Earl was very modern in his musical taste and was willing to take chances in areas of music that had not been explored by Southern musicians prior to his pioneering spirit.
—Roger McGuinn, folk rock artist
Following the breakup of bluegrass music’s most successful act, Earl Scruggs felt a great sense of relief, after years of boredom with picking the same old songs with the same old arrangements, over and over again.[1] He was now free to spread his wings into other genres of music where the five-string banjo was seldom heard. His liberation from the shackles of traditional bluegrass (acoustical strings only) allowed him to include percussion instruments, keyboards, horns, and electric guitars. This seemingly radical departure from his almost twenty-five-year mainstay introduced the talents of Earl Scruggs to a new multigenerational audience that he never would’ve known from inside the garden gates of bluegrass. Scruggs was determined to diversify his craft by maximizing all of the resources from his beloved five-string before the eyes and ears of the world.
This marked the birth of the most rewarding period of his career. Not only was he attaining satisfaction in his new identity; he was also experiencing a wealth of personal joy rooted in the talents of his sons, Gary and Randy (and later on, Steve), whom he missed terribly during his many years of touring. Noticing how much their musical abilities had improved, Scruggs felt the time was right for them to become a band. And reminiscent of the musical family from which he blossomed, Earl was now at the helm of his own family troupe—the Earl Scruggs Revue.
While his former partner wasted no time in launching a new band—Lester Flatt and the Nashville Grass (consisting mainly of former Foggy Mountain Boys: Paul Warren, Burkett “Uncle Josh” Graves, and English P. “Cousin Jake” Tullock)—Scruggs spent the next couple of years in an experimental mode to perfect the direction of his artistry. With Gary attending college and Randy in high school, the performance schedule for the new group was largely limited to weekends and summer vacations, thereby restricting their exposure.
Despite Louise Scruggs’s effort to introduce the Earl Scruggs Revue in a June 1969 press release printed in Billboard, it would take another three years for an album to be released under the that name. During these organizational years, Earl would record two albums for Columbia. First came Nashville’s Rock (1971), featuring cover versions of pop songs, such as the Rolling Stones’ “Honky Tonk Women,” the Beatles’ “Hey Jude,” and an angelic-sounding arrangement of Simon and Garfunkel’s “Bridge over Troubled Water.” The second album was a guest-artist collaboration, I Saw the Light with Some Help from My Friends (1972), that included the talents of Arlo Guthrie, Tracy Nelson, Linda Ronstadt, and the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band, along with Revue members Gary Scruggs, Randy Scruggs, Vassar Clements, and Bob Wilson. Concurrently, Gary and Randy put out two records for Vanguard as the Scruggs Brothers: All the Way Home (1970) and The Scruggs Brothers (1972). But the first true family production to introduce and showcase the Revue resulted from a 1970 National Educational Television network special titled Earl Scruggs: His Family and Friends, which effectively captured this critically pivotal moment in Earl’s life.
In the television documentary, Earl declared himself part of a new generation of banjo pickers looking to climb out of the pigeonhole associated with such relic tunes as “Cumberland Gap” that predated his existence. The further he went with the banjo, the more pleased he became. As his sons Gary and Randy began to evolve musically, he instinctively recognized that a serious makeover was imminent. It was time to reinvent himself: the Stetson hats and Kentucky colonel string ties were laid to rest in favor of dress suits with standard neck ties (in the coming years, he wore suits less frequently and opted for a more casual wardrobe accented by a longer hairstyle). And while Earl’s appearance had changed, it would be a few months before the public would hear a peep out of him. Gary Scruggs defines the logic behind his father’s delay:
After Flatt and Scruggs parted ways, Mom and Dad were not so eager to immediately hit the road again. They wanted to think things through, so Dad took some much-needed time off and then he, Randy, and I started working up new material, or rearranging some of his older material. We worked up a variety of styles of music, both materially and sonically. The sound evolved over the next few years.
In molding their band, Earl and his banjo became the nerve center to Gary’s lead vocals, electric bass, and harmonica and Randy’s lead guitar (acoustic and electric), with occasional fiddle, banjo, and autoharp. The boys quickly became a powerful influence on their father’s selection of music. Together they would weave some of Earl’s favorite songs, such as “T for Texas” and “Step It Up and Go,” into a new repertoire blended from contemporary folk, jazz, blues, and pop-rock rhythms and backbeats.
An early arrival in the new band was future Country Music Hall of Fame member Charlie Daniels. Having grown up in rural North Carolina, Daniels was a longtime fan of the banjo man. Upon his arrival to Nashville in 1967, he went to work at Columbia Records, doing odd jobs for producer Bob Johnston. It was during that time when he met his musical hero, Earl Scruggs, as he was booked by Johnston to play on a number of Flatt and Scruggs sessions. By mid-autumn 1969, Charlie was drafted by Scruggs to join him at the Vietnam Moratorium, and from that moment, he was a full-fledged member of the Revue. Daniels reflects on his brief time with the band:
They kind of took me under their wing when I came to Nashville, [and] they did, Earl, Louise, and the boys. I didn’t have a lot going on at the time. They put me in position to appear in front of a lot of people. Nobody knew who Charlie Daniels was. Of course, Earl was a legend and to be associated in any way with him or anything like that raised my stature to some degree in that it gave me some validity and some legitimacy. And I’ll never forget it. It meant a lot to me at the time. To be a part of the Earl Scruggs Revue was a big deal to me—playing the Grand Ole Opry, the first time I ever played it, and recording with Earl and doing some personal appearances with him was a big, big deal to me.
“In addition to his talent, Charlie Daniels brought a lot of positive energy and showmanship to the band,” adds Gary Scruggs. “Charlie was a Revue member for a year or so, playing guitar. He left the Revue in order to pursue what turned out to be a very successful solo career with his Charlie Daniels Band. At that point, Jody Maphis joined the Revue on rhythm guitar.” As the son of country music stars Joe and Rose Lee Maphis, Jody would spend the next nine years as an “adopted” member of the Scruggs family. Maphis recounts his induction into the Revue:
I met Randy Scruggs at Madison High School, just outside of Nashville, and he was a year ahead of me. And he come and got me one day and introduced himself and said, “Are you Joe Maphis’s son?” and I said, “Yeah.”—He said, “Let’s get together and do some picking.” So we got together, and Randy’s playing “Foggy Mountain Breakdown” [on banjo], and I played rhythm guitar to it, and before I knew it, I’m over at Earl’s house—and we’re sitting around after school playing with him. It kind of started right there in Earl’s living room. For me, working with Earl was kind of like going—that was my college. I went straight from high school right to the Earl Scruggs Revue. I spent more time with the Scruggs family than I did my own.
Shortly after Jody entered the Revue, studio backup singer and pianist Lea Jane Berinati joined for several months and was later replaced on the piano by Bob Wilson, whose Nashville recording session credits included playing on Bob Dylan’s Nashville Skyline and Self Portrait albums. During this shuffling of members, Jody Maphis would experience a switch of his own from rhythm guitar to his permanent post on the drums, as he explains:
I always just kind of messed around with [the drums]. It wasn’t anything planned. Some friends—other kids we went to school with—they were putting a band together to go try to play down in Florida for the summer. And they were going down there to kind of audition at a couple of places. Two days before they were supposed to leave, the guy who was playing drums backed out. And I just happened to be messing around. I went down there for a week with them and auditioned and came back up, and the next thing I know, me, Randy, and Gary are starting to mess around with some stuff. They were just doing their first Scruggs Brothers album, and we started messing around as a trio ’cause they were wanting to go out and do some stuff with me on drums, and then Earl heard it and, before I knew it, we just started doing it. It just kind of grew from there. It wasn’t like there was a set thing. As the new members of the Revue played longer together, and then, other people would come in and out, we just started finding what was working, what was adding to it, you know, what sparks some things. There [were] quite a few people in and out of there. I think the Revue was trying to figure out what it was going to do ’cause nobody got settled into it and locked in. But it was really a magic time musically, you know. It was wide open back then. Everybody wanted to play with everybody.
In 1971, legendary fiddler Vassar Clements graced the Revue, and following close behind for a stint was an old friend from the past, Burkett “Josh” Graves, who signed up for a couple years on the Dobro, after exiting Lester Flatt’s Nashville Grass in 1972. Both Vassar and Josh would eventually leave the Revue in order to pursue solo careers. That same year, Earl’s youngest son, Steve, began to make appearances on a part-time basis, as he was still in junior high school. However, he became a full-time member in 1976, after his eighteenth birthday, mainly on the piano, with some guitar, saxophone, and banjo. Other comings and goings included pianist Jack Lee for a year or so, steel guitarist and saxophonist Jim Murphy, and drummer Taylor Rhodes, who replaced Maphis during the group’s final two years.
Trekking the grounds of America’s institutions of higher learning and the stages of its finest music clubs and concert halls, Louise Scruggs also made sure to book dates for the Revue in the popular bluegrass festival circuit. Earl’s new sound echoed through the open grounds of such fests held in Bean Blossom, Indiana; Watermelon Park in Berryville, Virginia; and Camp Springs, North Carolina, where the Revue was filmed performing their rendition of Elton John and Bernie Taupin’s composition “Country Comfort” as part of Albert Ihde’s documentary Bluegrass Country Soul. The Revue would soon be performing at major rock festivals as well.
At these venues, Scruggs began publically to experience the rewards he’d hope to reap in the rebirth of his banjo with the talents of his sons. The freshness presented a resurrection to many of the old bluegrass standards, and as his nephew J. T. Scruggs summarizes, it coincided with a philosophical belief he held in high esteem:
I think he was always just proud of doing things different. I mean, he was an innovator in music. He always embraced change. I think he was very proud of the fact that he didn’t just do one thing all of his life. He was always changing his music style and trying to do things differently. He said, “If I can see a light shining out there farther, I want to try to find it and see where it leads me.”
On November 15, 1969, just ten months after appearing in President Richard M. Nixon’s inaugural parade with Lester Flatt and the Foggy Mountain Boys as representatives of Tennessee, Earl Scruggs stepped outside of his unassumingly quiet demeanor to stand in unison with an estimated one million antiwar demonstrators congregated on the National Mall for the Vietnam Moratorium march in Washington, DC. With his sons Gary and Randy, along with thirty-three-year-old Charlie Daniels, Scruggs broke ranks with his peers in Nashville to make a bold political statement for the first time in his life. Documentary writer/director David Hoffman, who captured the historic event on film, paints a portrait of Earl’s bravery in that epic moment:
Country stars were unanimous at that time in being pro—what used to be pro-American, as though the antiwar movement was anti-American, which it wasn’t. But there was a debate in the country, and the prowar community set it up so that, if you were an American, you wore an American flag and supported the war. And the country [music] people were completely like that; the Grand Ole Opry was totally like that. There was no break until all of a sudden Earl pops up out of nowhere, with no one directing him or leading him. He decides on his own the war is wrong. We are killing American boys for no good reason—he didn’t like that. So, typical of him, he informs the press in some way or another, they pick [it] up, he makes a statement about it, which upsets his community in Nashville—really upsets his community in Nashville—and the antiwar movement asks him to come to the largest demonstration in the history of American demonstrations to perform. He didn’t care what anybody else thought. He didn’t care what it would do to his career, which, people said, it will hurt your career—it will reduce your sales and they may not invite you to the Grand Ole Opry again.
Charlie Daniels reiterates Earl’s conviction and the massive reception they faced on that frigid Saturday:
This was a big step for Earl. This was an act of courage for Earl. This was kind of a step out from his, what was considered at the time, his base, his bluegrass base of older people—of course, Earl had a big following of younger people too, but I thought it took a lot of courage for him to do that. And when he called me and told me that “they have been trying to get me to go to Washington for this Vietnam thing, and I’m going to go—I’ve decided I’m going to go and I’d like you to go with me.” And I, you know [said], “Yes, I’m there. I’m with you. Let’s go.” I was very honored that he asked me to go.
I remember that day. It was so cold you couldn’t even feel the strings under your fingers, and it was impossible to keep an instrument in tune. It was brutally cold! I had never seen the [National] Mall where we were, across from the Washington Monument, that many people—it was just a sea of heads from one side of the Mall to the other and up and down. It was a moving experience. Especially for Earl, this was a big step out for him, in my opinion. I think it was something that he probably had to think about a lot.
“There was quite a bit of criticism directed toward us regarding our appearance at the Moratorium,” remembers Gary Scruggs. “The Nashville music community was generally very politically conservative back then, and our appearance there surprised a lot of people. We were the only Nashville act, I’m aware of at that time, to speak out against the Vietnam War.”
During the formation of the Revue in 1969, Scruggs became a subject of discussion at the front offices of the National Educational Television (NET) network, just as it was undergoing absorption by the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS).[2] Independent filmmaker David Hoffman was pitching an idea to feature the banjo man in a documentary showcasing music along with interviews. Hoffman outlines the scope of the TV special:
It was a time when [NET] was kind of interested in broadening its base out of the northeast, and I came in the door with my partner at the time with a proposal that they do Earl Scruggs, who had a vision that he was going to move out of bluegrass and interact with other great musicians. And since he was seen as kind of—everyone who had ever met him liked him—he was a good guy and a guy without an ego. We came in with money from a grant—I think it was a fundraising grant. They were going to use it to raise money for [NET], and Earl said, “Fine.”
We made a list of all of the people Earl wanted to play with. There was no one who said no, but there was a few whose schedules didn’t allow, but everybody said yes. And then we traveled with Earl, and that was the idea—my idea and Earl’s idea—we could’ve seen Joan Baez, other than at her home, we could’ve seen Doc Watson, other than at his home. They could’ve been in a studio or in any other place, but we decided we were traveling to them to their place. It was let’s just sit down together—Earl’s view and mine. And the Vietnam story, which is a part of my film, is a key moment because it was how we started. We started with the Vietnam story and then filmed all of the other scenes.
Though the Moratorium was the first sequence shot, it wouldn’t appear until a little more than a third of the way into the final cut, just before Gary’s interview about his dad’s personality and playing together as a family, which segued into the Scruggs Brothers Vanguard recording session with Charlie Daniels. The film opens with Earl, Gary, and Randy jamming with folk rock legend Bob Dylan at the home of Thomas B. Allen in Carmel, New York.
According to Gary Scruggs, they played four songs with Dylan that day, but only two of them appeared in the final cut of the movie. And out of the two tracks, just “Nashville Skyline Rag” made the groove on the vinyl disc. Another two-song segment in the movie that flew into Earl’s nest came from the Byrds. The band’s leader and founding member, Roger McGuinn, shares his affinity for Earl Scruggs along with his memory of the program:
I admired him greatly for his musicianship, and he was such a gentleman. He always dressed up, wore a suit and tie and a diamond stickpin that I thought, you know, this guy is really a class act. I thought he was wonderful. I just enjoyed his whole personality. He was so gracious he had that sort of southern hospitality, inviting you to come to his house and everything. It was amazing.
What sticks out in my mind is doing that little film that he did with his sons, Gary and Randy and my band, the Byrds, with Clarence White. I remember that, and doing “You Ain’t Going Nowhere.” There’s a clip of that that sticks out.
Earl’s desire for the Byrds to participate in the film resulted from a previous jam session he had with them at his house in 1968. Gary Scruggs describes in detail the backstory of his family’s relationship with the pop band:
It was in the spring of 1965 when I first heard the Byrds on the radio, and it was their recording of “Mr. Tambourine Man.” I loved the vocals and the jingle-jangle of Roger McGuinn’s electric twelve-string guitar on that record. The Byrds quickly became one of my favorite rock bands. Even when the Byrds went through major personnel and stylistic changes over the next few years, I continued to like their music. Roger was the constant for me.
I met Roger at Nashville’s Columbia Records’ Studio A in March 1968 when the Byrds were there working on their Sweetheart of the Rodeo album. He told me he was an Earl Scruggs fan, so I invited him and the band over to Mom and Dad’s house to meet Dad. The meeting turned into a jam session and a friendship that led to Dad inviting Roger and the Byrds to take part in the made-for-TV documentary Earl Scruggs: His Family and Friends.
Along with taping “You Ain’t Going Nowhere” with the Byrds, we also played Doc Watson’s tune “Nothing to It,” a great instrumental which had appeared on the Flatt and Scruggs with Doc Watson album Strictly Instrumental. Both my brother Randy and the Byrds’ Clarence White had been influenced by Doc’s flat-picking style on acoustic guitar, and the tune gave Randy, Clarence, and Dad a chance to really shine on the solos.
Although the Byrds were considered to be a rock and country rock band at the time, Roger had a strong folk music background and Clarence came from a solid bluegrass background. Roger, who was formerly known as “Jim,” had played acoustic guitar and longneck five-string banjo for folk groups in the folk boom era such as the popular Chad Mitchell Trio. Clarence had been a member of the Kentucky Colonels along with his brother Roland, a mandolin player. So both Roger and Clarence were well aware of Dad’s contributions to the music world.
Dad reciprocated the respect shown to him by the Byrds as well as other musicians from various genres. He enjoyed the often impromptu jams that occurred in those days, whether at his house or on the road at concert venues. His enthusiasm for jamming with other musicians, both young and old, carried over for the rest of his life.
Perhaps one of most redemptive moments in bluegrass ever caught on camera is the dressing-room jam session between Scruggs and Bill Monroe at the Ryman Auditorium as the Grand Ole Opry was being broadcast on WSM radio. More than twenty years earlier, when these two giants were bandmates in Monroe’s Blue Grass Boys, they were frequently announced on the Opry stage by the “Solemn Old Judge,” George D. Hay, as “Bill Monroe and Earl Scruggs and his fancy five-string banjo.” When Scruggs quit Monroe’s band, along with Lester Flatt, in 1948, things were friendly, or at least cordial, the few times they crossed paths during their travels, but when Flatt and Scruggs joined the Grand Ole Opry in early 1955, Bill Monroe was furious and refused to speak with either man for the next fourteen years. His loathing for them even went as far as refusing to make eye contact with them whenever both acts were present at the Opry. The NET documentary crew captured the very first performance between the two men (with their respective bands), which visually chronicled the end of their longstanding rivalry, as confirmed by Gary Scruggs:
I visited the Grand Ole Opry at the Ryman Auditorium fairly often in the latter years of the Flatt and Scruggs partnership. I spent most of the time backstage in the area where the dressing rooms were located or standing in the wings offstage. I witnessed firsthand how Bill Monroe totally ignored Lester and Dad, even to the point of avoiding eye contact if they were nearby.
The Revue made its first appearance on the Grand Ole Opry several weeks after Flatt and Scruggs had split up in February of 1969. I was shocked when Bill came up to us with a big smile on his face, welcoming Dad back to the Opry. I later noticed he was just as friendly to Lester after the Flatt and Scruggs split. So there was no real “reconciliation”—at least there was no mention of any past animosity that I know of. Rather, Bill’s mood and attitude just changed out of the blue when Flatt and Scruggs split up. It was as if there had never been any grudge or ill will at all.
Other aspects of the television production included a trip near to Earl’s birthplace in North Carolina, where Scruggs reunited with family. Audiences witnessed him in action with his brothers Horace and Junie in a rendition of “Cripple Creek” (Junie on the banjo with Horace, Earl, and Randy on acoustic guitars). The Morris Brothers, Zeke and Wiley, whom Scruggs affectionately respected and performed with on WSPA in Spartanburg, South Carolina, back in 1939 at the age of fifteen, are introduced in a jam session with Earl and Randy. Viewers were also taken to the homes of Doc Watson and Joan Baez, two of Earl’s favorite songwriting musicians whom he absolutely adored, for picking sets, along with his sons. Spectators followed Randy Scruggs to Madison High School and were welcomed inside the Scruggs family’s modest home for a sampling of Earl’s cover version of the Beatles’ song “With a Little Help from My Friends,” on his then upcoming instrumental LP Nashville’s Rock.
And yet, with all of this attention bestowed upon Earl Scruggs for the NET television audience, the banjo man, in all of his humility, found ways through his musical genius to deflect the honor away from himself, as articulated by David Hoffman:
Earl liked what was happening in contemporary social cause[s] [and in] new music. He was interested in great talent, whether it be famous or not famous. If you watch him in any single scene, he is doing his best to listen to the other musicians and to play into and support what they’re trying to do—not to be his own man, stand out and stick out, you know, but to play into the other guy’s music and enhance it. He wasn’t driven by ego. He was driven by great music.
Not long after the NET special aired, Hoffman directed two documentary shorts for Mobil Oil: Spike: A Montana Horseman and Travelin’ Men. Both were produced with a little help from the Earl Scruggs Revue on the music tracks.
With the success of Earl Scruggs: His Family and Friends to jumpstart Earl’s new musical direction, the 1970s proved to be a banner decade for his new family-centered band. It was an era packed with memorable live performances, innovative albums, film-worthy events, and national television appearances. Flanked by the youth of his sons, forty-six-year-old Scruggs Sr. was attracting a younger crowd of college-age kids at a time when many entertainers his age were frowned upon by youngsters, who saw them as their “parents’ music.” The hard-driving sound of the Earl Scruggs Revue shattered that stigma and paved the way for Earl to be relevant among a new breed of fans half his age. Gary Scruggs details a number of key venues for the Revue that had a profound impact on Earl’s reinvention of himself:
We performed in Carnegie Hall in New York City and in Wembley Arena in London, England. We played on the Grand Ole Opry in the early years of the Revue. In the Revue’s early years, we performed in several nationally known music clubs, including the Troubadour in Los Angeles, the Cellar Door in the Georgetown area of Washington, DC, and the Great Southeast Music Hall in Atlanta. There were also the Lone Star Café in New York City, the Quiet Knight in Chicago, and the Great American Music Hall in San Francisco. We appeared on many music festivals—both rock festivals and bluegrass festivals, even though we were never truly a rock band or truly a bluegrass band. We played on many college campuses, big and small. It seems like it was during the 1970s that big-city “street fairs” started happening, and we were booked on quite a few of them. Outside of the USA, we performed in several provinces in Canada, as well as Bermuda and England.
As for television, we performed on NBC’s Midnight Special two times, once on a show featuring country music that was cohosted by Loretta Lynn and Marty Robbins, and once on a show featuring rock and blues music, hosted by Ray Charles. Radio legend Wolfman Jack was the show’s announcer. We played on Phil Donahue’s show when it was based in Dayton, Ohio. We performed on several Country Music Association’s network shows. We also did the PBS show Austin City Limits. We did NBC’s The Today Show in, I think, 1971 or 1972, when the late Frank McGee anchored the show. We did The Tommy Hunter Show in Canada and shown on the CBC network. There were other TV shows, including Nashville-produced programs, but I don’t remember the names of them all.
Along with the many clubs, college campuses, festivals, and television shows the Revue played, they also found themselves in harmonious alignment with a number of artists appealing to the youth crowd, as Jody Maphis elaborates:
The young kids really took to Earl, and I don’t know exactly what the magic was, but they loved him. It was just a great time. All of a sudden it just started, like we’d be on the road and then we’d be doing four or five dates with the Doobie Brothers, or we’d be out with the [Nitty Gritty] Dirt Band, or doing stuff with the Byrds, or doing these big rock festivals. It was just amazing. You never knew what—I mean, we did a little short tour opening for Steppenwolf, and we even did some gigs with Edgar Winter and the James Gang. We did a little short tour with Three Dog Night. We did a lot of stuff with Linda Ronstadt, the Eagles, and of course Charlie Daniels. We played Central Park several times with, like, Emmylou [Harris] and Asleep at the Wheel. We did Willie Nelson’s first Dripping Springs Reunion [in March 1972]. Everyone wanted Earl. He had that kind of appeal.
In the town of Manhattan, Kansas, just northwest of Topeka, is the campus of Kansas State University, the site of two milestones in the Earl Scruggs Revue’s portfolio. In March 1972, Columbia recorded and later released Live at Kansas State, the band’s first concert album, featuring a diverse range of songs that covered almost every musical genre. Not only were old tunes like “Bugle Call Rag,” “Sally Goodin,” and “Foggy Mountain Breakdown” revamped for the college crowd; the Revue proved just how much they could jive with Earl’s “Carolina Boogie” before getting down deep in the blues with “Everybody Wants to Go to Heaven.”
Their performance was a big enough hit that the university invited them back to the campus for an Earl Scruggs tribute concert the following January, to be filmed by Michael C. Vorhol and Richard Abramson. The event included performances from Joan Baez, the Byrds (just prior to their disbanding), the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band, Ramblin’ Jack Elliot, Doc and Merle Watson, Tracy Nelson and Mother Earth, David Bromberg, and the Earl Scruggs Revue. Intercut with interviewed segments of the performing artists, the concert made its movie premiere two years later in 1975 as Banjoman at the Kennedy Center in Washington, DC, although it would be another two years before the soundtrack LP from Sire Records made its way to store shelves.[3] Country music artist Vince Gill was just getting his feet wet when he first crossed paths with the Earl Scruggs Revue and vouches for the generous compassion the senior Scruggs had for numerous beginners seeking guidance:
I started learning to play mandolin, I started to learn banjo and trying to play fiddle and all the stuff on guitar and Dobro. I started playing in all the bluegrass bands. But, I think, at eighteen probably, eighteen years old, I [ran] into Earl and Randy and Gary and all those guys when they had the Revue going in the midseventies, and we were playing a lot of the same festivals, so we got to be friends all those years ago. I loved how welcoming [Earl] was to all musicians—the person that he was, and how kind he was to all the young musicians that were obviously going to start tripping around his feet and admire him and love him like we all do and did. I think when you’re a young person, and someone you admire is kind to you, I don’t think you ever forget it for your whole life. That’s what I saw in Earl every time a young turk would come sniffing around. He was always, always welcoming. You’d be hard pressed to find a kinder guy than Earl.
For all of the adulation Scruggs was receiving with his new band, there was a large group of fans who felt abandoned by the banjo man and were not so quick to embrace the musical change that came with the Earl Scruggs Revue. Jody Maphis reveals the disgruntled feelings among steadfast bluegrass music fanatics:
The purist bluegrass people, they weren’t real pleased with us at all. Especially with me playing the drums and Earl when he went electric. Oh my goodness, they hated that. But, I mean, for the most part, a lot of the other bluegrass [people], they saw that it was opening the door for everybody. Everybody was getting to participate a little bit more, but there were some that just didn’t want to go through the door. It was a touchy time ’cause there were some people like [from the magazine] Bluegrass Unlimited, when an album came out, oh they’d crucify us. Earl was taking it. I think he understood it, but it was, like, he thought it was pretty silly.
Banjoist and Bluegrass Today host Doug Hutchens corroborates the sentiment voiced by bluegrass fundamentalists:
They were getting so much bad press—there wasn’t that many bluegrass periodicals, but he and the boys weren’t that popular with the hardcore bluegrass people. So much of the time, it didn’t go over that well with the audience because people were coming expecting to hear Lester Flatt and Earl Scruggs. Even though it was called the Earl Scruggs Revue, he came out with his banjo with a pickup in it.
The installation of an electric pickup on Earl’s banjo that stirred so much controversy among bluegrass fans was completely misunderstood, as Gary Scruggs clarifies:
He added it in the early 1970s with the Revue. Why? We had drums, electric bass, and on some songs, Randy would switch from acoustic to electric guitar—our concerts were high energy, and there were times when we were fairly loud and performing on large stages. Dad installed a pickup so that he could plug into an electric guitar amplifier placed behind him in order to better hear his banjo onstage—feedback from an acoustic instrument, especially in that era, could easily become an issue if front-of-mic monitors are relied upon on a loud stage in a large venue. Many bluegrass “purists” complained that “Earl has gone electric,” but what they didn’t realize or understand was that what the audience always heard was his banjo being played into a microphone, not the guitar amplifier sound we heard onstage.
Perhaps one of the most agile attributes to Earl’s musicianship that was passed along to his sons and their band was the ability to record entire albums in short blocks of time, a practice that was becoming less common as pop LPs were beginning to take months to record. Much of it had to do with their readiness prior to entering the studio. A lot of their arrangements were worked out on the road in front of audiences, as every song required a lead break from someone in the band. The more they experimented on the road, the more organized they were in the studio. Much of the material recorded was songs they played live, so they’d be ready when the engineer rolled tape.
They did their homework for the studio, unlike groups that would record brand-new songs, never played nor rehearsed, causing them to spend long hours and days recording—one song. “You didn’t go out and just waste a lot of studio time,” says Jody Maphis. “You go in there and do the best you can and knock it out. And also, you start losing the magic of it doing it over and over and over. We knew to catch the first couple of takes.” Gary Scruggs further comments:
Typically it took a few or sometimes several three-hour sessions to record a studio album, depending on how much overdubbing we did after the tracking. Additional time would be needed to mix the sound. A couple of live albums only took an hour or so to record, but then additional time was needed to mix them. We recorded an instrumental album, titled Dueling Banjos, in one day, doing so during two three-hour sessions.
It was on March 9, 1973, when the Revue capitalized on the popularity of “Dueling Banjos” with their own version, along with an all-instrumental collection of new material and a revitalization of oldies. In addition to Earl and Randy’s banjo/guitar duel, the band picked their original country-styled “String Bender” and a rearranged version of an old fiddle tune, “Black Mountain Blues,” along with their progressive banjo-fiddle-based “Peking Fling.” Among the old catalog of Flatt and Scruggs tunes, “Reuben” (revamped and retitled “Lonesome Ruben”) and “Fireball Mail” were, without doubt, the most radically transformed from their previous versions on Foggy Mountain Banjo. Both are played in a combination of jazz and blues, hence reflecting the musical revival Scruggs wanted to achieve with bluegrass tunes from a decade earlier.
Unquestionably, one of the most innovative musical productions assembled on vinyl is the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band’s epic album from 1972, Will the Circle Be Unbroken. And at the epicenter of this phenomenon in country music was Earl Scruggs. At the dawn of the seventies, the Dirt Band released their Uncle Charlie LP, which scored a top-ten single for them, “Mr. Bojangles,” a cover version of Jerry Jeff Walker’s 1968 ballad, backed with their rendition of Earl’s “Randy Lynn Rag.”
While still making a name for themselves, the Dirt Band captured the attention of Gary Scruggs during his senior year at Vanderbilt University. Near the end of his fall semester in 1970, the group held a concert at the university that sparked a relationship between themselves and the Scruggs family, which led to the production of their musical masterpiece. Gary Scruggs provides an in-depth account of Circle’s evolution:
I invited Mom and Dad to go with me to the concert, and with the help of a Vanderbilt dean of students, I arranged a meeting beforehand with the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band in the dressing room before the concert. We had a fun visit, and we also got together with the band in their dressing room following the concert. We quickly became friends and ended up working several concerts and festivals together over the years.
In June of 1971, the Earl Scruggs Revue played for a week at a music club in Boulder, Colorado, called Tulagi’s. Most of the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band members lived in Colorado at that time, and John McEuen, the multi-instrumentalist who played mostly five-string banjo and fiddle in the [band], didn’t live all that far from Boulder. He came to see us just about every night. He would come back with us to the motel in which we were staying after the shows, and there would be jam sessions well past the wee hours of the morning. John asked Dad if he would consider recording with the Dirt Band. Dad said yes and returned the invitation for the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band to record on his next album, and the Dirt Band agreed.
For the original Will the Circle Be Unbroken album, the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band came up with the idea to record with older country music artists they were fans of. The Dirt Band asked Dad to help with inviting some of the artists because they had never met some of those artists. Dad was particularly helpful in getting Roy Acuff, Maybelle Carter, and Jimmy Martin involved. The Dirt Band also asked Dad to recommend some musicians for further support on certain instruments—Dad helped in getting Vassar Clements on fiddle, Roy “Junior” Huskey on upright bass, and Norman Blake on Dobro guitar booked on the sessions. Randy and I also appeared on several tracks of the three-record set.
The album was recorded in the summer of 1971 and was significant for a number of reasons, including [that] it merged what was considered to be a pop or rock act, the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band, with traditional country music artists. It involved younger artists performing with older artists at a time when there was much discussion, concern, and debate over the so-called generation gap. It was also a triple-disc album, which was very unusual in country music, if not unprecedented. All in all, I think it’s fair to say that it was the first of its kind, at least the first I know of.
Not to be left out, the rest of the Scruggs family, Louise and Steve, were invited to be a part of the large chorus assembled to sing background vocals on the title track. Two more Circle volumes arose from the Dirt Band, both produced in participation with Earl Scruggs: one in 1989 and the other in 2002. As part of the thirtieth anniversary of Circle’s original release, PBS aired a concert special called Will the Circle Be Unbroken, Farther Along, in which Earl and Randy Scruggs, Vassar Clements, and Jerry Douglas (on Dobro) appeared onstage with the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band for a rendition of “Earl’s Breakdown” that went on to win a Grammy for all the artists in 2005 for Best Country Instrumental Performance.[4]
Based on the novel of the same name by Vera and Bill Cleaver, Where the Lilies Bloom was a low-budget feature film written for the screen by the creator of The Waltons, Earl Hamner Jr., produced by Robert B. Radnitz, and directed by William A. Graham. Shot on location in Watauga County, North Carolina, the movie depicts the heartfelt courage of four backwoods children (three girls and a boy) determined to stay together as a family following the death of their widower father, who struggled to make a living as a sharecropper on a primitive farm at the foot of the Great Smoky Mountains.[5] While much of the onscreen talent recruited for the production was picked from a crop of local actors in the Appalachians, the services for the soundtrack were rendered straight from the Scruggs Talent Agency outside of Nashville, as Gary Scruggs recalls:
The film’s producer, Robert B. Radnitz, invited Dad to do the soundtrack. Radnitz brought the raw and unfinished film to Nashville. Dad, Mom, and Revue members viewed it in a rented movie theater in downtown Nashville. Not long after the viewing, we recorded the soundtrack in a studio in Los Angeles. The studio had a large screen and we watched the action on the screen as we recorded the music.
Along with the United Artists theatrical release of the film in 1974, Columbia issued the Where the Lilies Bloom soundtrack album, headlined by the Earl Scruggs Revue. A single of the title track (backed with Randy and Earl’s original “All My Trials”) was also cut under the Revue’s name, featuring the high-pitched lonesome vocal of Barbara Mauritz, who wrote the song, which is heard during the movie’s opening credits. Interestingly, the small black-and-white image of the Revue appearing on the album jacket’s front cover was a photo taken by Nashville photographer Wilmer “Slick” Lawson that is similar to the photo used on the cover of the band’s 1973 self-titled LP The Earl Scruggs Revue. In that still on the Lilies cover, Earl is surrounded by Revue members Josh Graves, Randy Scruggs, Gary Scruggs, Jody Maphis, and fifteen-year-old Steve Scruggs. The photograph misrepresents Steve’s participation, as he didn’t play on any of the Lilies tracks, while Vassar Clements, who was part of that project, is not pictured at all.
Where the Lilies Bloom was the second theatrical feature to showcase instrumental compositions by Earl Scruggs, such as “Stash It,” which fit perfectly into the mountain ambience of the movie, as did an updated version of his classic “Flint Hill Special.” It’s also the first (and only) motion picture to be scored by the Revue.
More than a year after the Revue’s Rockin’ ’Cross the Country landed on store shelves, producer Bob Johnston collaborated with the Scruggs family in the early fall of 1975 to create a celebratory two-volume Anniversary Special album honoring Earl’s twenty-fifth year with Columbia Records. The records highlight the talents of Earl and the Revue with an array of guest artists and their respective songs.
Some of the guest artists, like Joan Baez, Charlie Daniels, Tracy Nelson, Roger McGuinn, and Johnny Cash, were already established fixtures in the Scruggs camp, while others, such as piano man Billy Joel and the rhythm and blues trio the Pointer Sisters, came from a talent pool of rising stars and studio musicians assembled by Johnston, with some help from guest vocalist Don Nix. Two of the coveted musicians who participated in the sessions at Nashville’s Quadrafonic Studios were keyboardist L. Leon Pendarvis, the future music director and conductor for the Saturday Night Live band, and drummer Willie Hall, who went on to play for such performers as Isaac Hayes and the Blues Brothers. Unlike most of the other guests, who came from genres that had Nashville ties, both men were rooted in rhythm and blues. Pendarvis tells of his experience as part of that unique compilation:
I was brought there because of Bob Johnston, who produced it. For about a couple of years or so, I was kind of like one of Bob’s guys, so to speak. So when that project came up, he thought I would be suited for it; so that was my first Nashville recording. I was doing studio recording in New York, which is, I think, how Bob and I met, but I had never done any recording in Nashville. It certainly was an album that I was proud to be a part of—certainly because of who Earl was. He was just a legend. And also, it was somewhat novel for me, because of the nature of the kind of record that it was, considering that most of what I was doing in New York was in the pop or R&B vein. So it was different in that regard and a learning experience in that regard too. That album was kind of, for lack of a better word to put it, an all-star cast of folks. It didn’t feel like your typical studio record. So it was kind of unique in that regard.
Willie and I were the only [instrumental] players of color that I recall, at least, on that project. In some respects, I didn’t pay a lot of attention to that, but I did pay attention to it because it’s kind of hard not to. And you know, it meant nothing in terms of what the rapport was like with the players there because musicians, the way I look at it, is we tend to transcend that stuff. There’s kind of a camaraderie and kind of this unspoken bond that musicians have, and that’s a lot of what I felt, you know, being like the outsider in a way.
Willie Hall revisits his invitation to play on the record along with his discovery of Earl’s musical diversity:
The way I became involved: a friend of mine, Don Nix, who’s a noted guitarist and songwriter, who was actually a friend of George Harrison of the Beatles—Don and I are old friends, and Bob Johnston, who was the producer on that session, he wanted to change musicians, you know, he wanted a variety of different musicians on that particular session. And at that time, my reputation was pretty hot as an R&B player—and Don came to me and asked me if I wanted to do a session with Earl Scruggs. And we both laughed about it because it was so far-fetched from the Stax Studios—the R&B stuff. So, naturally, I agreed. I thought it would be a great privilege to be a part of that. So Don and I flew up to Nashville, and there were a host of musicians involved in that—some real great players.
One thing that impressed me about Earl Scruggs: the musicians in between takes or on a lunch break, everybody would just get in the studio and start jamming. And Earl was the first banjo player that I ever heard play the blues on the banjo. I thought that was so impressive, man, so he gained my total respect from that point. It was so impressive to hear him actually bend notes on the banjo. Most of the blues consist of a lot of single notes, but you know, some of the guys had tendencies to bend their notes, and Earl really impressed me with that, man. I didn’t know many banjo players at that time, but hearing him do that, it just blew us away, man.
On the morning of Monday, September 29, 1975, as Bob Johnston and company were assembled in the studio listening to playbacks, they received startling news that Earl Scruggs had suffered injuries from an airplane crash the night before. While flying his single-engine Cessna 172 into Nashville’s Cornelia Fort Airpark after operating hours, Scruggs encountered dense fog that caused him to overshoot the runway. His landing gear clipped a fence that flipped the small aircraft upside down in a nearby soybean field. With fractures to his left wrist, left ankle, and nose, he was stranded within the wreckage until sunrise.[6] Earl’s niece, Grace Constant, depicts how the family searched for and rescued him:
One night I received a late phone call from Gary. Uncle Earl had driven his car to the airport. Uncle Earl was flying his plane to a [Revue] show out of town, then returning to Nashville. When it was apparent Uncle Earl was late getting back home, Aunt Louise and Gary went to the airport to look for him, but Uncle Earl wasn’t there. My son, Jeffrey Davis, and I got up and dressed, and I drove as fast as I could to Cornelia Fort Airpark. We got out of the car and ran down the runway calling for him and finally heard someone faintly calling for help. I knew that was my Uncle Earl’s voice. I took off to call Gary so he could get help. We didn’t have cell phones [back then], and it was so dark that you could not see anything without lights.
Scruggs spent the next few months recovering from the crash, which eerily occurred four days shy of the date of his horrific car accident twenty years earlier. During his recuperation, the first volume of the Anniversary Special was released before the end of 1975. Willie Hall relives the thrill of it all:
When the product was released, man, I was really surprised to see the list of people that participated, because a studio musician, usually he’ll come in and they work hard on the basic tracks. And once those are finished, you know, they usually go on back to their regular life. So I was only there for the recording of the basic tracks. But then when the product came out and I got to see all the people that were involved—all the background people and different musicians that would come in to do overdubs and stuff like that—I was really pleased with the product. I tell a lot of people that I speak with, you know, they ask me about my accomplishments in the music field and I say one of my most cherished accomplishments was the Earl Scruggs project. Because of the fact that, you know, growing up as a child in Florida, I was an avid fan of The Beverly Hillbillies. I thought that kind of comedy was new, and it was so funny at that time, man—and that theme just sticks in your head, you know. So I grew up memorizing and humming that theme for years, and then to actually meet this man, and to be a part of one of his projects, and for that project to make such an indentation, I cherish it as one of my most memorable participations in a recording.
The Anniversary Special’s second installment hit the streets in 1976 under the title The Earl Scruggs Revue Volume II. America’s bicentennial year also brought the release of Family Portrait, a country rock production that heavily spotlighted the talents of Gary, Randy, and Steve, with Earl mainly backing them up. And while their studio recordings were changing, they continued to perform much of their noted material on the road, as captured on Live from Austin City Limits. Only four more albums awaited the Revue in between booking dates during its latter few years: Strike Anywhere (1977), Bold and New (1978), Today and Forever (1979), and Country Comfort (1980).
In the spring of 1979, Earl’s former partner, Lester Flatt, was in need of hospitalization due to chronic cardiac problems that dated back to a heart attack he endured twelve years earlier. This would be Lester’s final trip to the infirmary, as the severity of his illness was too great for him to overcome. Understanding that he may never see his old friend again, through the urging of Marty Stuart (who was their mutual friend and member of Flatt’s Nashville Grass at the time), Scruggs went to the hospital and he spent more than an hour visiting the deteriorating Flatt.[7] In his 1989 radio interview on Bluegrass Today, Earl responded to his dying bandmate’s special request:
I went to see Lester—I don’t know how many days it was before he passed away, but he was really in bad shape; he was in the Baptist Hospital here in Nashville. And he could hardly talk loud enough for me to tell what he was saying. And he wanted to know if we could play some dates together—some reunion dates together. And my answer immediately was, I said, “Lester, number one: I want you to get well. Number two: yes, we’ll play dates together when you get well. But my biggest concern now is for you to get more strength and get to feeling better, then we’ll talk about doing a reunion.” So that was kind of the way it was left.
Soon afterward, on May 11, 1979, Lester Raymond Flatt, one of the pioneers of bluegrass music and cofounder with Scruggs of the legendary Foggy Mountain Boys, passed away at the age of sixty-four, just over a month short of his sixty-fifth birthday. In 2003, Earl spoke endearingly about his relationship with Lester on NPR’s Fresh Air with Terry Gross. “Though he’s been dead for several years, I still have a warm spot in my heart and cherish the days we worked and traveled together.”
Shortly after the passing of Lester Flatt, Earl summed up his future plans in an interview with Tim Timberlake on May 19, 1979, in Lanexa, Virginia:
I don’t have any thought of retiring. I have cut back. I used to travel seven days a week, and I just don’t want to do that anymore because I’m enjoying grandchildren and my own children and family. I want to still stay in the business but, you know, not at a hard pace like I used to—but my health, thank goodness, is still good and as long as it is, and I love music, so I’d like to stay with it as long as I can.
By the early spring of 1980, Earl’s recurring back pains were reaching an all-time high in frequency and complications. Traveling became increasingly difficult for the banjo man, who at only fifty-six years old was still in the prime of his life. But while the patriarch of the Scruggs family was battling health issues, Randy was eager to launch a production company he founded through his investment in a recording studio (which later included a partnership with his brother Steve). That September, the Earl Scruggs Revue played their last show in a North Carolina city street festival.
After eleven years of riveting performances, the family troupe that was voted the number one musical act among colleges consecutively for two years officially disbanded.[8] Though Earl Scruggs performed and recorded under his own name in the coming decades, sons Gary and Randy continued to be a presence by his side, keeping the spirit of their father’s Revue alive for the rest of his days. In retrospect, Jody Maphis conveys the essence of Earl’s leadership through this transitionally gratifying juncture of his career:
He took some stands on things at a time when it wasn’t popular to take those stands—and he was the same way with his music. If it was something he believed in, he was a hundred percent behind it, and it was going to be out there. He never held anybody back, especially with the music, and he defended everything that we did, which I find very admirable ’cause he believed in what we were doing. He let us all grow musically in the process, and that’s something that I’ll cherish forever.
Earl’s “great sense of relief” is affirmed by Gary Scruggs. See also Rosenberg, Bluegrass, 310; Kochman, Big Book of Bluegrass, 34; and Scruggs in Earl Scruggs: His Family and Friends.
NET was absorbed by PBS in 1970. See Carolyn N. Brooks, “National Educational Television Center,” Encyclopedia of Television, Museum of Broadcast Communications, http://www.museum.tv/eotv/nationaleduc.htm.
Louise Scruggs mentions the Banjoman premiere at the Kennedy Center in her liner notes for Earl Scruggs and Friends.
Earl’s Grammy for his performance on the recording of “Earl’s Breakdown” is verified via the Past Winners Search page on the Grammy’s official website (grammy.com).
The original 1974 poster for Where the Lilies Bloom notes that it is “filmed in color in the backwoods of the Blue Ridge Mountains.” Locations and local casting verified by IMDb.com, Robert Radnitz “Where the Lilies Bloom” page on Roger Ebert’s official website (rogerebert.com), and the North Carolina Film Office’s official website (ncfilm.com).
Details of Earl’s 1975 plane crash appear Graves, Bluegrass Bluesman, 52, and in Scruggs, Earl Scruggs and the 5-String Banjo (2005), 169–70. Wreckage of the plane was photographed by Owen Cartwright of the Nashville Banner (September 29, 1975), which clearly shows the plane’s right wheel severed from the remainder of the aircraft. Most of the visible damage is on the plane’s underside.
Marty Stuart’s urging Earl Scruggs to visit Lester Flatt in the hospital is confirmed by Gary Scruggs and documented by Country Music magazine columnist Patrick Carr’s liner notes for The Essential Flatt and Scruggs: ’Tis Sweet to Be Remembered . . . (Sony Music Entertainment, 1997).
Louise Scruggs, liner notes for Earl Scruggs and Friends, and Earl Scruggs, liner notes for The Essential Earl Scruggs.