I learned to play the banjo a little bit. Obviously, all of us that ever picked one up, we go straight to the source, and everybody tries to play like Earl. I mean, that’s pretty profound actually—hands down, the largest majority of all people who play that instrument are going to be pointed to and defined by Earl.
—Vince Gill, country music artist
After the breakup of the Earl Scruggs Revue in September 1980, Earl entered into a long period of semiretirement. The serious back pains that were plaguing him thwarted any chance of maintaining a full schedule of tour dates. Though he may not have had the health to sustain extensive travel, he did have the desire to continue performing and recording on a part-time, at-will basis. The first project to emerge came about as a friendly offer from Scruggs’s pal Tom T. Hall, who remembers the circumstances that led to the Columbia release of The Storyteller and the Banjo Man in early 1982:
I had a recording contract with Mercury Records, and my manager came to me and jokingly said, “You’re going to be out of a recording contract for a while,” and I said, “What happened?” He said, “I’m negotiating with the record company, and it’ll be about a month before we get the negotiations wrapped up, so right now, you’re not on a recording label”—and he was sort of laughing about it.
But I had an idea. I had been working with Lester and Earl on all these songs all these years, and for some strange reason I picked up the telephone and called Earl. I said, “Earl, I’ve got an idea.” I said, “I’m in between recording contracts and I’m not signed with anybody right now,” and I said, “Why don’t you and I get together and do an album together?” It was quiet on the phone for a minute, and he said, “Tom T., the hair is standing up on my arms,” and I thought that was a great compliment, and I said, “Well, let’s get it done.” I knew Louise was running the show. I said, “See what Louise thinks.”
So they called me back and said Randy Scruggs was a producer at that time and was producing some nice things, so Randy Scruggs produced the album, and we went into the studio and we recorded it, and we had a great time. We had success with it, and it sold some albums. I didn’t collaborate with Earl on any more projects other than that, but Louise had called me up and wanted us to go on tour together, but, you know, I had a manager and a booking agent, and I had a full-load schedule of tours, but I’d like to brag and say that I did.
Out of the album came the singles “Song of the South” and “There Ain’t No Country Music on This Juke Box.” Even though both 45-rpm labels note that the songs were taken from the Columbia LP The Storyteller and the Banjo Man, the word “banjo” is misspelled in capital letters on “Song of the South” as “BANGO.” The tone of the album signaled a less electrifying progressive sound than that of Earl’s Revue days. His return to more traditional country arrangements was announced publically by Associated Press writer Joe Edwards in an article on August 20 of that year.
By autumn of 1982, Earl temporarily traded his suit and tie for a pair of denim overalls in Kornfield Kounty to make a surprise appearance on the long-running country music variety series Hee Haw. Without any fanfare, Scruggs participated, briefly, in two episodes as part of the Real Hillbilly Band. The popular syndicated program was taped behind the Grand Ole Opry stage at the Opryland Complex in Studio A, then produced in segmented pieces that were later assembled into a season’s worth of episodes. Hee Haw’s producer, Sam Lovullo, explains Earl’s unannounced presence:
One thing that made this show was that it was an impromptu show. In other words, things happened suddenly. And Marty Stuart, that day, was in the back room of the Grand Ole Opry visiting with Roy Clark. He was not listed as a guest, and so the bottom line is that, I have recollection now, that Earl Scruggs was there [too]. Roy Clark—and this is something very exciting which was the way Hee Haw was done—Roy Clark said, “Let’s go out there and put these guys together and do something.” And that’s the way this event came about.
Earl kicks off the opening lick for their vocal rendition of “I Like Mountain Music” and then plays a break in the instrumental “Soldier’s Joy.” In a star-studded lineup, Scruggs is visible at the far left top of a riser with Marty Stuart on mandolin, Roy Clark on Dobro, and Opry upright bassist Billy Lineman, all standing behind front-row fiddlers Byron Berline, Roy Acuff, and John Hartford, with flattop guitarist Norman Blake. Hee Haw cohost and country music star Roy Clark elaborates on the band’s arrangement:
We had all those great musicians, and all of them, maybe, never had a chance to play together before. They had Earl playing banjo, of course, and they put me on a Dobro. And Earl said, “Can you really play that thing?” I said, “I’ll only know when we get through.” I never played that much Dobro, but I wasn’t about to play banjo in front of Earl [laughs]. All I had to do was turn around and look at whoever was there and point to have them do it. I was like the leader of the band, only because they wanted to know where to aim the camera.
Keeping his collaborative momentum going with guest artists, Scruggs recorded Top of the World in 1983. With Rodney Dillard, Ricky Skaggs, Lacy J. Dalton, and the Burrito Brothers in the mix, the record would be the second of Earl’s to be produced by his middle son, Randy, along with John Thompson. Scruggs brothers Gary and Steve also contributed their talents, Gary with background vocals and Steve as assistant engineer. Another single for Earl was cut from this album, “Sittin’ on Top of the World,” featuring Dillard’s vocals.
In 1984, Scruggs composed the cheerful-sounding “American Made—World Played,” which became the title track for his final LP with Columbia. The album’s outcome was similar to his first post–Flatt and Scruggs project, Nashville’s Rock, in that it primarily contained instrumental cover versions of recent popular tunes, only this time it favored some of country music’s hit songs. And after thirty-four successful years with Columbia Records, Earl Scruggs remained silent for the next seventeen years before returning to the recording studio to appear on a brand-new medium—compact disc.
During this long break from recording, Earl and Louise Scruggs suffered their greatest loss as their youngest son, Steve, and his wife, Elizabeth, died tragically in their home on September 23, 1992. The shock of losing his son at thirty-four years of age sent Earl into a mourning period where he didn’t pick a single note on his beloved five-stringed instrument for eight consecutive months.[1] The healing for him, musically, didn’t begin until his dear friend John Hartford stopped by with his fiddle offering to “pick.” The invitation helped to close the wound in his heart as Earl slowly began to play again that night.[2]
A little more than a year later, after he rejuvenated his banjo, Scruggs received a request to participate on Byron Berline’s forthcoming album. The longstanding rift that existed between Flatt and Scruggs and Monroe (which started in 1948 and worsened in 1955) was clearly over when Flatt and Scruggs split up in 1969, as demonstrated by their willingness to share the stage at various shows. Yet it had been decades since the public heard them together on a recording. Berline describes his success in the studio homecoming for the two biggest names in bluegrass:
In 1994, I asked Earl to play on my album Fiddle and a Song, and he said he would, and then I asked Bill Monroe if he would play on it, and he said he would as well. So I got the both of them in the studio at the same time. That was the first time they’d been in the studio together since the forties. [We] told Earl that Bill was going to be there, and Bill that Earl was going to be playing as well, and they didn’t seem to mind. I filmed the whole thing—I had my nephew film it—and I still have it. I haven’t put any of that footage out, and of course the Nashville Network heard about it, and they came down and filmed some of it too.
Two years later, while in the hospital for back surgery, Scruggs took an unexpected turn that nearly claimed his life. “In September of 1996 he was hospitalized in hopes of getting his back problems solved,” says Gary Scruggs. “The back surgery turned out to be successful, but, while in the recovery room, he had a heart attack. It was found that he needed a quintuple bypass. It took a while to recover, but after a year or so, he felt a hundred percent better than before the heart attack.”
Upon full recovery from his near-fatal encounter, Earl was energized enough to make a musical comeback. At the age of seventy-four, he assembled a new band that included his sons Gary and Randy along with a rotating ensemble of friends. Gary Scruggs illustrates some of the highlights from this new chapter in his father’s career:
In 1998, he started touring a little, now and then, with his Family & Friends band. I was always a part of it and felt very grateful and excited over the next several years to be performing with him again. We didn’t tour full-time, just occasional dates, so the band’s personnel varied, depending on which musicians were available at any given time.
Over the next thirteen years or so, Earl Scruggs with Family & Friends performed at several major music festivals, including Warren Hellman’s Hardly Strictly Bluegrass Festival in San Francisco, California; the Stagecoach Festival in Indio, California; MerleFest in Wilkesboro, North Carolina; the Newport Folk Festival in Newport, Rhode Island; the Telluride Bluegrass Festival in Telluride, Colorado; the Huck Finn Music Jubilee in Ontario, California; the Bonnaroo Music and Arts Festival in Manchester, Tennessee; the Calgary Folk Music Festival in Calgary, Alberta; the Winnipeg Folk Music Festival in Winnipeg, Manitoba; the Vancouver Island MusicFest in Courtenay, British Columbia; and the Johnny Keenen Banjo Festival in Longford, Ireland.
Other highlights included performing at the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum in Nashville, Tennessee; the Kennedy Center in Washington, DC; the Ryman Auditorium in Nashville, Tennessee, and playing some co-billed concerts with friends such as Steve Martin, the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band, and Charlie Daniels. We also performed at a couple of well-known music clubs, B.B. King’s Blues Club in New York and the Birchmere in Alexandria, Virginia. Dad appeared as a guest on recordings or live performances with several other artists, including Dwight Yoakam, Patty Loveless, the Chieftains, Béla Fleck, Loretta Lynn, Marty Stuart, Tony Trischka, and the Dixie Chicks.
In 2001, a CD titled Earl Scruggs and Friends was released on MCA Records. There were several guest artists involved with that album, including Elton John, Sting, Johnny Cash, John Fogarty, Steve Martin, Travis Tritt, Vince Gill, and Billy Bob Thornton, to name just a few. “Foggy Mountain Breakdown” was re-recorded for that MCA album. Featured performers were Earl Scruggs on banjo, Glen Duncan on fiddle, Randy Scruggs on acoustic guitar, Steve Martin picking the second banjo break, Vince Gill on the first electric guitar break, Marty Stuart on mandolin, myself on harmonica, Albert Lee playing the second electric guitar break, Paul Shaffer playing piano, Jerry Douglas on Dobro, and Leon Russell on organ. A video of us playing along with the recorded track was released and went to the number four spot on the CMT cable channel video chart. In 2002, the featured performers all won Grammy Awards in the Best Country Instrumental Performance category.
Dad made television appearances on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno and The Late Show with David Letterman. Earl Scruggs with Family & Friends [also] appeared on a PBS special, All-Star Bluegrass Celebration.
And tuning in to Earl’s first late-night spot from November 2001 was Paul Henning’s authorized Beverly Hillbillies biographer, Stephen Cox, who recalls the excitement of the banjo man’s revival:
The most impressive thing I’ve ever seen on David Letterman was the night that Earl was on there with about eight other guys, and they all played. And of course they were plugging the new CD. But, holy mackerel, when they played “Foggy Mountain Breakdown,” and you have all those guys, including Paul Shaffer and Steve Martin and the rest, playing that thing—one of the best things I’ve ever seen on David Letterman in all those years there. It was quite amazing. It was just a sight. It was historic on that show. That was some good television right there.
According to Steve Martin, performing “Foggy Mountain Breakdown” on the late-night program was the result of a subtle admission by Earl: “I remember when we were going to do the Letterman show, everybody thought [since] ‘Foggy Mountain Breakdown’ is played so much, we shouldn’t do that, let’s do something else. They asked Earl and he said, ‘Well, I think you should always go out there with your best.’ And that’s why we ended up doing ‘Foggy Mountain Breakdown.’”
Shortly after his return to television, Earl Scruggs made a cameo appearance, with his son Randy, in the heartwarming motion picture Changing Hearts, released in April 2002. Based on the award-winning play Colored Eggs by Daniel Wright, the screen adaptation’s star, Faye Dunaway, personally requested Scruggs as a wedding musician for her matrimonial scene with costar Tom Skerritt.[3] This would be the second time that Earl had a presence in a feature film with Dunaway—the other, of course, being Bonnie and Clyde (1967).
In late July 2003, PBS’s long-running Great Performances series aired an epic concert hall production that was a countrified spin-off from the international operatic sensation the Three Tenors. Gary Scruggs discusses the televised event:
Earl Scruggs performed a live concert billed as “The Three Pickers” that featured him along with the great guitar player from Deep Gap, North Carolina, Doc Watson, and bluegrass artist Ricky Skaggs. Alison Krauss also took part as special guest, playing her fiddle and singing harmony on a few of the songs. The concert was held in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, and was recorded for CD and DVD release on Rounder Records. The CD and DVD were released in 2003.
Before the Three Pickers united to pick and sing for the bulk of the concert, Earl was joined by his Family & Friends band for a couple of songs; Ricky was likewise joined by his band, Kentucky Thunder, and Doc performed a couple of songs with his grandson, Richard Watson. When the Three Pickers began their trio performance, it turned out to be a great combination of picking, singing, and storytelling.
The historic performance brought two Grammy nominations by the year’s end: Best Traditional Folk Album and Best Country Instrumental Performance for “Pick Along.”[4] The following years brought even more attention to Scruggs, beginning with Sony Music’s two-disc compilation The Essential Earl Scruggs, released on March 2, 2004, and showcasing the banjo man’s body of work from 1946 to 1984. In September 2004, he was named Resident Artist at the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum, where his residency gave way to four concert programs. That same month, Scruggs traveled to Ireland with his Family & Friends band for the Johnny Keegan Banjo Festival. Christine “Chris” Keenan, the event’s organizer and widow of Johnny Keenan (one of the greatest four-string banjo players to come out of Ireland, for whom the festival was named), speaks eloquently about Europe’s emotional reception of the American banjo icon:
Earl’s appearance in Ireland made the national main evening news. Thousands of people came from all over Europe to get a close-up glimpse of their hero. When he walked onstage in our specially erected concert tent—incidentally, the largest seated event ever to be held in the town of Longford—the whole crowd stood up in unison, unheard of in Ireland prior to a performance—with several rows of grown men clutching Flatt and Scruggs albums, crying their eyes out. The earth shook.
On April 30, 2005, he joined a host of veteran bluegrass musicians at MerleFest’s Blue Grass Boys’ reunion honoring Bill Monroe. Former Blue Grass Boy guitarist Peter Rowan recites an “Earlism” that’s exemplary of his well-known dry sense of humor:
There was a quote from Earl that really blew my mind. We had a Blue Grass Boys reunion at the MerleFest years ago, and Earl was part of the band. During the rehearsals, it was bliss, it was heaven. During rehearsal, standing in a circle at the Hampton Inn, I asked Earl if he wanted us to play the song “Heavy Traffic Ahead,” the same structure on his solo as the verses, and he just looked at me and said the most drop-dead thing I’ve ever heard anyone say—he said, “Well, follow the leader is all I know.” That has got to be the most classic bluegrass statement of all time, because when you take the solo you’re the leader. That’s another thing people don’t understand about bluegrass: you’ve got to get up there and lead the band.
“He had a good sense of humor,” adds Steve Martin. “He loved little phrases like, ‘He’s one knife short of a full set,’ meaning a set of cutlery, when he’s talking about somebody being dim.” Scruggs enthusiast and Banjo Newsletter columnist Bob Piekiel used to spend time with Earl via his friendship with John Hartford. It was Hartford who introduced Bob to Earl, which morphed into regular visits to the Scruggs house for jams and conversation. “When I would go to the jam sessions, I would always have my banjo in hand,” says Piekiel. “But I would much rather sit, and watch, and listen to Earl than actually play. Sometimes Earl would say, ‘Why don’t you pick?’ and I would say, ‘Well, the priest doesn’t say grace when the Pope is around [laughs].’ Earl would laugh and say, ‘Well the Pope isn’t here.’”
During a break at another such picking session, Bob recalls an incident Earl recounted from his childhood that could’ve changed the course of history:
Earl was a storyteller himself, and a fountain of information, and he just loved to tell stories about everything from his early days on the farm and growing up to music and so on, and how he approached playing. He told me a story that when he was just a boy, back in [Flint Hill], three men and their wives, they were called the Gaines Brothers, came to his church, and they were teaching gospel singing and piano, among other instruments. They were offering ten lessons for approximately three dollars to anybody who wanted to come to this event and to try out with these people to see if they were any good to be worthy of these lessons. So they had songbooks and so on, and Earl showed up with his banjo. They happened to pull a tune from one of the songbooks that Earl sort of knew, “The Old Tiny Serenade,” which now has been turned into a fiddle tune that we know of as “Chinese Breakdown.” It’s kind of a lesser-known bluegrass song, but it’s out there. So they told Earl to play it, and Earl played it the way that he would on his three-finger banjo. He did a very good job at interpreting the melody and, when he finished the tune, one of the guys said to him, “There ain’t no use in you taking lessons. You’re never going to be any good,” and told him to leave.
In addition to his wit and storytelling, Earl also had an uncanny ability to create little oddities from novelties dating back to his youth. Longtime friend and devoted student of Scruggs Pete Wernick (aka Dr. Banjo) admits how one such instance became a magical moment:
Visiting him once in his later years, he was wailing away on a tune I’d never heard before. I asked what it was and he just said, offhandedly, “Obelisk Flour.” It was really catchy, up the neck, and unmistakably “Earl,” but unlike anything I’d heard him play. I asked where it came from and he ended up singing this little jingle about Obelisk Flour and let me record it, singing and all. “It’s songs and music for a quarter of an hour, a few kind words about Obelisk Flour. . . .” I learned it from my recording, and after that when I’d visit, he’d ask how I was coming on Obelisk Flour. I’d play it and he’d say I didn’t quite have it and would show me again, but my recordings show he kept changing it slightly. I know my version is pretty close, and I love playing it and thinking about him. At one point I googled “Obelisk Flour” to get some background and was a bit shocked to learn that the company, which was based in Louisville, had shut down in 1940! So Earl must have heard the song on the radio in the 1930s as a teenager, and here he was past eighty making a banjo tune out of it. I don’t know of anyone else playing the tune, so I have a special feeling about having learned this little gem from him.
Less than a year after the Blue Grass Boys reunion at MerleFest, Anne Louise Certain Scruggs, Earl’s wife of fifty-eight years, lost her lengthy battle with an illness at Nashville’s Baptist Hospital on February 2, 2006. The woman most responsible for the success of her husband’s remarkable career passed away just fifteen days prior to her seventy-ninth birthday. Earl and Louise’s sixty-year relationship came full circle as the banjo man bid his final farewell to the love of his life at the Ryman Auditorium, where they first met.
On November 13, 2007, the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum held its first annual Louise Scruggs Memorial Forum to honor businesswomen in the music industry who are reflective of the pioneering spirit established by Mrs. Scruggs.[5] Three years later, on September 30, 2010, Louise would join her husband, who was listed in 1991 as an inaugural inductee into the International Bluegrass Music Association’s Bluegrass Hall of Fame.[6] Earl, Gary, and Randy paid tribute to Louise’s memory during the induction ceremony with a touching rendition of “You Are My Flower,” an appropriate choice from the old Flatt and Scruggs catalog, as voiced by Gary Scruggs:
It was my mother’s idea for Flatt and Scruggs to record the album Songs of the Famous Carter Family, which was released in 1961. One of her favorite songs on that album was “You Are My Flower,” a song on which Dad played guitar whenever he performed it. So that’s the song we decided to play in memory of her at her induction. Joining Dad, Randy, and me that evening were Jon Randall Stewart and Dierks Bentley on harmony vocals and Rob Ickes on Dobro guitar.
The 2010 IBMA awards show was held in Nashville at the Ryman Auditorium where Mom and Dad had met in 1946. We thought it was fitting that the other Bluegrass Hall of Fame inductee that year was the late John Hartford, who had been a very close and dear friend of Mom and Dad’s.
The Ryman was also host to Earl’s last recorded album. Gary Scruggs looks back at the recorded performance and identifies many of the talented artists who contributed to the Family & Friends troupe over the years:
In 2007, Earl Scruggs with Family & Friends played a concert at the Ryman Auditorium that was recorded for future CD release. The band consisted of Earl Scruggs on five-string banjo and picking his three-finger style on acoustic guitar on a couple of songs, Hubert “Hoot” Hester on fiddle, Rob Ickes on Dobro, John Jorgenson on electric guitar, mandolin, and clarinet, John Gardner on drums, Jon Randall and Randy Scruggs on acoustic guitars, and myself on electric bass. The live CD, titled The Ultimate Collection Live at the Ryman, was released on Rounder Records in 2008. The album was nominated for a Grammy in the Best Bluegrass Album category.
There were other musicians who played at least several dates in the Family & Friends band, including guitarists Albert Lee, Keith Sewell, Bryan Sutton, Jeff White, and Brad Davis—fiddlers Bobby Hicks, Stuart Duncan, and Glen Duncan—Dobro players Jimmy Stewart, Jennifer Kennedy Merideth, and Jerry Douglas—drummers Harry Stinson and Mark Beckett. Guest artists who sat in with Family & Friends included Vince Gill, Emmylou Harris, Travis Tritt, Marty Stuart, Charlie Daniels, Dierks Bentley, and Kris Kristofferson.
As Earl’s career (and health) was beginning to slow down, his ear for musical perfection remained strong. Veteran banjoist Tony Trischka remembers one experience that taught him a lesson not only about how Scruggs could truly pull tone out of his instrument, but also about how easily he could play songs in other keys and tunings:
I was out in Missouri with Earl, I don’t know, maybe five or six years ago, and his road manager came over to me and said, “How would you like to play Earl’s banjo?” I said, “Ahhh ya!” This was the banjo he recorded everything on, though it had a different neck, but it was that banjo. So I went back to Earl’s dressing room, and he handed me the banjo, and it felt terrible and it sounded terrible, but he sounded great on it, I couldn’t get a sound out of it. Steve Martin was on the show also. Earl hands me the banjo and I started playing “Ground Speed,” then I hand it to Steve, who likes to play in double-C tuning. He plays and then hands it back to Earl without retuning it, and Earl starts playing “Brown’s Ferry Blues” without picks in double-C tuning, without batting an eyelash. I’ve never heard him play in double-C tuning, and he just did it. I thought, I need to record this, but I couldn’t because he played it just one time through.
Scruggs’s final performance occurred at UCLA’s Royce Hall on November 5, 2011. Retrospectively, Earl’s thoughts about the vast number of musicians he performed and recorded with since the genesis of his career is expressed by Gary Scruggs. “He got a big kick out of jamming with others, and it’s really amazing to look back and note the many musicians with whom he collaborated—and the diversity of all those artists.”
Just as Earl’s recordings with Columbia were heading toward a close in 1984, the Gibson Guitar Corporation (prior to their name change, Gibson USA) sought to create an Earl Scruggs–model five-string banjo. Nearly twenty-five years after Scruggs first approached Gibson and they declined to carry his name on a line of banjos, he was now fully unified with the company to revitalize his coveted Granada complete with nickel-plated hardware, not gold-plated hardware as was originally on the banjo. The new model was called the Earl Scruggs Standard. In 1989, Earl summarized the development of his signature model to Doug Hutchens on Bluegrass Today:
Well, let’s see, I guess about three or four years ago, it started with the idea to do a Scruggs-model banjo. And that’s what they did. They came out [with] one and it was very good. But about a year and a half or two years later, Greg Rich and some other people came in—he’s a perfectionist and not [to be] throwing off on the first banjos that they made because the sound was there—but Greg has put it back to the old prewar style. I mean, you can’t tell it, or I can’t tell it, from the prewar banjos, and I believe—I’ve had a lot of prewar banjos over the years, and I believe the Scruggs banjos that they’re building now just lay down a dozen of them. I believe just about every one of them will come up to what the best old prewar banjo would come up to. I’ve never seen anything like it. They just don’t miss a trick, and I think a whole lot of it is—is the perfection that goes into it and how well they put it together. They’ve got the very best of metal that goes in it, they use the best wood, and I just don’t know what they could do to improve it. And even to the inlay, it’s all just like the best you could ever ask for.
Subsequent models were introduced after the nickel-plated Earl Scruggs Standard: there was the ’49 Classic, which was like the Earl Scruggs Standard model except for the “bow tie” style inlay on the fingerboard, followed by three gold-plated engraved editions—the Golden Deluxe, the Flint Hill Special, and the Earl Scruggs Special. On July 19, 2002, Gibson saluted Scruggs with the unveiling of a unique limited edition collectible banjo simply called The Earl. Featuring a hand-drawn portrait by artist Randall Martin on the back of the resonator, the very first model was personally presented to Earl Scruggs, compliments of Gibson’s chairman and CEO Henry Juszkiewicz, at the Gibson Bluegrass Showcase in Nashville.[7]
With all of the awards given to Flatt and Scruggs during their prosperous reign in the 1950s and 1960s, the crowning achievement for the duo came in 1985, when Earl and Lester were inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame. They joined the ranks of their legendary predecessors Gene Autry, Tex Ritter, Hank Williams, and the Carter Family, as well as their peers, Roy Acuff, Chet Atkins, Merle Travis, and Johnny Cash, in addition to their old boss Bill Monroe and a fellow banjoist whom Scruggs held in high regard, Uncle Dave Macon. “I’ve had a lot of honors that has made me feel as good, but, I guess, the greatest one would have to be the Country Music Hall of Fame,” admitted Scruggs to Doug Hutchens in 1989. Being a man of few words, he confessed, “I didn’t have [a speech] prepared. I just went up and smiled and bowed and walked off. To put me out on a stage to make a speech, I just go speechless, so I just accepted it and walked off.”
The following year, Scruggs returned to his old stomping ground in Boiling Springs, North Carolina, to receive an honorary doctorate of humanities from Gardner-Webb College. An honorary doctorate of music followed in 2005 from the Berklee College of Music in Boston, Massachusetts. In 1989, he was awarded a lifetime honor, a National Heritage Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), before visiting the White House, where he was presented with the NEA’s National Medal of Arts by President George H. W. Bush in July 1992. In the inaugural year of the International Bluegrass Music Association’s Bluegrass Hall of Fame (1991), Scruggs was one of three inductees—the second, following Bill Monroe, with Lester Flatt as the third. Upon his out-of-retirement return in 1998, Scruggs picked the notes from his locomotive-sounding “Reuben” at the end of “Same Old Train” (from the CD Tribute to Tradition), which won him a Grammy in the Best Country Collaboration with Vocals category in 1999 along with twelve other country music artists.[8] And Gibson Guitars once again recognized Earl in February 2002 with their Orville H. Gibson Lifetime Achievement Award.
Pop music singer-songwriter Ray Davies wrote a number for his band the Kinks about seeing all of the stars on Hollywood Boulevard in 1972. And while “Celluloid Heroes” names a few actors from the Dream Factory’s golden age, the glamorous sidewalk in the heart of Tinseltown added the name Earl Scruggs to its illustrious Walk of Fame in 2003. Gary Scruggs reminisces about the day the banjo man was immortalized in concrete:
He was presented his Hollywood star on February 13, 2003. Several celebrities attended, including The Beverly Hillbillies cast members Max Baer Jr. and Donna Douglas. John McEuen of the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band and Kevin Nealon, formerly of the Saturday Night Live cast, who also plays five-string banjo, were there. The date was the one-year anniversary of Waylon Jennings’s death, and Waylon’s widow, and our friend, Jessi Colter, was also there. Other celebrities attended, including musicians Keb’ Mo’ and Dwight Yoakam. There were other celebrities present. I just don’t remember them all.
Dad’s star was embedded in the Hollywood Boulevard sidewalk almost directly across the street from the Roosevelt Hotel, the hotel he and Lester always stayed at whenever they were in Los Angeles to film shows for The Beverly Hillbillies.
And among the Hillbillies clan, Max Baer Jr. served up a “Man of the Hour” roast when he was reunited with the Clampetts’ “old friend from back home” on that Thursday afternoon:
When he had his star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame and they asked if I would show up there, and I did, if I would say something, I said, “Well, we did seven years of The Beverly Hillbillies before I realized that Louise was not a ventriloquist”—because Earl never said anything, and he was laughing. I said, “If everybody talked about as much as Earl, this would be the shortest party that you’ve ever had. There would be a lot of silence,” you know, because Earl didn’t talk. And when he finally did, he had to get up and say something—when he did at this thing [laughs], he didn’t say very much, I can tell you that.
The man directly responsible for hiring Scruggs to perform “The Ballad of Jed Clampett” as well as casting him in guest appearances, Paul Henning, was too ill to attend. His authorized biographer, Stephen Cox, was on hand to witness Earl’s reserved excitement:
Earl’s wife, Louise, invited me to the star ceremony. He was proud and everything, but he’s on a smooth road there. He’s not getting too excited. You can tell he was excited in seeing that star, and he was all smiles, and he had lots of friends with him there, and all that, and it was a big honor, but anybody else would be jumping for joy, but Earl was just, sort of, on one speed, you know, and it was “medium.”
I was impressed that Max drove in from Vegas for it. Donna was here; she went to it, and that, to me, was a really nice touch. And I think that Earl was visibly, not that he got up and screamed or anything, but just from his face, when they introduced both Max and Donna there, that he was very proud to have them by his side. Because they, at that point, were the surviving stars from the show.
And after leaving a permanent impression on the streets of Hollywood, Earl Scruggs continued to receive numerous honors, including the Academy of Country Music’s Pioneer Award (2005), the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum’s special exhibit Banjo Man: The Musical Journey of Earl Scruggs (2005–2006), induction into the Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame (2007), the Folk Alliance’s Lifetime Achievement Award (2007), the Recording Academy’s Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award (2008), and an induction into the North Carolina Music Hall of Fame (2009).
In 2005, Junie Scruggs’s son J. T. was employed as a manager of the PPG Industries plant in Shelby, North Carolina, when he was asked to spearhead a monumental project that would become the ultimate preservation of his famous uncle’s legacy. J. T. Scruggs expounds upon the evolution of the Earl Scruggs Center: Music & Stories from the American South:
I was actually at work and got a telephone call from a gentleman who said, “You know, we got two people in Cleveland County that have done well, and we need to do something to recognize them.” And that was Earl and [country music singer-songwriter] Don Gibson. I said, “What do you want to do?” and he said, “Well, we ought to do a museum. We got this old courthouse [built in 1907] sitting up there empty and nothing going on.” And I said, “Fine, what do you want me to do?” and he said, “Would you help me talk to the family?” That’s kind of how we got started. We went and talked to both families: to Ms. Gibson and to Earl and then we made a decision later—it sort of died for just a little bit, and through some work that we’d done with the community, we brought in a guy from North Carolina State University to help us with the city of Shelby from a standpoint of revitalization. It was basically dying. We actually had forty different people who volunteered and came in three different days for meetings over a three-month period. We’d done a lot of research, and he told us we just needed to do something, and out of that we came up with something called Destination Cleveland County and adopted the two projects: one was the Don Gibson Theatre and one was the Earl Scruggs Center.
We started our fundraising campaign, and we then formed a board, and we said, “Well, we need to really do something to make sure our donors know that we’re for real,” and the easiest thing to do first was the theater; it didn’t require as much research. So we actually borrowed some money and renovated an old theater for an event center and opened it and then continued to do research and work on the Scruggs Center. We spent a lot of time and effort on research because, when we first started, we met with the Department of Cultural Resources in North Carolina at Raleigh. They told us that only seven percent of museums in the state of North Carolina were in the black and asked us, “Why do you want to do a museum?” We told them that we had this person we felt we needed to recognize, and they said, “Before you do it, make sure you go research that seven percent that’s actually doing well so that, when you do open up, people will come and want to come back again.” So that’s kind of how we got started.
For as much of an interest as Earl had in the development of the center, the sands of time ran out, and he didn’t survive long enough to see the opening of the museum bearing his name. It took an additional two years before the grand opening occurred on January 11, 2014. Elevated into the center’s chairmanship, J. T. Scruggs details the spectacular event, which was nearly washed out:
We assembled a group of volunteers who led everything, and they put together a heck of a grand opening. We had planned this big thing for musicians to come out of the crowd and out of buildings to do a flash mob appearance on the outside, and guess what? We had this humongous rain. I mean, it must’ve rained four inches—and they didn’t let that bother them. They went over to the Methodist church, right across the street from the Scruggs Center, which held about 800 people. They got permission to use it, and they moved in there and had the music and all [of] the ceremonies and everything inside, and we probably crammed an extra 150 people in above what they really wanted us to have in there. But it was really good! And then that night we had a great show for the grand opening, with Travis Tritt, Vince Gill, and a lot of other people that were there. It was grand. It was really good.
Other performers appearing in the grand opening concert were Sam Bush, Gary Scruggs, Randy Scruggs, Jim Mills, Rob Ickes, and John Gardner. Eddie Stubbs of Nashville’s WSM radio emceed the event. Gary Scruggs comments on how the facility honoring his father exceeded his personal expectation and became a valuable asset to the community:
I expected to see great things when I visited the Earl Scruggs Center just prior to its grand opening, and what I saw was even greater than I had imagined. Memorabilia and artifacts that help tell the story of my father’s life, and also the history and cultural traditions of the region are exhibited on the first floor. But the Earl Scruggs Center is much more than just a museum.
Civic and private events are held on the second floor, and the facility hosts educational events for schools. Limited-time special exhibits are also displayed on the second floor. The center hosts community events held outdoors on its grounds.
That same year, another hall of fame enlisted Earl Scruggs into its honorarium. “Dad became the first five-string banjo player to be inducted into the American Banjo Museum’s Hall of Fame,” notes Gary Scruggs. “Previously, only four-string banjo players had received that honor.”
With all of the numerous accolades (some of which are mentioned in preceding chapters, while others remain unnamed due to the extensiveness of his merits), Gary specifies the ones (both tangible and intangible) most dear to his father’s heart:
I think as far as awards and honors are concerned, being a member of the Country Music Hall of Fame was probably number one. His Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award was also special to him. I know he was proud that he inspired the term “Scruggs style,” which became widely known. Though he didn’t live to see the opening of the Earl Scruggs Center, he was justly proud and honored that the facility located so near his birthplace would bear his name. As far as a collective accomplishment, he often said the highlight of his career was playing music with his sons.
I have to add that likewise, the highlight of my music career was the years I spent performing with my father in the Earl Scruggs Revue and his Family & Friends band.
After battling a number of health issues that brought him to St. Thomas Hospital in Nashville, Earl Eugene Scruggs, the youngest and only surviving child of George Elam and Lula Ruppe Scruggs, died peacefully on Wednesday morning, March 28, 2012. He was eighty-eight years old, thus making him the longest-living member of the family from which he was born. Earl’s funeral service was held on Palm Sunday, April 1, at the place where he stood sixty-six years earlier and brought to the world a revolutionary new sound on the five-string banjo.
Many of Nashville’s most recognized names and faces filled the seats of the Ryman Auditorium to pay their respects to a man who was both so much admired and so well loved. The service, billed as “A Celebration of Life,” was emceed and officiated by Grand Ole Opry announcer and WSM air personality Eddie Stubbs. Many of country and bluegrass music’s finest musicians took to the stage to eulogize and perform in honor of the banjo man. “Gary asked me to play on it,” professional banjoist and Scruggs historian Jim Mills recollects. “I played a tune with John McEuen, and I also went to the graveside service just for the family and friends he invited me to. It was surreal for me, you know, to think that he was gone, but it was still a beautiful service, very reverent. It was a long service, but it was great. You didn’t want it to end, that kind of thing.”
Country music star Charlie Daniels, who was one of the many eulogizers of Scruggs, speaks eloquently about the assembly that brought the music world together to pay their final respects:
I was very impressed. I think Gary was the one that probably put it together. At Earl’s funeral at the Ryman, it was so classy. It was so well done. It was not underdone, it was not overdone, it was just perfect. The people who were involved in eulogizing, and the music that was played, the things that were said, and the ending was one of the most poignant I’ve ever seen at any funeral.
In the middle aisle, they had Earl’s casket set at the front. They had his banjo sitting on a stand behind the casket, and when the service was over, the pallbearers came and took the casket. A gentleman came out, and if I’m not mistaken, he was wearing white gloves, he took Earl’s banjo, put it in the case. They wheeled the casket out, and the middle aisle, it was like a graduation at West Point, where they hold the swords up; they held five-string banjos up.
And it was such a poignant moment. I mean, it’s something that I’ll always remember. I’ve never seen more of a tribute to what this man was about and what he meant to us than that. Here’s all these banjo pickers. We’re all Earl Scruggs fans and admirers, and they were standing there holding their banjos up there like swords. I don’t know how many there were, but there were a bunch. They lined the aisle and they took the casket out. The last thing was that Mastertone went out in the case.
Though Earl’s music brought an abundance of joy to millions of people around the world, many of whom idolized the banjo man as a legendary musical genius, there are those who saw him as an inspiration, a mentor, an innovator, an aviator, a friend, and of course, a devoted family man. Collaborative friend and country music’s “storyteller” Tom T. Hall recounts some of his visits to Earl’s house that, unwittingly, spoke volumes without uttering a word:
Earl used to call me, you know, and tell me to come by and visit, and I would go out there, and go into Earl’s house, and Earl would go to the refrigerator and get us a couple of Coca-Colas, and we’d take the tops off them, and sit on the couch and we would talk. The thing that always made it very interesting was that we were sitting, not looking at a TV or out a window; we were just sitting looking at a wall. The couch we were sitting on faced the wall, and there were paintings on [it], and as much as I’d looked at it, you’d think I’d remember, but I don’t. We’d sit there and talk awhile, and we’d talk about fifteen or twenty minutes, and Earl would get very quiet. I would sit there for another fifteen or twenty minutes, and we wouldn’t be saying anything, and I’d get more and more uncomfortable. And this happened on several occasions, and then I’d say, “Earl, I got to be getting down the road,” and Earl would turn to me and say, “Oh, Tom T., don’t leave. We’re having a good visit.” I always rather marveled at that, and that was part of the charm of Earl Scruggs. You know, me being a storyteller, you know, I’m just running my mouth all the time, but Earl had enough class and southern manners to know you could sit on the porch and just visit without running your mouth all the time. I regret somehow that I never got the hang of that.
Grace Constant, daughter of Earl’s sister Ruby, also shares a few thoughts of endearment about her uncle and his family:
Uncle Earl always encouraged me to be true to myself, follow my heart, and take time to stop and smell the roses. Uncle Earl was a father figure to me. I was very close to Uncle Earl, Aunt Louise, and the boys. Gary and I have been extremely close, and I love him like a brother. That bond grew even tighter as Gary and I took care of Uncle Earl the last years of his life. Being able to travel with Uncle Earl, during his last years, was a great experience for me. I always made sure he was properly dressed and on time for his shows. Gary and I alternated living with Uncle Earl in his last years so he would have someone with him at all times to assist with whatever he might need. We were a team. I will always cherish all the stories Uncle Earl told me about growing up on the farm and his life after he started making music and traveling on the road.
One of the highlights of every year was Uncle Earl’s birthday party. Aunt Louise planned huge celebrations and invited politicians, such as the governor and mayor of Nashville, and lots and lots of celebrities. After Aunt Louise passed away, Gary and I continued this tradition. Uncle Earl also enjoyed “working” in his little garden, which consisted of tomato and pepper plants. He had a garden until his last year of life. Uncle Earl always had a dog. He named all the male dogs Clyde and all the female dogs Bonnie, except for one, which he named Pepsi. I still have his last dog, Bonnie.
Uncle Earl always took time to talk with his fans and sign autographs. He commented several times that, if it weren’t for his fans, he would not be where he was, and that making time for them was the least he could do.
Earl’s eldest son, Gary, who assumed all of his father’s managerial duties after the passing of his mother, also reveals some of his fondest memories about the Scruggs family patriarch as both a celebrity and a dad:
It was great fun performing with him in the Earl Scruggs Revue and, in later years, in the Earl Scruggs with Family & Friends band. He had a very appealing stage presence, and it was fun to perform alongside him.
We both shared a love for baseball. When I was young, I played Little League, Babe Ruth League, and high school baseball. When in town, he not only attended those games, he was also ready and willing to get out in the yard and spend time playing catch with me and hitting ground balls, line drives, and high fly balls to me. He did the same with my brothers. He was good with the bat. In his later years, we watched many baseball games on television together. He was a great conversationalist and always fun to talk with. I also have many fond memories of him interacting with my mother and other family members.
I learned early on that he was very quick to share his musical talents and knowledge with younger people, or anyone else, for that matter, who wanted to learn his style of picking five-string banjo or just get some tips about music and the music business in general. Many times I saw him giving advice and demonstrations to others when asked about how he played a particular lick or riff on the banjo. He was very generous with his time and talent.
Dad was also a gifted guitarist, a true icon in the world of music, and an inspiration to countless musicians. As far as I know, he accomplished what he set out to accomplish, and then some.
The death of Steve and Elizabeth Scruggs was noted in the New York Times, September 25, 1992. Earl’s eight months of mourning was documented in Louise Scruggs, liner notes for Earl Scruggs and Friends, and Scruggs, Earl Scruggs and the 5-String Banjo (2005), 171.
Scruggs, Earl Scruggs and the 5-String Banjo (2005), 171.
Faye Dunaway’s invitation to Earl Scruggs is listed in the “News” section of Earl Scruggs’s website under December 2, 2001, http://www.earlscruggs.com/news.html.
The Three Pickers Grammy nominations announcement is noted on the Earl Scruggs news page December 4, 2003, on Earl Scruggs’s official website (earlscruggs.com).
“News,” EarlScruggs.com, November 13, 2007, http://www.earlscruggs.com/news.html.
“News,” EarlScruggs.com, August 18, 2010, http://www.earlscruggs.com/news.html.
Doug Hutchens, “The Earl Scruggs Banjo,” BITH Newsletter, 2000; Roger Siminoff, “The Five String King: Earl Scruggs,” in Gibson Guitars: 100 Years of an American Icon, by Walter Carter (Los Angeles: General Publishing Group, 1994), 117; Walter Carter, “Gibson Honors Earl Scruggs with the Earl Banjo Model,” press release, July 19, 2002.
The 1999 Grammy for Best Country Collaboration with Vocals (on the recording of “Same Old Train”) also went to Earl’s fellow participants Clint Black, Joe Diffie, Merle Haggard, Emmylou Harris, Alison Krauss, Patty Loveless, Ricky Skaggs, Marty Stuart, Pam Tillis, Randy Travis, Travis Tritt, and Dwight Yoakam.