go get paid from Louise, you know, and she’d write me out a check. I remember walking up the stairs, and they had a little office trailer off the property. It was in Madison, Tennessee, and they lived a few blocks away from the office where they had this trailer. So I remember going in there and having to walk up, and she says to me, and she has this check in her hand and she’s not letting go of it, she’s saying, “Do you think you played pretty well this week?” I said, “Yes, ma’am.” “You didn’t make any mistakes did you?” I said, “I don’t think so,” as she’s tugging back and forth on the check. And then she finally lets it go [laughs]. She was great, she was wonderful, and she was really funny. I was able to play for Earl a couple, or three times, but then he came back. The fact that he even considered me was such an honor.
While the times were indeed changing, both culturally and musically in 1967, Flatt and Scruggs were continuing to perform the same catalog of songs they played endlessly for years, which by this point had grown stale for Earl. They previously made a few unsuccessful attempts at cover versions of easy rock songs like John Sebastian’s “Nashville Cats” and Tommy Boyce and Bobby Hart’s Monkees classic “Last Train to Clarksville,” both produced by their longtime coproducers Don Law and Frank Jones. The pop singles, combined with recent alterations to their sound, may have been indicative of Earl and Louise’s desire to move the band into a more progressive mode away from traditional bluegrass. However, it wasn’t enough to rescue them out of their slump of declining record sales.[10] A huge makeover was needed quickly, and the brass at Columbia had one waiting in the wings that would permanently alter them from the sound of bluegrass. To boost sales in a market that was gravitating more toward the nation’s growing “long-haired” youth culture, Columbia decided to separate producers Don Law and Frank Jones from Flatt and Scruggs. Their salvation came through the ingenuity of Bob Johnston, who recently had transferred from New York to Nashville. Recognized for producing two of the label’s biggest stars, Bob Dylan and Johnny Cash, Johnston proved to be a valuable commodity for Columbia. Jumping at the chance to work with Lester and Earl, he convinced the pair to step outside of their comfort zones by cutting songs from his repertoire of artists, which didn’t appear to be much of an issue at first.
“They were receptive to recording anything,” Johnston comments. “I never really asked anybody to record anything that they didn’t want to record or didn’t like or something else. They were wonderful players, and they knew what they were doing. They were really good at what they did and really good at what they played.” Gary Scruggs asserts the Johnston formula:
The strategy was to record songs made popular by contemporary artists of that era. Johnston was Bob Dylan’s producer at the time, and he brought a lot of Dylan songs to the table for them to record for the albums he produced—there were five Dylan songs on Changin’ Times. Johnston also changed the Flatt and Scruggs sound by adding a full drum set and electric instruments to their records.
Appropriately titled Changin’ Times, this revolutionary LP not only reflected the cultural change that the country was facing; it also signified the reconstructive musical direction of Flatt and Scruggs as well as the changes developing within them as individual men. But the superbly polished arrangements on the album, coupled with its financial success in early 1968, wasn’t enough to convince Lester Flatt, a bluegrass purist at heart, that the group was justified in their musical transformation. Appearances at counterculture music venues like the Avalon Ballroom in San Francisco became bothersome to him, as he disliked and disapproved of the long-haired hippie crowds. Yet, on the flipside, Earl Scruggs loved the challenge that came from this new material along with the audiences it attracted. Both Earl and Louise understood the importance of expansion and diversification as an opportunistic means for growth and marketability—a concept that Lester just didn’t want to grasp, especially since his interest in the business end of the partnership was nonexistent.
Changin’ Times also included a revamped version of “Foggy Mountain Breakdown” (minus the recently added harmonica break from the 1965 arrangement) and another unique piece of artwork from Thomas B. Allen depicting Flatt and Scruggs in pastel-colored clay busts on the front cover. And among the backside’s black-and-white photos is a prominently placed reprint of the Avalon Ballroom’s psychedelic-style poster for the duo’s November–December 1967 shows.
By March 1968, Flatt and Scruggs headed to the Far East for a series of sold-out shows in Japan. They would be the first American bluegrass band ever to tour Asia. Takashi Shimbo, one of the promoters from Shinnichi Promotions responsible for booking the pair, shares his memory of Lester and Earl’s historic visit:
When I look back at the day when Flatt and Scruggs came to Japan years ago, I’m sure their impressive performance meant a dawn of Japanese bluegrass. It was also my first experience as a promoter for [a] foreign artist. Because nobody wanted to take [the] risk for [a] bluegrass act in Japan at that time.
The release of their first record was from Japanese Columbia records in January 1958. It was a 45-rpm single record that contained two tunes: “Jimmie Brown, the Newsboy” and “Blue Ridge Cabin Home.” The following release in April of the same year contained “Flint Hill Special,” “Your Love Is Like a Flower,” “Foggy Mountain Chimes,” and “Jimmie Brown, the Newsboy,” a total of four songs on a 45-rpm EP. These were the first and second bluegrass releases in Japan. Japanese bluegrass started from Flatt and Scruggs—actually the popularity of “Jimmie Brown, the Newsboy” and banjo picking. Before long, linked with folk music, bluegrass was getting popular among college students in the early ’60s.
The band spent a few days in Hawaii, then they got to Haneda Airport at night on the fourth of March in 1968. [At] that time, Narita International Airport hadn’t been open[ed] yet. Just after they arrived at the hotel, Mr. Masaaki Yosimura, coeditor of Country and Western magazine, and I were invited to the hotel. We had a meeting about the schedule during their stay. Earl Scruggs and his wife, Louise Certain, as a manager, joined us. Lester Flatt was exhausted from the long flight, so he didn’t show up.
The day finally came. There was a long line several hours before the concert. The concerts were scheduled from March 3 to 14, held in Tokyo (twice), Osaka, and Kyoto, including several days [on the] Okinawa U.S. Armed Forces bases. The audience for the concerts filled every hall to overflowing.
Unbeknownst to Flatt and Scruggs, within those massive crowds, a “Beatles-esque” frenzy was brewing for them as Earl described to Doug Hutchens in 1989 on Bluegrass Today:
It was just unbelievable—how they accepted us and the crowds that we did have. It was really—it just blew my mind. I didn’t know how popular the banjo—well, I had no idea how popular the banjo was over there, but I met one guy who was teaching banjo, and he had a little over 200 students just himself. So it went real well, and I’ve had a lot of personal contact with Japanese people ever since.
The first night, we [were] playing this auditorium, and it was equivalent to Carnegie Hall. It was a real elite auditorium. Apparently, there’d been a band there that didn’t want to do any autographs. So this manager asked if we would sign some autographs after the show, and we said, “Sure, we’d be happy to.” Well, behind the stage they had a little corridor and one side of it was glass, as well as I remember. But they had a table setting to where they couldn’t get by us except but one side. In other words, [they] would come by me first, and I’d sign and Lester signed, then go on by [to] the end of the table. Well, we signed until the time was running low and people knew that they wasn’t going to have enough time to get an autograph. So they got to trying to push in so fast until they pushed this one glass panel down. Well, that wound it up with the promoters. They rushed us into a room, cut out all of the lights, and it took a couple hours, I guess, before we ever got out—and they got us out with cigarette lighters, showing us down the exits. I had fun with the guy on the rest of the tour while I was over there. Each night I’d say, “Can we autograph tonight?”—“No, no, no, no autographs, no autographs.”
One of the many young fans following the band on that tour was Japanese banjoist (of the band Bluegrass 45) and future publisher of MoonShiner magazine Saburo Wantanabe. Flashing back to March 1968, he affirms the overly excited mob that besieged Flatt and Scruggs. “I went to see them at Osaka, Kyoto, and Tokyo. In Tokyo, a lot of young Japanese fans are waiting [for] autographs after the show. The Beatles toured Japan in 1966, and girls were going crazy, but I never thought it happened [to] boys! I was there, anyway.”
And for all of the hoopla that came with their arrival in Japan, only one song from their new Changin’ Times album, “Down in the Flood,” made it into their set according to Takashi Shimbo:
To select the tunes they play on the stage was very important for the Japanese bluegrass fans, who might have no chance to see them live again. On behalf of Japanese bluegrass fans, I persistently negotiated with them about each song. Our requests, which we were eager to [hear] from them, were mostly from the old records at the time. The tunes they recorded at Mercury and early Columbia. In fact, those were the tunes which Japanese fans learned from records. Concerning every tune, Louise asked Earl if they could sing or not. Then he promptly answered, “I don’t remember such old numbers. But, anyway, I’ll try to recall them.”
For as much as Earl Scruggs enjoyed his group’s Far East tour, the repeated renditions of the old-school songs, loved by Lester Flatt, were now a huge bore for him personally. His resilience to forge ahead with their covers of contemporary music was met with animosity by Flatt, who was extremely uncomfortable singing the lyrics of most of these songs.[11] So by the time Nashville Airplane flew in near the end of 1968, Flatt’s disinterest in more material from Bob Dylan, as well as Donovan’s “Catch the Wind” and Tim Hardin’s “If I Were a Carpenter,” was overtly obvious, as his voice lacked energy and conviction. And the best example can be heard on the LP’s opening track, “Like a Rolling Stone,” which was also released as a single earlier that summer.
Like with The Story of Bonnie & Clyde and Changin’ Times, the Nashville Airplane sessions grafted in the talents of Earl’s sons, Gary and Randy. Gary provided background vocals and a tambourine, in addition to an instrumental composition, “Frieda Florentine,” while Randy played lead guitar and a five-string Dobro. The three Bob Johnston–produced albums from 1967 and 1968 had utterly derailed Flatt and Scruggs off their previous course into uncharted territory.
The presence of Earl’s sons on these albums didn’t just happen by accident or because their dad thought it would be fun to put them on his records; the boys spent years honing their musical talents, as noted by Gary Scruggs:
I learned to play trumpet in grade school and continued in school bands until I graduated from high school. Guitar was the first stringed instrument I learned to play, and then electric bass. I later taught myself to play harmonica and keyboards. Randy’s first instrument was autoharp, then guitar. He also played trumpet in school bands. He also learned to play banjo and fiddle. Steve played guitar, piano, banjo, and saxophone. We all learned a lot from Dad but were mostly self-taught, except for school band lessons and Steve taking some piano lessons. I taught Randy his first chords on the guitar, but he quickly took it to a much higher level soon after on his own—seems like he always had a guitar in his hands once he started playing. Dad had taught me my first chords on guitar. We jammed occasionally with Dad when growing up.
The skill sets of Gary and Randy (Steve was still very young) began to infiltrate the Flatt and Scruggs ensemble during the early 1960s while the band was at the top of their game. An early instance came in 1962, when at age nine Randy made his television debut on the Flatt and Scruggs Grand Ole Opry show playing the autoharp and would continue to do so numerous times afterward, as well as perform with the band in concert. The boys would sometimes spend part of their summer vacation traveling with their dad and getting to better know the members of the Foggy Mountain Boys. “The band members treated us very warmly,” says Gary Scruggs. “Josh, Jake, and Paul all had children about the same age as Randy, Steve, and me. Mom was a friend of the band members’ wives, and Randy, Steve, and I grew up around the band members and their families.”
And when it came to recording with their dad’s legendary troupe, the Scruggs brothers got an early start. “I was seventeen, about to turn eighteen. Randy was thirteen, almost fourteen,” Gary recounts. “I played rhythm guitar on some tracks but was primarily used on background vocals. Randy played acoustic guitar, both rhythm and lead, on the tracks he played on.” Gary eventually received a recording contract of his own from Columbia, and under the direction of Bob Johnston he cut two singles.
As for Papa Earl, the excitement of watching his sons come of age musically filled his heart with a level of joy that made his destination as an artist crystal clear. Scruggs shared his sentimental feelings with NPR in 2003:
Well, the biggest thing for me—see, I had three boys coming along, Gary, Randy, and Steve was my youngest boy, and they were good musicians. So I just had a band in my home, and one of the biggest thrills a person will ever get is to go onstage with his children, especially if they’re good musicians, and I’ll have to brag on ’em even though they are my boys. I thought [they were] some of the best musicians that I ever played with. So it was a great outlet for me to start working with my boys.
Lester Flatt’s disengagement with the recording and performance of their new material proved to Earl Scruggs that there were no more worlds to conquer for the two biggest names to come out of bluegrass over two decades earlier. At the same time, Scruggs’s love and admiration for his sons was a constant reminder that a new horizon was within his grasp. The time was quickly approaching for him to make a judgment call regarding his future in showbiz.[12]
By February 1969, only two months following their participation in the Miami Pop Festival and just a few weeks after their appearance in Richard Nixon’s presidential inauguration parade, both Lester Flatt and Earl Scruggs were ready to go separate ways. They played their final show together on the Grand Ole Opry on the 22nd of that month, and all of the members of the band were given notice, although Flatt soon rehired those members to be his backing band along with a new banjo player. A few weeks later, the business end of Flatt and Scruggs and their “Foggy Mountain” brand was officially dissolved, but not to the satisfaction of Lester, who sued the Scruggs Talent Agency (Earl and Louise) on April 9.[13] As a consequence, neither man could retain the use of the name Foggy Mountain Boys for their subsequent bands.
Ironically, both Flatt and Scruggs would regroup with their producer, Bob Johnston, in late August 1969 to crank out one last album for Columbia, per their contract. Suitably titled Final Fling—One Last Time (Just for Kicks), the cover art by Thomas B. Allen was symbolic (whether intentionally or subliminally) of the current and future status of the former partners. In the forefront is an invigorated, hatless Earl Scruggs sporting a standard necktie. Behind him is a slightly faded Lester Flatt donning his traditional bluegrass uniform: Stetson hat and Kentucky colonel string tie. Above them, in a cloud of flowers, are colorless images of Leonard Cohen, Bob Dylan, and Johnny Cash, three of the influential figures that came with Johnston, whose songs are not only covered on the album but whose compositions Flatt reluctantly sang on their previous recordings. Scruggs, however, continued to work with Cohen, Dylan, and Cash on later productions as he held their work in high regard. And if the Allen painting wasn’t enough, the caption bubbles on the back cover solidified their dissolution in plain English with “So long, Earl . . .” and “So long, Lester . . .”
Though their parting was a sad blow to the loyal fan base that had grown to epic proportions over their twenty-one years together, each man took with him a different element from that sector, as Lester would keep on singing true bluegrass for the older generation while Earl reinvented himself, catering to the tastes of the younger crowd. Both of them experienced a newfound happiness that had dwindled over the last couple of years due to their musical differences. Speaking on behalf of his father, Gary Scruggs cites a few of Earl’s most memorable moments from that blessed era of his career:
Even though the early Flatt and Scruggs years were sometimes a bit of a struggle, they were an exciting time for him because the band was making a name for itself. They won numerous country music industry awards from the mid-1950s on into the mid- to late 1960s. He very much enjoyed making cameo appearances on The Beverly Hillbillies TV show. I know he enjoyed the Japan tour, his first appearance on the Newport Folk Festival, and the live Flatt and Scruggs recording at Carnegie Hall. There were many highlights for my father throughout the Flatt and Scruggs years, too many to mention.
With further retrospect, bluegrass banjoist and historian Jim Mills provides an analogy on the legacy of Lester and Earl:
Flatt and Scruggs were a success that came along at the right time in history, and I don’t think what they accomplished can be replicated by anyone, not now or in the future. Now keep in mind that I think they were anointed. I mean, everything just fell into place for them through the years, no matter what the decade was. Something good always came along, and they never took a step backward. It was always a step forward for the Flatt and Scruggs band, and for Earl Scruggs.
One day I got to looking back on just how great the Flatt and Scruggs career was, a twenty-one-year period. How many bands can you say have lasted twenty-one years and be successful the entire time? If you separate Earl from the bunch, and look at his life, I don’t think honestly that it’s a career that can ever be re-created simply because of the timing in life. Flatt and Scruggs played six days a week for fifteen years. These guys knew when the other guy would breathe in or out. I don’t think there’s a band today, or there will ever be a band in history, that’ll be that tight and work that much.
Rosenberg, Bluegrass, 150–51. Carnegie Hall’s official program from Folksong ’59 does not identify Earl Taylor and the Stoney Mountain Boys, as they are listed third on the roster of entertainers as “Bluegrass Band.”
Peter Cooper, “Earl Scruggs, Country Music Hall of Famer and Bluegrass Innovator, Dies at Age 88,” Tennessean, March 29, 2012, and Cooper, “Flatt & Scruggs Crossed Cultural Boundaries,” Tennessean, May 3, 2013.
Flatt and Scruggs’s taping at George Washington University and their June 15, 1963, airdate was mentioned by Earl Scruggs in an interview with Ernie Knight on WLOE in May 1963 and documented in a press release from the ABC Television Network on May 23, 1963.
Nashville’s Centennial Park crowd of more than 20,000 on July 14, 1963, was documented by the Tennessean and reprinted in Flatt and Scruggs’s Picture Album Song Book (1965).
The first edition of Earl Scruggs and the 5-String Banjo from Peer International Corporation is copyrighted 1968. No definitive reasons have been substantiated for why it was delayed two years from its anticipated March 1, 1966, street date.
Ralph Emery’s introduction of Flatt and Scruggs in Country Music on Broadway: “Good bluegrass music has been taking the country by storm. And these boys we’re about to bring you are just about the best in that line. They’ve traveled the country more than anybody else, I suppose, singing the great bluegrass songs. They’ve been in New York many times—with us right now, give a big welcome for Lester Flatt, Earl Scruggs, and the Foggy Mountain Boys” (Marathon Pictures Corporation, 1964).
See Billboard’s Charts Archives, http://www.billboard.com/archive/charts.
Grammy Awards for the performers of two versions of “Foggy Mountain Breakdown” in 1969 and 2002 are verified via the Past Winners Search page on the Grammy’s official website (grammy.com).
Rosenberg, Bluegrass, 309.
Ibid.
Ibid., 310; Kochman, Big Book of Bluegrass, 34; and Scruggs, Earl Scruggs and the 5-String Banjo (2005), 167. Scruggs also affirmed his desire to play different types of music in Earl Scruggs: His Family and Friends.
Cox, Beverly Hillbillies, 27.
“Flatt, Scruggs Ending 21-Year Partnership,” United Press International, April 11, 1969.