My biggest influence from the start to this day has always been Earl Scruggs. I then began to listen to the disciples of Earl, and that included J. D. Crowe, Sonny Osborne, and Bill Emerson. They became a new group of banjo players to learn from after spending my first few years listening only to Earl. Of course Earl was their hero as well.
—Jim Mills, professional banjoist and Scruggs historian
It’s been said that imitation is the highest form of flattery. In the case of Earl’s disciples, one of the best representations of that saying occurred at Carlton Haney’s bluegrass festival in Camp Springs, North Carolina. As part of the muggy-weathered Labor Day weekend event in 1971, a banjo line performance, featuring a roster of pickers that was a literal who’s who of bluegrass banjo virtuosos, paid tribute to their musical idol—Earl Scruggs. Independent producer and director Albert Ihde captured the historic moment on film and used it as the finale for his documentary Bluegrass Country Soul. Among the many players visible were Sonny Osborne, Bill Emerson, J. D. Crowe, Alan Munde, Jimmy Arnold, Don Stover, and Randy Scruggs, along with a few other lesser-known banjoists: Rick Riman, A. L. Wood, John Farmer, and Saburo Watanabe of Japan.
After a flattering introduction by Osborne, a noticeably sheepish Scruggs compliments all the banjo players onstage before hammering the opening lick to his iconic instrumental, “Foggy Mountain Breakdown” (followed up by “Dear Old Dixie” at the close of the movie). From the moment Earl pinched the strings on his banjo, all of those standing by him knew the game was on. The master had, once again, set the standard they knew couldn’t be matched. It was a privilege for these devoted followers of Scruggs to pay homage to him the best way they could, yet most of them felt inferior performing in front of him before a live audience. One of the many in that lineup, Alan Munde, recalled the moment when Earl led the charge of battling banjos:
I’ll tell you what my sense of the whole experience was for me. As soon as Earl pinched the banjo strings, I wished I wasn’t there. His tone was so, so good, and the playing sounded so brilliant. It sounded like Earl Scruggs for sure. I played because I was standing there and they put me in the line. It was, for me, the best tribute to Earl Scruggs just to listen to him play. We should have all sat down in chairs and just listened to him, which would have been a good tribute. I appreciate what they were trying to do, but for me I just felt like, oh man, I just feel so useless.
Opinions about the experience vary from player to player. Some admit to feeling humbled and nervous about following Earl, while others, like Bill Emerson, expressed relief that Scruggs chose a tune they could each play with confidence:
When he said, “Let’s pick one,” and kicked off “Foggy Mountain Breakdown,” it was a little bit of a relief [laughs]. It was a relief because that was one that I knew and had played a thousand times, and I guess everyone else kind of felt the same way. It’s a standard banjo tune, and everybody knew how to play it. For me it was not intimidating. I had a lot of confidence at that particular juncture in time. I was with the Country Gentlemen, and we were, kind of, at a peak, and we were playing almost every day all summer long, and I knew I’d have no problem playing “Foggy Mountain Breakdown.” So there I was onstage, and there was Earl Scruggs playing “Foggy Mountain Breakdown,” and I was going to get to play it too, so I was sort of happy.
Most of the featured banjoists knew from the beginning that they were not going to beat Earl at his own game and that the best they could do was to show respect by attempting to play “Foggy Mountain Breakdown” as close to the way he played it as possible. One of the earliest disciples, J. D. Crowe, learned quickly that he was never going to be Earl Scruggs, but he always tried to play like him simply out of admiration. Crowe affirms that point through his recollection of the banjo lineup:
If you’re going to honor the man, then you should try to play as close to the way he played it as you can. I wanted to show Earl that I learned how to play from him, and I tried to play it like he played it. During that jam, I played the melody and not a bunch of hot licks and other stuff. I mean, there were some guys that got up there, and you couldn’t even tell what they were playing.
Without question, it was a thrill for these musicians to play with their mutual hero. It’s an amazing thing to consider that the platform was filled with banjo masters in their own right, who themselves felt humbled in the presence of this musical legend. The disciples of Earl Scruggs all seem to share similar narratives of his influence on their musical development and lives in general. Almost anyone you talk to about Scruggs will immediately reference The Beverly Hillbillies, the 1949 recording of “Foggy Mountain Breakdown,” the old Martha White television show, and local concert venues as the catalysts that propelled them into the world of the five-string banjo. It was also possible, in those early days of bluegrass, to get a one-on-one conversation with Earl, and many of those aspiring young banjo players speak of such encounters as life-changing experiences.
The disciples highlighted in this chapter have been placed by when they began playing professionally, regardless of the year they first picked up the banjo. Not all practitioners of the Scruggs style are mentioned, as they are countless, although many of the major players are included as a testimony to the fingerprints left on them by the hands of Earl Scruggs.
As primitive string music began to evolve into early country and gospel music before the refinement of bluegrass, old-school banjoists such as Charlie Poole, Uncle Dave Macon, Dave “Stringbean” Akeman, Grandpa Jones, and Snuffy Jenkins played either clawhammer, two-finger, or various forms of three-finger banjo, often within the context of comedic buffoonery. The banjo wasn’t thought to be a serious instrument, and its players weren’t considered serious musicians. All of that changed literally overnight in early December 1945 because of a young man from the Piedmont region of North Carolina. The three-finger rolls that Earl Scruggs spent endless hours refining jettisoned every one of his predecessors. “All the old banjo players were jealous of Earl, the new guy on the block,” bluegrass banjoist Eddie Adcock says candidly. “Earl was extremely talented for his day, and a very nice, soft-spoken person who would always treat you nice.” His peer group of three-finger stylists was very limited in the 1940s, the other primary players being Don Reno and Ralph Stanley. Without any thought of what he had started, Scruggs was simply doing what he loved most, but in the homes of rural Americans, seeds were being sown in the young hearts and imaginations of his first crop of pupils.
The 1950s wasn’t just the first decade of rock-n-roll; it was also the premiere decade for the disciples of Earl Scruggs. Many within this rudimentary batch of five-string banjo pickers, despite having previously heard Scruggs in the mid- to late 1940s, did not begin professionally until the 1950s. One of the earliest to hail from this group, Sonny Osborne, started at the age of eleven in the winter of 1948 after encountering Larry Richardson, who played banjo with his older brother Bobby as part of the Lonesome Pine Fiddlers. In a Frets magazine interview, Osborne acknowledged that he copied Earl closely and could play every break and background note from Flatt and Scruggs’s 78-rpm recordings. He further credited Scruggs’s backward roll patterns as the resolution to the timing problems he was experiencing at the outset of his picking. By 1952, the same year he began his stint with Bill Monroe, Sonny claimed he truly understood the mechanics of the right hand, which intensified his duplication of Earl.
Though having heard Scruggs’s recording of “Randy Lynn Rag” in 1957, Sonny had an epiphany to distinguish himself from the man he so much admired.[1] The separation led to the development of his own fiery drive, which became the main ingredient in a countrified bluegrass sound he perfected with Bobby as the Osborne Brothers for more than fifty years. “Sonny Osborne, to me, is the first that went progressive while sort of staying in the Earl Scruggs style,” claims bluegrass musician Sam Bush. Bluegrass historian Fred Bartenstein backs up that point by referring to Osborne as “kind of a ‘mad scientist’ on the banjo” due to his experimentation with a six-string banjo that had five long strings and his early controversial use of an electronic pickup.[2] Osborne is widely recognized by bluegrass aficionados to be one of the post-Scruggs giants of the five-string banjo and has been a lifelong student of Earl’s music.
Before attending a Flatt and Scruggs performance at the Kentucky Mountain Barn Dance in Lexington, J. D. Crowe had never witnessed the banjo played with such command. This made him want to get a banjo of his own so he could imitate Earl. Flatt and Scruggs had recently based themselves in Lexington, which gave young J. D. access to Earl anytime he and his family came to the shows they played in the area. Though his father tried to set up lessons for him directly with Scruggs, Crowe confesses that Earl’s advice produced a better result for him:
My dad would talk to Lester and Earl, and of course they were grown men, and I was just a kid. I was just in awe of everything. I wouldn’t say nothing, but my dad asked Earl if he could give lessons, or show me some things, and I remember him saying, “Well, I really don’t know what I’m doing myself. I just play whatever I hear that comes to my mind. He can watch and pick up anything he can, but I can’t sit down and show him.” Earl was probably just too busy being on the road, you know, but he did say I was welcome to pick up whatever I can by watching him play. All those guys were just so gracious in those days.
I was still too young to comprehend what Earl was doing, but it did help to fix my eyes on the hand positions on the neck. You know, it really did help me some. I just watched him. He did what he was supposed to do. He did his job. He just played what he normally played, and all I did was watch and take in all I could. I learned it all by just watching Earl, and listening to records. Maybe if I’d had a teacher, it might have been different for me. Who knows? I’m just glad it happened the way it did. I was lucky to have the chance to be around Flatt and Scruggs because they lived here in my hometown, so I was very fortunate. Otherwise, I would not have been able to do that.
By 1955, J. D. had learned how to play well enough to go on the road with Mac Wiseman during his summer vacation. This gave him the necessary experience of playing professionally. A year later, Jimmy Martin was passing through Lexington when he heard Crowe on a live show on a local radio station and offered J. D. a job on the spot. After his stint with Martin, Crowe teamed up with mandolin player Doyle Lawson and legendary guitarist and singer Red Allen. Together they formed the Kentucky Mountain Boys, wherein J. D. developed a unique sound all his own. In 1975, he founded the New South, a band that became a nurturing ground for some of bluegrass music’s greatest talent. Crowe’s popularity got a significant boost with the founding of the Bluegrass Album Band in 1980, with the help of Tony Rice, Jerry Douglas, Doyle Lawson, Bobby Hicks, and Todd Phillips.
Like other Scruggs disciples from the 1950s, Bill Emerson was introduced to Earl’s banjo through old 78-rpm recordings. Some people had the opportunity, in various places, to hear Flatt and Scruggs on the radio, but that luxury wasn’t available to Emerson, growing up in the Washington, DC, area. After hearing cuts from Flatt and Scruggs, along with Bill Monroe, from his neighbor’s record collection, Emerson purchased the same records as well as a few of the Stanley Brothers from a record store by special order. And of all the things on those records, it was Earl’s banjo that stood out most to young Bill. When Flatt and Scruggs came to town, Emerson finally had the opportunity to see his new idol in action. He admits to the everlasting impression it left on him:
Lester Flatt and Earl Scruggs had come to town here. There was a ship that was docked in Washington, DC, called the SS Mount Vernon, and it went down to Mount Vernon on the river and back again. It was a tour. They might have a jazz band, Louis Armstrong, or somebody like that, and this time they had Flatt and Scruggs, and I went down there and was able to sit right in front of the stage and watch Earl Scruggs close up. That’s the first time I ever saw him play, and of course I was thrilled at that and just became obsessed with playing the banjo. I really noticed the power and the attack Earl had when he played. I used to get upset when the fiddle would play and say, “Why is that guy playing when Earl could be taking that break.”
I never dreamed I would be able to get up and play in front of people. I just wanted to give it a shot. I got to where I could play one song, then two songs, and then the whole thing kind of snowballed. Then it got to where people wanted to hire me to play.
Yet, as Bill developed his own banjo skills, he came to realize, like so many other budding banjo players, that he was not going to be Earl Scruggs. “I finally figured out that I wasn’t getting very far trying to play exactly like Earl,” says Emerson. “And not only could I not do that, but he’d already done it. I kind of had to do my own thing, whatever that is, you know. [I] just tried to play what I’d heard.”
Bill Emerson evolved into one of the most original-sounding five-string banjoists in this first tier of Scruggs disciples, especially during his tenure with the Country Gentlemen, as he’s considered, by many, to be a maestro at playing out of the open C position. This was unusual in bluegrass music, since most banjo pickers played in G tuning.
A number of musicians who blossomed in the 1950s started on less expensive instruments, typically Kay banjos (as did J. D. Crowe) or sometimes homemade banjos that almost never stayed in tune. The goal, nonetheless, was to pick like Earl Scruggs, regardless of the instrument’s quality. Such is the declaration of disciple Roni Stoneman:
I was living in Maryland in a one-room house with everybody playing music night and day with instruments my daddy made for all of us. Daddy made me my first banjo. The neck was so short it looked like a mandolin neck, but that was to work on the rolls that were so important, and they were Earl Scruggs rolls, the rolls of Earl. Scott [my brother] said, “You have to learn that. That’s the only way to do it right.” Daddy made me a second banjo, but it wasn’t very good and it stayed out of tune a lot, but I was able to keep it in tune when I played one of Earl’s tunes like “Down the Road.” Scruggs kept the strings ringing, and you don’t stop and start. You don’t have a jump in your roll. My right hand is marvelous because of the Scruggs roll.
Veronica Loretta, nicknamed “Roni,” is the youngest daughter of Ernest Stoneman (who was affectionately known as Pop), a multitalented musician who decided he was going to try his hand at music and became best known for his song “The Sinking of the Titanic,” which became one of the most popular recordings of the 1920s, selling around one million copies. Pop and his wife, Hattie, formed a family ensemble with their children—the Stonemans. By the time her father built her a second banjo, Roni was beginning to learn a number of Earl’s tunes, and the second time she saw Flatt and Scruggs perform, she had the opportunity to briefly chat with the banjo man himself. Stoneman spoke about her awkward meeting with Scruggs that eventually led to a more teachable moment years later:
So I went to see Earl, and he was in the dressing room, and there I am just standing there looking at him, just staring at his hands, and I said, “I play too,” and he said, “You play? Do you play clawhammer?” I said, “No, I pick it like you.” He said, “You do?” I said back to him, “Yes, well, I’m working on it, working on playing the rolls like you do.” He just looked, and I thought, here was my hero. Here was my future for whatever I had coming up the road. He smiled and never said anything else. A few years later, I saw him again at some festival, him and Flatt, and I loved them both. I never talked to them. I was too shy, but Earl Scruggs would watch me. He would watch every move I made.
Then several years passed, and the Stonemans were at the Opry, and I’m about seven months pregnant, though I don’t look it because I only weighed 118 pounds. Well, I’m standing there at the Ryman, and Earl Scruggs walked over to me and said, “You play the banjo?” I was real shy, but I said, “Yes, but I play real simple.” He said, “Keep it simple—keep it that way and you’ll never have any trouble. Keep the rolls clean and simple.” It gave me courage to go out onstage and play the “Orange Blossom Special,” and I had to kick it off, and I thought, please, God, give my fingers the rolls to make it clean, and I did good on it.
By the 1960s, the Stonemans’ success had expanded significantly as they would appear on top venues like the Grand Ole Opry and The Jimmy Dean Show, and in 1966 they had their own syndicated show, Those Stonemans. The family also had the opportunity to appear in feature films before disbanding. Roni embarked on a solo career and is perhaps most remembered as a regular cast member of television’s long-running musical variety series Hee Haw.
With his young ears attuned to the jangling sound of clawhammer-style banjo, Haskel McCormick was only nine years old when he first heard Earl Scruggs in 1946. From the moment he heard the crispness of Scruggs style, his perception of the five-string banjo was forever changed, and he was determined to copy Scruggs. McCormick explains:
Earl’s the one who got me going. He got me interested in the banjo. When I first heard his style, I just loved it. It just took hold of me, and I had to learn how to do that. My dad played the clawhammer style, and was good at it, but when I heard Earl the first time, I wasn’t interested in the claw-hammer style anymore. I like the clawhammer style; it’s a good style, but I just never got interested in it much. I followed Earl, and Earl was my hero, and I looked at him and tried to follow him as close as I could. It was just out of this world. It was exciting. It was something. It was like icing on the cake, you know. You’ve heard the old-time style of banjo, and that’s all I had heard up till that point, and I thought, how can anyone be that different and that good?
And just like Osborne, Crowe, and Emerson, it became obvious to Haskel that trying to imitate Scruggs note for note and tone for tone was simply out of the question. “Later on, after I got going pretty good, I tried to make my own style,” says McCormick. “I didn’t want to be exactly like Earl because he’s already done it his way. I wanted to try to be a little different, and I think I did.” Haskel and his brothers, known as the McCormick Brothers, started playing music as early as 1945 but made a name for themselves by the 1950s. As mentioned in chapter 3, McCormick was one of three pickers to have the honor of filling in for Earl Scruggs, for a short time, while he was recovering from his car accident in 1955 (the other two being Don Bryant and Curtis McPeake). Many years later, he would join Scruggs’s former partner, Lester Flatt, in the Nashville Grass from 1971 to 1973.
The 1950s proved fertile years for the development of bluegrass banjo. Earl Scruggs opened the floodgates to a new generation of creative banjo players who were building, not only on his style, but also on the approaches of his contemporaries, like Don Reno and Ralph Stanley. During the 1960s, a fresh group of Scruggs devotees began to carve out their own techniques, yet their musical senses were being influenced by the increasingly popular genres of folk and rock-n-roll. Bluegrass banjo had not changed a great deal from the late 1940s through the 1950s; however, the ears of this latest brand of banjoists were being adjusted to the pop culture to which they were now exposed, and that meant unlimited possibilities for the five-string, as Earl himself quickly discovered. Despite the plethora of sounds emerging from this turbulent decade, Scruggs continued to be the chief motivator for people to play the banjo. The influence and appeal of his style was no longer confined to regions east of the Mississippi River. During the 1960s, banjo enthusiasts were popping up all over the landscape, from coast to coast.
For many aspiring musicians in the 1960s, inspiration came from a contemporary innovation known as the concept album. One of the decade’s earliest examples, spearheaded by Louise Scruggs in 1961, was Foggy Mountain Banjo. Though it was a Flatt and Scruggs production, many consider it the first “unofficial” Earl Scruggs solo album. The instrumental compilation showcased Scruggs style at its best and drew a clear distinction between Earl and his folk counterparts. Native Oklahoman Alan Munde is one of the many Scruggs disciples who couldn’t believe his ears after listening to Foggy Mountain Banjo. Munde describes its relevance in near mind-blowing terms:
The first time I heard Earl play the banjo, I thought it was inhuman, or extrahuman, or superhuman. I just couldn’t imagine in my wildest dreams how that could be done. The other impression I had was that it was the best I’d heard in my whole life. I just couldn’t believe it. It was overwhelming. The Christmas after I started playing the banjo, one of my friends gave me the Foggy Mountain Banjo album by Flatt and Scruggs, and that was the huge kick in the pants for me, and that’s no new story. It’s the story of almost every banjo player, to a certain extent, and it started in my era. The year Foggy Mountain Banjo came out was the first time, in my recollection, that I heard him. I’d heard the style before, just on TV and, you know, my family wasn’t particularly musical, and they certainly weren’t into country music, but, you know, folk music was big in the late fifties and early sixties, and there were banjo players in among them who played a Scruggs-ish style, and I was really liking the banjo then. The only banjo player I could identify by name was Pete Seeger.
In perfecting his own instrumental technique, Munde gravitates more toward the melodic style popularized by Bobby Thompson and Bill Keith in the early 1960s, as much of it stems from his exposure to the fiddle players in the Oklahoma-Texas region where he grew up. The banjo’s melodic approach is to play fiddle tunes in a way that mimics the fiddle, note for note, utilizing flowing scales rather than playing melodies out of chord positions, which is more in line with Scruggs style. Alan played banjo for Jimmy Martin from 1969 to 1971, and during that time he learned how to play solid, Scruggs-style banjo, which explains his ability to play melodic tunes with the same kind of intensity and drive.
When his tenure with Martin ended, Alan Munde joined up with fiddler friend Byron Berline to form the legendary bluegrass band Country Gazette. His creativity can be observed in the seemingly effortless way he plays tunes in keys like F, B-flat, E, and D while in G tuning without the use of a capo. Though firmly connected to Earl Scruggs, Alan has drawn from a number of musical genres to create a methodical technique that echoes classical, jazz, blues, and rock-n-roll. While never claiming to be a jazz banjoist, Munde was one of the first players to experiment with elements of jazz.[3]
After the breakup of Flatt and Scruggs in 1969, Lester Flatt hired all of the members of their former Foggy Mountain Boys to launch his new band, the Nashville Grass (as mentioned in chapter 6). The only vacancy that needed to be filled was the spot occupied by Earl Scruggs. “I was the first banjo player after he and Earl split up,” remarks Vic Jordan. “Josh Graves asked me if I might be interested in playing with Lester, so I auditioned, and he liked it. After the audition, Lester said, ‘Do you have any questions?’ I said, ‘Only one question: do you want me to try to play just like Earl, because I don’t think anybody can do that.’” Flatt gave Jordan assurance that he could play the tunes as he felt them.
Though he played with Earl’s old bandmates, Jordan fancies himself a disciple of both Earl Scruggs and Don Reno. He was encouraged to study them both and to pick up whatever he could from their distinctive styles: Reno had a more single-string guitar technique, in sharp contrast to Scruggs’s syncopated roll patterns. As Vic began picking the banjo in his late teens, he acknowledged that his initial preference for Reno’s approach was soon invaded by Scruggs:
I actually started out trying to do a little more Reno style than I was Scruggs style at the time. I got into both of them, and they were both influential on my playing. I graduated from high school in 1957, when I met a banjo player named Harlan Baumgardner, and he had a band called the Cripple Creek Boys. This guy took me under his wings. He showed me how to use picks, how to tune the instrument, and showed me some chords. He used to invite me over to his house when the Cripple Creek Boys would practice, and I would sit over on one end of the living room and plunk on my banjo while they played and practiced. Harlan pushed me in the direction of Earl Scruggs and Don Reno and the Stanley Brothers. This would be about the time that I learned about Scruggs and Reno.
As time went on, Vic was able to develop his own style of playing that incorporated the things he had learned from Scruggs and Reno. He knew that he would never be able to play exactly like Earl, yet he loved the tone and sound of Earl’s attack on the banjo, and he goes on to say, “I just liked the sound of Earl’s playing overall. I didn’t know much about timing and tone; it just sounded good to my ear, the way he was playing it, you know. It sounded good and I simply wanted to play just like that. I was very impressed with it.”
The California connection to bluegrass music developed mainly through the folk boom that was taking the world by storm in the 1960s. The banjo had united with folk music fans via Pete Seeger and the Kingston Trio. Earl Scruggs only helped to popularize it even more within the hootenanny circuit through such venues as the Newport Folk Festival. In 1962, Flatt and Scruggs furthered their folk identity with the subtitle Folk Music with an Overdrive, a phrase coined by American folklorist and musician Alan Lomax, as printed on the cover of their latest songbook.
Out of that awakening came a number of banjo enthusiasts who would become converts to bluegrass music after hearing it for the first time. Anybody listening to Dave Guard of the Kingston Trio and Earl Scruggs side by side could hear the major differences between these two banjo players. And for many, it was the sound of Earl’s banjo that raised the bar. California banjoist Herb Pedersen (who substituted for Scruggs in 1967 due to his medical issues at the time) rose out of the folk music scene in the early 1960s and justifies how bluegrass swayed him away from folk music. “About 1959 [or] 1960 I heard bluegrass for the first time. It was just very infectious, and anybody who likes bluegrass knows exactly what I’m talking about. At the time, I was more into folk music, and then, when I heard bluegrass, you know, that really turned the corner for me.” He further reflects upon his introduction to the banjo of Earl Scruggs:
There was a local record store that I’d go into to get the latest folk music that was out and that sort of thing, and this guy came up behind me and said, “Do you like banjos?” I said, “Yes,” and he said, “Well try this record,” and he pulled out the Country Music album with Flatt and Scruggs on the cover; they had the red coats. The title of it just said Country Music across the top. It didn’t even refer to bluegrass at all. I brought the record home and put it on the turntable, and that was the first time I’d ever heard Flatt and Scruggs play. It was just amazing. It sounded so smooth, and Earl was just so precise at what he was doing, you know, and the note value of each string he was playing was phenomenal. I’d never heard anything done that well.
After a few stints in West Coast bands, Herb Pedersen played a significant role in the cross-pollination of bluegrass, country, folk, and rock-n-roll. His musical dossier includes a three-year period with the Dillards (1967–1970) as a replacement for banjoist Doug Dillard, and he performed with other bluegrass groups such as Country Gazette and the New Kentucky Colonels. His career as a musician reached a pinnacle when he recorded and performed with Linda Ronstadt, Emmylou Harris, and John Denver. Pedersen’s success continued to grow when he, along with guitarist John Jorgenson and mandolinist Chris Hillman, formed the Desert Rose Band in 1985.
As one of the original founders of the legendary pop group the Eagles, Bernie Leadon brought to the table a rich background in folk and bluegrass music, which can be heard in a number of Eagles songs recorded during his tenure with them (1971–1975). Like many others of his generation, Bernie was first influenced by folk artists such as the Kingston Trio and Pete Seeger. He talks about how he was introduced to Scruggs-style banjo via Pete Seeger. “I bought Pete Seeger’s book How to Play the 5-String Banjo and, although Seeger was not a Scruggs-style player, he had a photo of Earl in that book and a decent explanation of how the three-finger bluegrass style was played with finger and thumb picks.” While living in Southern California, Bernie had the chance to befriend other bluegrass musicians like Chris Hillman, banjo player Kenny Wertz, and Dobro player Larry Murray to help whet his appetite for bluegrass.
“In late 1964, my family moved to North Florida, where there was more bluegrass music in the local culture,” notes Leadon. “I met some good players there and was taken one evening to fiddle player Vassar Clements’s home in Tallahassee to play with him. Vassar was driving a Charles Chips truck for a living because his wife had made him give up touring. Luckily for everyone, he went back to music.” Eventually, he would pick up a few Flatt and Scruggs and Don Reno LPs in an attempt to gain more instruction. “I had purchased and studied by then the Flatt and Scruggs record Foggy Mountain Banjo and had slowed the old record player down to half speed to get all the notes right,” explains Leadon. Being one of the few disciples of Earl to successfully cross over into the cultural world of pop music, Bernie Leadon’s command of Scruggs-style banjo is prominently evident in such Eagles songs as “Take It Easy,” “Earlybird,” and “Outlaw Man.”
After tenures with local bands in Columbus, Ohio, and an enlistment in the Marine Corps, banjoist John Hickman began his professional career when he joined Earl Taylor and the Stoney Mountain Boys. By 1969 he moved to Los Angeles, where he and his brother started a band called the Hickman Brothers. John initially started off playing guitar in 1957, but after hearing Earl he shifted his attention on the banjo. Hickman paints a picture of the scenario that altered his course:
Earl Scruggs was the first banjo player I had ever heard. There was an older fella in the neighborhood who had all of Earl’s records, and so on, at that time, and I became interested in it through him. It was a 45[-rpm] record; it was “Shuckin’ the Corn,” I believe. His name was Burley Blankenship. I was really impressed by how much in control Earl was with the banjo, more than anybody else, I imagine. That impressed me right off the bat; everything was where it should be, it seemed like, you know. I think more than anything it was the way Earl heard the music and was able to project it. Pretty much the way he heard things.
Though Hickman never tried to imitate Earl note for note like other players did early on, he mainly strived to make his own sound from the outset. He illustrates that point with an example from his favorite Scruggs tune, “Dear Old Dixie.” “I really like the kickoff introduction to it. I was never able to get that exactly right, of course. I don’t play anything exactly like anyone else.” John soon met up with fiddler Byron Berline during his days with the Hickman Brothers, but it wasn’t until 1976 that he and Berline began playing together. In the late 1970s, John Hickman gained high recognition within the community of bluegrass banjo players for his unique style, which was a creative mixture of Scruggs, Reno, and melodic styles. His 1978 solo banjo album Don’t Mean Maybe is still a favorite of many aspiring and established banjoists.
The 1960s proved to be an experimental decade for music, and bluegrass was no exception. The advent of alternative forms of music gave birth to fresh sounds that would be taken even further by the time the 1970s rolled around. The decade would also become a breeding ground for a more progressive type of bluegrass, known as “newgrass.” This advanced approach had been adopted with the Bluegrass Alliance band in the late 1960s, yet there were a number of musicians prior to the Bluegrass Alliance who experimented with contemporary music à la bluegrass.[4] The winds of change could be felt with such groups as the Country Gentlemen and the Seldom Scene, who brought into bluegrass pop tunes like “Mrs. Robinson,” “Rider,” and “Sweet Baby James.”
As already observed, Flatt and Scruggs also dabbled in folk and rock with cover versions of songs by Bob Dylan, the Monkees, and the Lovin’ Spoonful. The difference with some of the ensembles that preceded the newgrass generation was that they only peppered their albums and performances with rock-n-roll and folk tunes, whereas the newgrass bands pulled all the stops out and created entire performances and albums around such songs. No matter how progressive bluegrass music became, Earl Scruggs never lost his place as the principal banjoist to be mimicked.
One such Scruggs disciple, Terry Baucom, became a dominant force in bluegrass banjo in the 1970s as he introduced his Scruggs-based picking in such bands as Boone Creek and Doyle Lawson and Quicksilver. He is known for a powerful, driving banjo style that earned him the title “The Duke of Drive.” Terry learned his craft by listening to Earl, which is how most everybody else learned to play, yet, like J. D. Crowe, he also learned by watching what Earl was doing with his hands. Often he would observe photos of Earl, and he tells a story about the placement of his right hand for optimal picking:
I was so eaten up with Earl that, when I was in grade school, I’d go to the library and look up “banjo,” and I forget when it was, probably the early sixties, but when you would find “banjo,” you see a picture of Earl sitting there, and he had the red string bowtie and the hat. He had his pinky and ring finger of his right hand down on the banjo head, he had the picks on the strings. So, when I saw that, man, that’s exactly what I did. I just put my little finger and my ring finger down, and it felt natural, and that’s how I play to this day. Seeing that picture of how Earl held his hand got me in the right program.
When Baucom was ten years old, he played in his father’s band, the Rocky River Boys, and it was right around this time that he had the opportunity to meet Earl Scruggs at a local show not far from his home. He details the experience as one of those unforgettable moments of a lifetime, and how Lester Flatt brought out the best in Earl:
The first time I saw Earl, it was in the early 1960s, and we had this little school a few miles from my house, though I didn’t go to that one. I was in another district, but it was in Fairview, North Carolina, and they were playing on a Sunday afternoon, I think it was, but it could have been Saturday. It was on the weekend, I do know, and that was the first time I ever saw him in person. It was in a gymnasium, and it was packed out, and I remember Earl got off the bus, and he came into the gymnasium, and he had to cross the whole floor to get to the dressing room. And man, everybody broke into this wild cheer! I mean, it was like Elvis had walked out. He just took his hat off, held it out, and nodded to the crowd and went on backstage. I was just a kid. I didn’t know any better that you couldn’t go backstage, but I went backstage and I didn’t say a word to him. I just stood there and looked at him for a while. I’m sure he felt my eyes burning a hole in his back. I just stood there, and I was in awe of how he could play like that.
Earl played like he did because he was Earl, but I’ll tell you one thing, Flatt was the perfect guitar player for him because he laid the drive on Earl. I mean, Earl didn’t have to do it all by himself because Flatt was on him all the time. Man, that’s why they sounded so good together. As a banjo player, you know well how fun it is to play with a really good guitar player. It’s just great, man, and that’s what made Earl want to get it. I just had to point that out, you know. How did Earl play with that much drive? Well, he had it in his right hand, but he also had Lester standing there jamming with him.
Baucom would eventually go on to play with a number of award-winning bands, many that have helped define the direction of bluegrass music in the 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s, and which led to his own band, the Dukes of Drive.
As established earlier in this chapter, Earl’s disciples understood that they were never going to be Earl Scruggs; however, it’s not uncommon to hear banjo players discussing the question of who “sounds” most like him. Among the small number of banjoists people mention, Kenny Ingram’s name seems to come up more often than others. Ingram credits Earl as his main influence, but he’s also drawn from the styles of several early disciples, like Sonny Osborne, J. D. Crowe, Bill Emerson, Allen Shelton, and Walter Hensley. As a young boy, Kenny used to watch The Flatt and Scruggs Grand Ole Opry on Saturday afternoons with his dad. He recalls the day his father made him an offer that caught him off guard:
He just made a comment to me, one day, that if he bought me a banjo, would I learn to play it? I was just a dumb kid, so I said, “Sure,” and that’s how I got started. I was about eight years old, or even younger, when I first heard Earl play the banjo. You know, I watch those old TV shows now and I can remember watching them when I was a kid. I remember seeing [seven-year-old] Ricky Skaggs on the show with Lester and Earl. It’s hard to say, as a kid, what my impression was, but it got my attention for sure.
Ingram first met Earl at the Culpepper Bluegrass festival in 1972 when he was playing with Jimmy Martin and the Sunny Mountain Boys. However, it wasn’t a significant one-on-one conversation at that particular moment. Later, he had the chance to spend some quality time with Earl, reminiscing that, “The first time I got to meet him up close and personal was about the time Lester passed away, and Red Allen had done a tribute album to Lester, and that was cut at Earl’s house. Earl was there, and, of course, Louise, and his son Stevie was doing the engineering.”
Kenny continued learning his chops throughout the 1960s and played with bands in his hometown of Nashville, Tennessee. He would eventually get the opportunity to put his banjo experience to the test on a professional level. “I picked banjo locally for a while, and in 1971 I went to work for James Monroe,” remembers Ingram. “I was one of the original Midnight Ramblers, and in May of 1972 I went to work for Jimmy Martin and stayed with him until October 1, 1973. I then went to work for Lester Flatt and stayed with him until the end of June 1978. I went back to work with Jimmy and stayed until, I think, the spring or winter of 1980.”
Kenny Ingram gained significant recognition as a banjo player when he joined up with Lester Flatt as the third banjoist in a direct descent from Earl Scruggs, preceded by Haskel McCormick, who was preceded by Vic Jordan. He laid a thumb to the banjo that was sometimes reminiscent of the way Earl performed.
Another banjo player often referenced for his similarities to Earl Scruggs is Charlie Cushman. When he was just a small child, Charlie had developed an interest in music from watching various country music shows on WSM television, and like Ingram, The Flatt and Scruggs Grand Ole Opry made the biggest impression on him. The allure of Earl’s five-string had captivated him noticeably enough for his grandfather to purchase a used banjo.[5] Cushman characterizes the origin of his fascination with Scruggs:
In comparison to the fiddle and the steel guitar and stuff, here comes Earl Scruggs with this banjo, playing these breakdowns, and that really caught my attention because it really stood out compared to fiddles and steel guitars. That banjo just jumped out at me. By age four, I was asking for a banjo. I was bitten fairly early. The first exposure I had was on television, and I don’t know if the same thing would have happened if it had been on radio or not, you know. It probably would, but the ability to watch this guy, and to watch his fingers, and watch him walk up to the microphone, you know, just the whole package. I remember all of that, the way they worked the microphones and took turns playing, you know. It’s all very obvious when you hear those guys play, even to a little kid.
Charlie took lessons for a while from a guitar player, who knew a little bit of three-finger-style banjo. Soon he would develop the ability to play by ear from Flatt and Scruggs records and was showing new licks to his teacher, consequently ending his lessons.[6] He went on to enter banjo contests in the Nashville region and also pick with other musicians in the area. He continued to earnestly study Earl Scruggs’s banjo technique as he progressed in performances with some of bluegrass music’s biggest names. After appearing on the Opry one night in the 1990s, Cushman was pleasantly surprised by a complimentary phone message that awaited him at home:
I was on there one night with [banjoist and fiddle player] Mike Snider. We had about five minutes left in the show, and he asked me if I had my banjo picks, and I said yes I did. So he took the banjo off, handed it to me, and it was during a commercial break he said, “You play us out of here.” We came back on the air and they introduced Mike and he introduced me and I played “Earl’s Breakdown.” Anyway, I went home that night, it was about midnight, and there was a message on my answering machine. Well, it was Earl saying, “I just watched you on the Nashville Network doing the Opry, and you really played that old tune really well, and I just wanted to let you know I saw that, and we’ll talk to you later.” That was a high point in my career, and if I never played again, I got a compliment from Scruggs. The next day I made sure I didn’t erase that message. I went and got my cassette recorder and I copied it.
Though Charlie Cushman enjoyed a prosperous career in bluegrass, in addition to becoming an authority on prewar Gibson banjos, fate ultimately led him back to his Scruggs roots as a key member of the Earls of Leicester (pronounced “Lester”), a Flatt and Scruggs tribute band.
In 1962, young Marc Pruett came home from school, as he usually did in the late afternoon, and sat down for a snack while listening to a music show called The Cornbread Matinee. He only had a half hour to snack and listen to the radio before his mom would make him do his homework. It was during one of those breaks that Pruett claims he received a spiritual calling:
One day, the deejay played Lester Flatt and Earl Scruggs’s “Flint Hill Special,” “Earl’s Breakdown,” “Dim Lights, Thick Smoke,” and it covered me up. I was eleven years old and I asked my mom, “What’s that instrument they’re playing?” She said, “Son, that’s a banjo.” I said, “I want one for Christmas.” That’s how I became interested in the banjo. When I heard him play, it was like God said to me, that’s part of who you are too. Earl’s playing spoke straight to my heart, and I’ve never heard any banjo music come close to moving me the way his did. There have been a lot of great players that I admire and emulate, but Earl Scruggs did the whole thing. I’ll say this—his music has given my life a quality that few things equal.
As an early adolescent in 1965, Marc worked up the courage to approach Earl Scruggs for an autograph at the Old Asheville City Auditorium, where Flatt and Scruggs were performing. Pruett relives the day when he knocked on their bus door and was greeted by their bassist, Cousin Jake Tullock:
I asked if Earl was there, and I was invited into the bus, and there he was. He was so cordial to me. I chatted for a couple of minutes and got an autograph. I asked Earl, “Where’s Mr. Flatt?” And he said, “He walked down the street with Josh to get a sandwich.” Later, I sneaked backstage to a room where I heard them practicing. In those days, I guess the artists weren’t so heavily guarded, and I just walked up the steps to the dressing room—and walked in. And it was me, alone with Lester, Earl, Jake, Josh, and Paul. They played “Gonna Have Myself a Ball.” That year, that was a current release for them.
Earl was sitting down in a chair that didn’t have much of a bottom in it because I remember he was sort of hunched over as he played. I always thought it was brilliant how he tuned his fifth string up to G-sharp for that one song, which was in the key of E. He played the song in open G with the fifth string tuned up one fret. That’s the only song I’ve ever heard in that tuning. At the end of rehearsing that one song, it was real quiet for a few seconds, and Lester said, “Let’s get this damn thing over with.” The mood was somber. No one else said a word, and they all put their instruments away and left the room.
As a thirteen-year-old kid, I didn’t know what to think, but many years later I heard that the promoter for that show collected all the money and left town without paying the band. I can only imagine how they felt playing to several thousand people—and not getting paid. One last thought on that show. On my way out of the dressing room, I lightly brushed Earl’s banjo with my left hand and listened to that silvery, rippling, pinging sound. I wish I could do that one more time.
In February 1968, Marc Pruett would again see Flatt and Scruggs perform at the old Asheville-Biltmore College. “It was cold and icy, but they put on a hot show,” says Pruett. “And that was just a year before they broke up. It was fabulous. I would call it controlled power with feeling.” Oddly enough, that night he was bitten by an English bulldog while entering the auditorium to find a seat. The dog actually took off the end of his index finger of the right hand, but he was patched up at the school infirmary and was still able to catch the show. Upon reflection, Marc whimsically quips, “I had come to hear Flatt and Scruggs and was bitten by a dog.” At the end of the show he was able to talk to the band again and to Earl specifically. Pruett remarks, “I asked him to show me how he played ‘Sally Ann,’ and he did, but I couldn’t play for a month or so.”
During the Earl Scruggs Revue’s early touring circuit, Earl met a banjo-pickin’ comedian from the greater Los Angeles area named Steve Martin. Long before he reached mega-stardom, the young comic was reminiscent of the Uncle Dave Macon era, when the banjo was used as a prop to support comedy bits. While his stage presence at the time was one of endless streaks of zaniness, offstage his knack for the five-string was serious business. Martin speaks about his fascination with the banjo and the man who inspired his musical talent:
I was about sixteen or seventeen when I got interested in the banjo. I got interested through folk music: the Kingston Trio—and where the banjo was used a lot. But it was not played like Earl played it. There were people who were okay, you know. They kind of strummed it. So I picked it up with that in mind, and through Pete Seeger’s book, but when I heard Earl I realized that the banjo was significantly advanced from what I had heard so far. That’s when I seriously got interested in playing Scruggs style.
I bought the album Foggy Mountain Banjo and that, I would say, changed my life. Earl’s playing really changed my life and gave me a whole new creative outlet—and it was really because of Earl. I was a comedian as soon as I was eighteen, and at that point I had only been playing about a year, but I put [the banjo] in immediately and did some comedy with it, and every once in a while in the show I’d play a whole tune.
As a high school friend of banjoist John McEuen, Martin was afforded the opportunity to meet his idol when McEuen invited him to a performance of the Earl Scruggs Revue in the seaside community of La Jolla, California. “I met Earl and was backstage with him, sort of in awe,” Martin admits. “It’s very hard to be a normal person when you idolize Earl Scruggs and you find yourself with him.” While perfecting his comedic skills on the road as a self-described tagalong with the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band, Steve would occasionally serve as the emcee and opening act for shows that the Revue shared with the Dirt Band.
Like many of the other disciples, “Foggy Mountain Breakdown,” “Reuben,” “Shuckin’ the Corn,” and “Sally Ann” ranked high on Steve’s list of favorite Scruggs instrumentals. However, he acknowledges that Earl gave him a more personal touch with one particular tune. “He taught me how to play ‘Sally Goodin’ his way,” says Martin. “I actually recorded it, and it was on the back of the single of ‘King Tut’ [in 1978] as a matter of fact. And I felt really good knowing that I was playing it exactly the way Earl played it.”
Martin’s ties to the Dirt Band also brought him to the recording studio during their historic Circle sessions in 1971, which he fondly remembers being graced by an unexpected visitor:
When the Will the Circle Be Unbroken album was being recorded, my manager William McEuen had assembled all these people, at least this is my impression of it. So I got a recording session after their day was done. I could go in and use the studio. I had written about five or six original banjo tunes that I was going to record, with no intent actually [other than] just to record them. They actually were released on my last comedy album called The Steve Martin Brothers. I have photos of Earl dropping by the session. I didn’t play with him, but he just dropped in and listened and was very encouraging.
Martin’s original compositions recorded in 1971 (not heard by the public until ten years later) had all of the earmarks of a contemporary sound that was gaining momentum among some Scruggs disciples who were creating a more modernized form of bluegrass music.
During the 1960s folk boom, alongside Pete Seeger and the Kingston Trio, Flatt and Scruggs were making huge inroads with the genre’s musical fanatics. The change that began under that influence continued to gain a large following among younger audiences into the 1970s and 1980s. It was during this time that progressive banjo pioneers like Pete Wernick, Tony Trischka, and Béla Fleck started redefining the limits of the bluegrass banjo. With all due respect to their Scruggs ties, they began to experiment with newer forceful rhythmic patterns on several ancestral bluegrass tunes. For many traditionalists, this did not set well, and they began drawing lines in the sand. They felt that newgrassers were attempting to change the music from its foundational structure, but as time passed there seemed to be fewer people bickering about the conventional versus advancing forms of bluegrass music. More and more festivals were beginning to feature traditional and progressive bands on the same stage, and it became more apparent to promoters that their growing fan base was in the significant numbers of young people who were showing up to their events.
Pete Wernick was steered toward the banjo, via Pete Seeger, by a friend who also introduced him to the music of Mississippi John Hurt, Flatt and Scruggs, and others in the realm of folk music. Shortly thereafter, Pete’s own banjo journey would begin. “My friend, Jake, showed me a bit of frailing on the banjo, and we had an old five-string in our house,” Wernick recalls. “So I started practicing and got hooked. I started with Seeger-style banjo and his book and playing folky stuff with my friends.” Pete also recounts the day he heard Earl’s blazing banjo and how it changed his direction:
Sometime around thirteen or fourteen years old, my friend Jake played me “Shuckin’ the Corn,” and my first comment was, “That’s one guy?” It sounded so dazzling. It was unbelievable and magical. I still remember exactly where I was standing when I heard that. Once I’d gotten a handle on Seeger-style banjo, I decided to try to learn what Scruggs was doing. It seemed impossibly hard. There was no written or recorded help available at the time, and nobody teaching it. It was just trial and error, find the melody and chords by ear, listen and experiment, listen and learn.
After a brief introduction to Earl by John Hartford in the late 1970s, Wernick didn’t have any further contact with the banjo man until 1981 when his band, Hot Rize, played the Grand Ole Opry with Scruggs in attendance. After the evening’s performance, a friend of Pete’s conducted an interview with Earl, asking what he thought of Hot Rize, to which Scruggs replied that he liked the way they sounded. That was motivation enough for Wernick to roll the dice and call Earl on the phone, hoping that he might get an invite to his musical role model’s house. He explains the payoff from his gamble in venturing to the House of Scruggs:
I was nervous, but he was so pleasant and welcoming [that] I relaxed. After that, I’d visit him and Louise about any time I was in Nashville, and we’d have long visits, talking about all kinds of things, and getting to play together sometimes, one-on-one, something I never would have dared to dream. It was hard to put out of my mind that my absolute musical hero and I were taking turns chopping chords for each other. One time it was after midnight, and he and Louise and I were still yakking away, and they invited me to stay over. That was cool!
Becoming a teacher of bluegrass banjo with the publication of numerous instructional books and videos, Pete Wernick has come to be known as Dr. Banjo, which is a play on the fact that he has a PhD from Columbia University. He runs banjo camps and programs for evolving players to learn how to jam and keep good timing in a band situation. He’s devoted his life to the teaching of Scruggs style and continues to commit himself to teaching the craft to anyone willing to do the work. Wernick surmises how his mentor, Earl Scruggs, felt about the widespread attraction to his musical aesthetics:
He would say he’s honored that people want to learn his style and leave it at that. His music was so appealing, its influence was dominant, and his musicianship brought a completely new life to the five-string and to bluegrass music. By far the majority of people wanting to play banjo over the last fifty years have wanted to sound like Earl. I do think Scruggs-style banjo is one of the big reasons that bluegrass music will live as long as there are human beings. I count as one of the most significant accomplishments of my life that I have helped many people learn to play Scruggs-style banjo, worldwide. I’m amazed and happy that I’ve been able to play it myself for over fifty years and counting. I feel grateful to Earl every day for that, and it gives me satisfaction that he knew how I felt about it. I told him I’d never be able to repay my debt to him, no matter how I tried, and I have tried.
When fourteen-year-old Tony Trischka of Syracuse, New York, first heard Earl Scruggs play the banjo, he could never have imagined the overpowering effect it would have on the rest of his life. His discovery of the banjo occurred during the folk boom of the early 1960s. He was first attuned to the banjo of Dave Guard of the Kingston Trio, which didn’t last long, as he heard a sound with a more hypnotic effect that made him think, “Okay, this is it, the mother lode, or the father lode maybe.” Tony admits that his thirst for the banjo intensified after he began listening to Flatt and Scruggs records:
The first time I heard Earl was on the Flatt and Scruggs album Folk Songs of Our Land. I imagine Louise Scruggs had a hand in this album because they were trying to go more commercial, so they did Folk Songs of Our Land. That was, I think, the second bluegrass album I ever owned. It was just like, holy smokes, this is too amazing. This is just what I’ve been looking for. I remember thinking, oh my gosh, this is too much, but the subtleties were lost on me at that point. But, I mean, I was playing his style at that point, and I got it, but I didn’t get it on the deeper levels that I would understand today, which comes from a lot of transcribing his solos at half speed, digging into what he’s doing.
More than thirty years after meeting Earl in the mid-1970s while playing on the same festival circuit as the Earl Scruggs Revue, Tony Trischka was honored to have his musical role model record on his 2007 Double Banjo Bluegrass Spectacular, along with guitarist Tony Rice and banjoists Béla Fleck and Steve Martin. Tony has contributed greatly to the world of the five-string banjo, from classic recordings in the 1970s as part of the bands Country Cooking (with Pete Wernick) and Breakfast Special, to some of the most comprehensive teaching DVDs and books available on the market today. As noted, both Trischka and Wernick are Scruggs disciples who were some of the first to push the envelope of what was acceptable for the banjo. Their more obscure chord combinations (and instrument arrangements) of bluegrass, jazz, and rock produced an avant-garde sound that foreshadowed the emergence of another disciple who took the banjo beyond everyone’s imagination.
If Earl Scruggs invented an entirely new vocabulary for the five-string banjo, then Béla Fleck built a second language. When people first heard Earl play the banjo, they had no idea the instrument could ever produce such a sound. Many years later, when Béla started gaining acclaim, folks responded in much the same way. They couldn’t believe what he was pulling out of the banjo. Fleck has raised the stakes for progressive banjo playing, just as Earl did when he set the standard that made Béla’s style possible.
Fleck gained a reputation in the band New Grass Revival from 1981 to 1989 with his creative approaches to Scruggs and melodic-style banjo. Along the way, he began incorporating single-string methods that allowed him to venture into jazz, funk, and classical music. His professional career actually began in 1976, with the New England–anchored group Tasty Licks, and he later moved to Lexington, Kentucky, to join the band Spectrum in 1979. Fleck was instrumental (no pun intended) in helping to create and define progressive bluegrass. It was during his tenure in New Grass Revival that he developed a more radical interpretation of the banjo that laid the foundation for the growing number of advancing banjo players in today’s generation.
When Fleck began playing the banjo he initially used Pete Seeger’s banjo book, yet he readily grasped that it was not reflective of what he was hearing Earl play, though he didn’t feel the book was filled with inaccuracies. He eventually purchased a copy of Earl Scruggs and the 5-String Banjo and began to devour everything in it, though Fleck confesses, “I wasn’t a Scruggs-a-holic in the beginning, but in the very beginning, when I first heard the banjo, it was Earl, and he had that profound effect on me that he’s had on so many people.”
In the reawakening of his Scruggs state of mind, Fleck began to work hard at emulating Earl’s timing and tone after he moved to Lexington in the late 1970s. His intellectual perspective toward the various nuances and intricacies in Earl’s musicianship may be due to his highly technical understanding of music theory. Béla outlines a few examples reflective of his ability to make connections in Earl’s stylistic bond to things most people would never consider:
Earl’s playing is even better than perfect, because perfect is boring. What I think Earl had was the sound of the high-tech primitive. There’s something so earthy and real about Earl’s playing that sounds as old as the hills, and he had the modern quality with that speed and dexterity and that bright silvery sound, which sounds very modern and high tech. It’s the combination of the two that makes it stand out so much.
I think Earl was a great unconscious player, and I mean that in a most positive light. When you talk about jazz musicians who improvise, they really do their best work when they let their unconscious take over, and Earl was so unpretentious, and unself-conscious, when he played the banjo. He just played what he felt. He wasn’t thinking about all the little notes, and that leaves all of us to try and figure out all the little notes.
Like so many other disciples, Béla was afforded the opportunity to jam with the father of the bluegrass banjo at his home. The mutual admiration and respect he and Earl shared was characteristic of Earl’s relationships with the disciples he had come to know. “Every time I was at a jam session with him, he was very aware of every single player in the jam, and he made sure that everyone got a solo before he ever came back in,” Fleck confirms. “He felt a duty to make sure that everybody was treated equally in jam sessions. He was no prima donna.”
Earl Scruggs loved to play contemporary music, which became most evident during the 1970s. By the dawn of the 1980s, his seniority with the Earl Scruggs Revue was coming to a close. His touring days ended, and his recordings were beginning to wind down. And while the music around him was continuing to change, a new generation of disciples, born out of the Vietnam War era, were primed and pumped to carry the torch that Scruggs lit some forty years earlier. By this time, banjoists playing newgrass incorporated some melodic techniques into their Scruggs-style picking, as opposed to such veterans as J. D. Crowe, who remained loyal to Scruggs style even within the context of more progressive rhythms.
Rising up through the ranks during this period is, perhaps, the most dedicated Scruggs disciple to date—Jim Mills. Having spent most of his life trying to capture the essence of Earl’s playing, he’s become a living embodiment of the Scruggs legacy. It was Jim’s father who first encouraged him to alter the course of his banjo heritage. “I’m a third-generation banjo player from the state of North Carolina,” says Mills. “My grandfather played clawhammer style, my dad played a locally popular two-finger style while I was growing up, and I kind of followed in his footsteps, playing two-finger style. He told me just put that finger pick on the third finger and it will come to you.”
Jim’s first discovery of Earl Scruggs occurred when he was just six years old. After hearing the original 1949 version of “Foggy Mountain Breakdown” from his older brother’s record collection, the song resonated with him, and he told his sibling to “play it again, play it again.” Four years later, he dedicated himself to Earl Scruggs exclusively over other banjoists who were cultivating discipleships of their own. And as Mills candidly admits, the popular styles of the day weren’t enough to lure him away from Earl:
I got serious trying to learn what Earl Scruggs was doing when I was about ten years old. From that period on, I was consumed with Earl Scruggs. It’s funny to say, and I’m almost embarrassed to say this, but I was very sheltered when I was learning to play. I’m not that old. I was born in 1966. It wasn’t like I was born in the forties, but I learned to play like a kid would have learned in the forties or fifties. I did not realize that J. D. Crowe existed, that Sonny Osborne existed, the Seldom Scene, the Country Gentlemen. I didn’t even know that Flatt and Scruggs had busted up when I was a kid. Like I said, I was sheltered as a kid. I was tunnel-visioned into Flatt and Scruggs.
I even tried to fool with some of the melodic stuff of Bill Keith and Bobby Thompson, but my ear always took me back to the root, to the foundation of Earl. So I very much patterned my playing after the Scruggs style, and these other guys gave me some new ideas as well. I found Scruggs style to be more natural for my ear.
Jim’s respect for Earl Scruggs, and the impact he made on the world of music, radiates from his life story and every tale he tells about Scruggs. His detailed knowledge of Earl’s life shows a commitment that is mirrored in the intensity with which Jim plays the banjo and in his passion to know everything there is to know about prewar Gibson banjos. Earl Scruggs was more than the master of the five-string banjo for Mills, and he makes clear the level of impact he’s made musically:
As a musician playing his particular instrument, I believe in all my heart that Earl Scruggs will go down in history as being the most emulated musician, on his particular instrument, of any musician you can think of. What other musician can you think of, on his particular instrument, seventy years after they started playing, is still considered top of the line on their particular instrument?
In the autumn of 2006, a number of Scruggs disciples recorded Foggy Mountain Special: A Bluegrass Tribute to Earl Scruggs. One of the devoted followers, who received an International Bluegrass Music Association (IBMA) award for Instrumental Performance of the Year for his rendition of “Foggy Mountain Rock,” is Pennsylvania banjoist Tom Adams. Like many Yankees, he initially regarded the “hillbilly” records from his father’s collection as “the whiny, singing-through-their-noses sound that came out of our stereo.”
By fourth grade, he was interested in playing the snare drum in his school’s band, but was never selected, so his dad thought it might cheer him up if he taught him some chords on the guitar, thus marking the beginning of a new direction for him. Adams details how he segued from the guitar to the banjo with an indirect hand from Earl:
One thing led to another, and I went from playing some rhythm guitar to having [Dad] show me some chords on the mandolin, and then my younger brother, Dale, also learned to play guitar and mandolin. In June 1968 Dale and I played onstage for the first time at a local firemen’s carnival. At that point, my dad borrowed a banjo, with the intention of learning it, and the three of us would be a bluegrass group. My dad never got the hang of the banjo, and prior to there being a banjo in our house, I never had any desire to play one. But something clicked when I heard the 1949 cut of “Foggy Mountain Breakdown” on one of Dad’s Starday sampler LPs. That was the sound that called me to the banjo. And then I found one of his records, called Foggy Mountain Banjo, with nothing but banjo tunes on it. I started learning to play the banjo in January 1969 when I was ten years old.
My first and lasting impression upon hearing Earl Scruggs play the banjo was simply Earl Scruggs equals banjo. We had lots of records with banjo on them, and I learned to love many of the tunes and players. But the thought that Earl Scruggs equals banjo was always first and foremost, followed by the thought [that] other people play the banjo too. But not like Earl Scruggs.
Adams had only been playing banjo a year when he had the opportunity to meet the banjo man himself at a show he was playing with the Earl Scruggs Revue. “I first met Earl at Sunset Park [in West Grove, Pennsylvania] in July 1970. It was magic. I will never forget the feeling of watching and listening to him play that day. He autographed my banjo after the show.” Tom also reflects on the influence Earl Scruggs had on the world and credits him with motivating so many people to learn the banjo and start playing. “I think that the most special thing about Earl’s playing is its power to inspire others to take up the banjo, to bring more music into the world.”
Best known for being Alison Krauss’s banjo player (though he cuts a good amount of time on the guitar also) Ron Block has a unique style that has captured the attention of banjoists worldwide. Though planted firmly in Scruggs, much of Block’s appeal to his five-string fans is the way he chokes the strings, not only to move through melodies differently but to add some electric-guitar-like effects to his playing. In some ways, he has created his own verbiage on the banjo.
Block grew up in Southern California, though for a few of those years he lived in the Grass Valley region of Northern California, and in his own words says, “It was a Huck Finn existence, and living in that kind of rural environment has affected me for life.” The first record he remembers hearing was Marty Robbins’s Gunfighter Ballads and Trail Songs, in addition to the music of Fleetwood Mac, the Beatles, and Paul McCartney (post-Beatles). When he was eleven years old, his dad got him a guitar, but as Ron concedes, it didn’t take long for the banjo to get a chokehold on his musical interest:
I first heard bluegrass at around twelve or close to thirteen. It was Lester Flatt on television. I think Haskel McCormick was the banjo player. I hounded my dad nonstop until he got me a banjo for my birthday. Now he likes to say he bought me a banjo when I was thirteen and I didn’t come out of my room until I was twenty-one, which is partly true.
Block’s journey into the world of bluegrass music was in full swing as he attempted to learn what Earl was doing on the banjo. Prior to any formal lessons, he taught himself how to play from the instructional books and records he began purchasing. Ron opens up about the transformation he underwent after discovering the sound of Scruggs:
I had no bluegrass education at first. I did buy Earl’s book early on, and Pete Wernick’s book, and learned from both of those and began to get some sense of what was good. I’d order three or four records from County Sales. This was in the very early eighties. I don’t remember exactly when it was, but it was early in my banjo journey. When I heard Earl for the first time, it was a revelation. I thought, “That’s how it’s done!” Two or three years into playing, Dad brought me for some lessons with John Hickman. John is a good guy and was patient with me. I remember when he pulled out some live Flatt and Scruggs on his old reel-to-reel tapes. Earl’s playing live blew me away. John piled up a box full of reel-to-reels and let me take them home. I had to borrow a reel-to-reel machine and then taped them all off. I’ve still got a lot of those on cassette. Back then the live shows were hard to come by. I love Flatt and Scruggs live shows because, at times, it seems Earl risks more than on record—he’ll do things that still really surprise me.
Despite his own success, Ron Block continues to be a devoted disciple of Earl Scruggs. He likes to contrast the way Earl played to that of other banjoists he has spent time studying. He often argues the case for Scruggs’s influence on the music world:
His influence is far-reaching. Is there a bluegrass banjo player, traditional or progressive, who has not been directly or indirectly influenced by him? Earl Scruggs wasn’t a traditional banjo player. He was one of the pioneers of a brand-new genre. He created the tradition by innovating, by making something radically new and, to a large degree, previously unheard. He soaked up the traditions of his day as a youngster, learned from players around his home, listened to the radio, played with different people, explored sounds on his own, and came up with a style that continued to grow and evolve. To me, Earl Scruggs exemplifies the spirit of what bluegrass is all about.
As the five-time Banjo Performer of the Year for both the IBMA and the Society for the Preservation of Bluegrass Music of America (SPBGMA), in addition to being the 2011 recipient of the Steve Martin Prize for Excellence in Banjo and Bluegrass, Scruggs disciple Sammy Shelor has an impressive list of accolades to his credit. As the banjo player for the Lonesome River Band for more than twenty-five years, his professional career was launched in the early 1980s.
The beginning of his interest in the banjo dates back to when Sammy was a young lad at the age of four. He was fortunate to have grandfathers who were dedicated to his success in learning to play the banjo and to exposing him to “real-deal” bluegrass musicians who would make that extra difference in his journey. Sammy briefly tells of his first exposure to Earl Scruggs:
My introduction to the banjo was my grandfather, but I would say that my introduction to bluegrass was Flatt and Scruggs. When I was four, or maybe five years old, my grandfather took me to Hillsville, Virginia, to the VFW, and Flatt and Scruggs were playing, and that’s the first time I ever saw a bluegrass band. That would have been around 1966. Visually I remember that show well, but musically I didn’t comprehend it. It did impact me and made me realize what music was, and that there was such a thing as a band, because prior to that I [had] just heard my grandfather playing banjo on the couch.
Most any professional bluegrass banjo players will tell you straight-out that they learned from the get-go the impossibility of trumping Earl’s legacy. Such a statement is merely a confession that Scruggs had that certain je ne sais quoi, and Sammy echoes the same sentiment:
Well, my first impression was, when I was trying to learn it, I figured out pretty quick that I wasn’t going to get it like he did it. He had his heart, and his brains, and his hands, and I didn’t, and that’s all you can say. I’ve tried to emulate that the best I can, and like I say, he just had his own thing with it, J. D. has his own thing with it, and Baucom has his own thing with it, and, you know, everybody’s got their own heart, and that’s what you have to discover. I discovered early on that I couldn’t be Earl, so I just tried to find something else. Every banjo’s got a voice. Every banjo player has their own voice as well. If Earl hadn’t come along, the music would have gone off in another direction.
It goes without saying that banjo players, in any generation, learned at the feet of the masters preceding them. The bluegrass stars that came out of the late 1970s and the 1980s sat at the feet of the second generation of bluegrass champions. The banjo players that came out of the 1990s were beginning to sound more bluesy in their playing, and much of it was influenced by predecessors such as Terry Baucom, Sammy Shelor, and Ron Block, though we can go back further to J. D. Crowe and find examples of bluesy playing in the 1970s.
There’s also a great deal to be said about bands that keep the original members around for twenty or more years (as with those of Sonny Osborne and Sammy Shelor). Jason Burleson is yet another one of those long-termers and has been with Blue Highway since 1994. His style is driving and bouncy, which has helped create his group’s distinctive sound. By the time he first took up the banjo at eleven years old, the field of potential mentors in bluegrass banjo was plentiful. But it was his father’s love of Flatt and Scruggs’s repertoire that drew young Burleson toward the ole five-string. The original Scruggs recordings, which were reflective of a past generation, had stood the test of time when he first heard them in 1978. And regardless of the music’s age, Jason notes how significant Earl’s body of work was, not only to him but to the longevity of the banjo and everyone who plays it:
My first influence was definitely Earl. I first heard Earl play on some of my dad’s old Flatt and Scruggs records. I loved the way Earl played on the vocal songs. “My Cabin in Caroline” and “We’ll Meet Again Sweetheart” come to mind as textbook examples of Earl’s genius when it came to playing behind the vocal and how to “play the words” on a solo.
The best way I can think to describe Earl’s playing: it’s the perfect combination of tone, timing, taste, and touch. To me, he [refined] it and perfected it at the same time. All of us bluegrass players are still trying to get there. We all speak this language he created on the banjo, just with a little different accent. I don’t think banjo playing will ever completely shift away from Earl. I think there will be generations that will continue to be inspired by him and will pursue that path of trying to re-create what Earl did. There will always be players that will take what Earl did as their foundation and create something of their own. Players like Béla Fleck and Noam Pikelny come to mind as examples of incredible musicians who were inspired by Earl but found their own voice. I think that pattern will continue indefinitely.
As another disciple who can master both traditional and progressive styles, Kristin Scott Benson plays with immense drive and timing that pops as good as can be found. Kristin comes from a musical family that played bluegrass, and both her father and grandfather were mandolin players. When she was very young, her grandpa took her to see the Earl Scruggs Revue perform at Gardner-Webb College in Boiling Springs, North Carolina. Since her grandfather was playing the same show, Kristin was afforded the chance to meet Earl backstage. “Even though I didn’t know anything about music,” she recounts, “I realized I was meeting someone important. I mean, it felt different to see him play. I could tell it was special, that this was an important guy to the banjo and to bluegrass, and I remember it. I remember the room and can remember feeling that something big had just happened.”
Despite her initial brush with Scruggs, Benson’s interest in the banjo didn’t surface until a few years later when she was nine years old. Interestingly, she confesses that it wasn’t triggered by Scruggs. “What got me into the banjo, specifically, was seeing Doyle Lawson and Quicksilver in 1985, and I got to see Scott Vestal play the banjo, and it was just really something. That’s what sparked my interest in that particular instrument, and it was years before I got one, but from that point on, I wanted to play the banjo.” With Vestal as the vehicle that brought Kristin to the five-string, she quickly comprehended the significance of the man she had once seen as a youngster. Her analysis of Earl’s relevance is summed up by the way she places the banjo learning process into a historical context:
The thing that I think characterized his playing above everyone else’s playing was the level of perfection. I can’t think of any other instrument in the world where the goal of your playing is so focused on the past. Oftentimes, in bluegrass, the weight of your musicianship in a bluegrass context is how closely you can do what Earl did. The part that’s so impressive about Earl is that no one has done it that well since. Now, people have since done different things, and have added intricacies to their playing, but as a whole bluegrass banjo playing has not changed very much, and the foundation of it all is still his playing, and to this day no one can execute the way he did, as well as he did.
Having played with a number of groups over the years, including the Larry Stephenson Band, Sally Jones and the Sidewinders, Honi Deaton and Dream, Larry Cordle and Lonesome Standard Time, and most recently the Grascals, Benson is also involved with some of the banjo camps that are offered throughout the United States, where she asserts to her students the principles of Scruggs:
I continually tell people this, because I teach a lot of lessons, as well as playing, and I continually remind people that Earl created this, and has done better than anyone else has. He was making it up. He created this system that was so flawless that it remains relatively unchanged all these years. I try to tell people that Earl was playing what came naturally to him. There are some phrases and characteristics of his playing that I avoid, if at all possible, because I just can’t seem to make it sound like that, and so I try to remind people that he did what came naturally to him. So after we learn a certain amount of material, then we have this word bank, essentially, of solid phrases that can give us the tools to be a solid bluegrass banjo player, and where does that come from? Well, it comes from the playing of Earl Scruggs. With this particular instrument, you really do have to adhere to rights and wrongs, and if you want to be taken seriously as a bluegrass banjo player, you have to adhere to the right way as being Earl’s way.
Many people think bluegrass music appeals exclusively to those living in rural America, yet amazingly, the attraction is widely shared throughout the world. Since music is a language that needs no interpreters, individuals can understand each other through harmonies without ever comprehending one another through the verbal tongue. In chapter 5, Earl Scruggs spoke eloquently of the banjo’s popularity in Japan in the 1960s, which spawned some of the finest bluegrass banjoists from Asia, such as Tamotsu Miyamoto, Kazuhiko Murakata, and Hiroshi Yasuda.
Following the end of World War II American music of many varieties became widespread in Japan. A big part of this growth was due to the U.S. servicemen who were part of the American occupation force from 1945 to 1952. Armed Forces Radio broadcast everything from big bands to swing, country, and bluegrass. Japanese civilians were exposed to these new forms of music. Bluegrass especially gained momentum with the Japanese, perhaps because of the similarities between the musical instruments of Japan and America. It’s easy to understand why the five-string banjo is so well liked among the Japanese when you consider the prevalence of Japanese instruments such as the shamisen and the sanshin (native instrument of Okinawa). These instruments are shaped like the banjo (bearing some of the same tonal qualities), yet they are fretless, with only three-strings, and are plucked with the fingers.
Saburo Watanabe has spent more than fifty years in the pursuit of bluegrass music, not only as a writer-editor for MoonShiner magazine and historian of the genre in Japan, but as an accomplished banjo player in his highly praised ensemble Bluegrass 45 (named in honor of the year bluegrass began, 1945). Watanabe formed the group in 1971 and has toured the United States and the world, sharing the stage with several top bluegrass artists. Growing up, he never really thought much about the banjo, though he was familiar with its crisp, twangy sound. He eventually had an experience that steered him toward the five-string banjo:
I believe it was [the] summer of 1964, maybe ’65. One day, I happened to turn on [my brother’s] tape recorder when he was out, and I hear [this] unbelievable sound. It was “The Old Home Town”—not fancy, just a simple old bluegrass song, but it hit me like lightning. I still remember the sight from [the] window of my brother’s room. The rice field and forest trees were all shining in beautiful green. I thought it was a perfect combination of the song and banjo at that time. I wanted to play banjo, and I did. After a while, I found out [why the] banjo is difficult to play. If you listen to the first version of “Foggy Mountain Breakdown” recorded 1949, you’ll understand the difficulty of the five-string banjo and the true genius of Earl Scruggs.
Watanabe’s gravitation toward Earl’s banjo and bluegrass music was part of an almost counterculture response by the Japanese youth to the cultural barriers that tried to suppress the artistry of rural America. As documented in chapter 5, Flatt and Scruggs paved the way for the genre to sustain credibility when no one in eastern Asia was willing to showcase that kind of entertainment. What Scruggs brought to Japan in 1968 is still widely appreciated and copied, based on the impressive number of Japanese bluegrass bands and attendees at conferences like the IBMA and SPBGMA. Saburo confirms his country’s attraction to bluegrass and their ongoing need for the fundamentals of Scruggs:
Japanese bluegrass was mostly developed by college students. [It was never on] the mainstream media for these [past] fifty years. Most Japanese bluegrassers started to pick at college. Today they still teach Earl’s “Cripple Creek” or “Blue Ridge Cabin Home” as the first tune to learn to play banjo and bluegrass. Every year, we still have a couple of hundred newcomers at the college bluegrass clubs all over Japan. In Japan, most of us understand if someone wants to play three-finger banjo, you should learn Earl first.
East Asia isn’t the only foreign area to express a passion for bluegrass and Scruggs-style banjo playing. Europeans have also embraced and copied Earl’s three-finger roll patterns. Some of the most notable players, such as Swiss native Jens Kruger, were produced within the borders of the transatlantic continent. The fondness for Scruggs and his banjo within Europe is reinforced by Chris Keenan, organizer of Ireland’s Johnny Keenan Banjo Festival:
Within Europe, Earl’s presence is unmistakable. It’s always obvious that nearly every bluegrass musician and band were influenced by the music of Earl and of Flatt and Scruggs. The majority of five-string banjo players play Scruggs style. The Eastern Europeans, who many years ago were not able to openly listen to and play music, have a particular affinity to bluegrass music. I regularly encounter musicians and fans in former Eastern Bloc countries who possess an incredible amount of bluegrass knowledge—some even able to recite whole catalogs of tunes and facts.
As mentioned, bluegrass music’s worldwide appeal can be experienced every fall at the IBMA convention. Fans and musicians stretching from the British Isles all the way to New Zealand can be spotted at workshops, seminars, live shows, and band showcases. Additionally, Europe has its own IBMA counterpart, the European Bluegrass Music Association (EBMA), headquartered in the Netherlands. Good tone, good timing, good separation between notes, and drive stir people and draw them into an experience both intellectual and spiritual. Earl Scruggs epitomized all the above, and citizens throughout the world connect with it because it has all the elements of great music.
One of the most popular bluegrass bands in Europe today is Italy’s Red Wine from Genoa, formed in 1978 by banjoist Silvio Ferretti with celebrated guitarist Beppe Gambetta. Their amazing drive, tone, and timing are second to none among American ensembles. They have toured extensively in the United States, sharing stages with award-winning artists like Alison Krauss and Union Station, Tony Rice, Ricky Skaggs, and the Del McCoury Band. Ferretti is the quintessential Renaissance man and not only plays banjo professionally but is a pediatric surgeon and a luthier who builds guitars, banjos, and quality banjo bridges. He is an articulate man of excellence, and a true disciple of Earl Scruggs.
Born in 1952, Silvio tried his hand at a variety of musical instruments, including piano, guitar, dulcimer, mandolin, autoharp, and electric bass, throughout his youth before pursuing the banjo in his early adulthood. Despite his late entry into the five-string arena, Ferretti recollects how the sound of Earl’s banjo struck a chord with him years earlier:
My first introduction to the sound of the banjo happened with Washington Square in the early sixties, I guess, actually, the Italian version of it, entitled L’uomo del Banjo, “The Man with the Banjo.” It was a tenor, played very basically, so I didn’t much care for it. Then I literally stole some records from my uncle, and there was some great five-string banjo on them: Pete Seeger, Doc Watson, and Earl Scruggs. I heard Earl on a Vanguard Records LP box set, recorded at the Newport Folk Festival with Flatt and the Foggies. “Salty Dog Blues” just blew my mind. I guess, like everybody hearing him for the first time, I thought, how can he do that? I thought he was the only man on earth who could play the banjo like that. Still do, by the way.
As a fan of bluegrass, jazz, 1960s and 1970s pop, and old country music, Silvio says Earl Scruggs opened the door for the banjo and expanded its repertoire:
To me, Earl worked the magic of making the banjo sound musical and above musical genres. In his hands, the banjo has found a place in other musical genres, and that place is rooted in the sound that Earl got out of it, not in the notes, not in the phrasing. The sound. I recorded Scruggs-style banjo on pop songs, and it fit, not because I’m a monster player—I’m not—but because I learned [the] banjo sound from Earl. Not many banjo players can boast such an influence on music. Earl Scruggs was unique.
Yet when it comes to the more progressive end of bluegrass that blends various genres together, Ferretti expresses a more traditional viewpoint. “I don’t even listen to jamgrass bands. I really don’t care for that. I consider Scruggs style the basic foundation of bluegrass, along with Monroe-style mandolin, or derived styles of mandolin, and the kind of rhythm guitar that Flatt developed and others brought to perfection. Take those factors away and, to me, you don’t have bluegrass.”
In Sweden, Jens Koch grew up in a home where music was played, and his interest in the banjo began when he was around twelve years old in the mid-1990s. His uncles used to visit his house and perform Dixieland jazz on four-string tenor banjos. It was the sound of the banjo that Jens found attractive, even though they were not five-string banjos. Eventually, he told his uncle that he wanted to play the banjo, and it was at this point he was exposed to the recordings of Flatt and Scruggs. Though he claimed to his uncle that he wanted to play the tenor banjo like him, his uncle understood the difference between the four- and five-string banjos, as Koch reveals:
He said, “Son, you need to hear this first before deciding on the tenor banjo.” It was one of those moments when your jaw drops. You can’t stand still. You want to know how it’s done and you want more. I had loved the sound of the tenor banjo before, which made me want to play the banjo, but the sound of the five-string along with the drive that it has in the hands of Earl, that captured me totally. Since that day, I’m a true Scruggs appreciator. Later, I got to learn about his taste, as I heard more banjo players. Earl’s sense of melody and choice of notes and phrasing still make me smile.
Jens is thoroughly steeped in Scruggs, but other influences can be heard in his playing from J. D. Crowe, Terry Baucom, Ron Stewart, Jim Mills, Sammy Shelor, and Sonny Osborne. He has his own technique and readily acknowledges, “We are other human beings playing banjo, created with our unique set of DNA, and sometimes I just think that we need to remember that. We’re so affected by those who inspired us that we try to play like them, and I think that, often, our true voice doesn’t get out as much because we try to play like others.”
In 2006, Jens met up with Christoffer Olsson, Erik Igelström, Tobias Strömberg, and Jimmy Sunnebrandt at a bluegrass festival in Sweden and quickly realized they had chemistry and the makings of a great band. They decided on the name G2, meaning “Generation Two,” because each of the members have fathers or uncles who play bluegrass. If Koch and Ferretti, along with others, such as Jens Kruger, are any indication of the way European bluegrass banjo players think about the impact of Earl Scruggs, then the future looks very encouraging for the banjo in Europe. The quality of the bluegrass bands rising out of Europe (as well as Asia) demonstrates an intentionality among the musicians and a commitment to learning how to play like the father of the bluegrass banjo.
By the 1990s the line in the sand between traditionalists and progressive bluegrass fans was less of an issue, and even to this day there’s no sign that progressive musicians are in any way attempting to undermine traditional music, nor for that matter are there progressive banjo players attempting to erase the past of Earl Scruggs as the starting point for the bluegrass banjo’s pilgrimage. No matter how far beyond traditional bluegrass this current generation of banjo players decide to travel, Earl’s influence will always be obvious.
One such Scruggs disciple who is known for his comprehensive and creative approach to jazz banjo is North Carolinian Ryan Cavanaugh. Alongside other accomplished progressive banjoists like Béla Fleck, Matt Menefee, and Rex McGee, Cavanaugh began his banjo curriculum at the “University of Scruggs” in 1990. “My dad introduced me to Earl’s banjo playing, and the album was Will the Circle Be Unbroken, and still to this day I think that is some of Earl Scruggs’s best playing, but I met Earl years later when I went to his house in Nashville for one of [his] jams.”
Most of the Scruggs disciples in this chapter speak of their banjo learning experiences as Scruggs-centric, in that they came from families that were familiar with and focused on old-time string music and traditional bluegrass. Bill Monroe, Flatt and Scruggs, and the Stanley Brothers were all that many people listened to, and it makes sense that the young banjo players, learning to pick in that kind of atmosphere, were most likely to be receptive to Earl’s talent. The musical Petri dish that Ryan Cavanaugh developed in was not exclusively Scruggs-fed but included the influences of a multiplicity of musical genres, and this is to be expected, given that it was in a different place and time in history. His vast experience with other musical genres gives him an ear for connections with Scruggs, as he insightfully describes:
I found, only through a study of [East] Indian rhythm styles, that upbeat drive, and Earl Scruggs was a very accessible American way to hear this type of thing, and it sounds so American to us, but if you listen for it in American styles, Earl Scruggs is the only guy doing that. It was an eye-opener to hear those Indian musicians, or to hear John McLaughlin, or to hear Pat Martino play guitar. It’s like, wait a minute, these guys are doing the same, but Earl was the first, and it was exciting to hear that flow of notes. Stevie Ray Vaughan had this song called “Scuttle Buttin’” where he played a bunch of really fast notes, and I related that to Earl Scruggs. I had to learn how to play that, and it sounded like something Earl would do. I learned it on the guitar first and then the banjo later.
Following in the same progressive path as Béla Fleck and others, Cavanaugh continues to be cutting-edge, experimenting with new forms of music on the banjo. It says a great deal about a banjo player when he lands a nine-year gig with the prominent jazz saxophonist Bill Evans. Most people could not have imagined in the 1950s that decades later there would be new generations of Scruggs-inspired banjo pickers playing modern jazz in notable bands (a reality once dreamed by Earl himself after his impromptu jam with King Curtis in 1960).
The longstanding belief of bluegrass purists that progressivists were diminishing the quality of the genre continues to bleed in the twenty-first century. However, with the millennial generation of musicians, that’s simply not the case. Noam Pikelny is one of the latest banjo prodigies to come from the lineage of progressivism. Prior to his participation in a number of acclaimed bands, such as Leftover Salmon, the John Cowan Band, and the Punch Brothers, Pikelny was introduced to the instrument through the modernistic interpretations of Béla Fleck:
I started playing banjo when I was eight years old. My brother was playing mandolin, and he saw a bluegrass band play at school as part of the rotating arts program. Eventually I wanted to learn an instrument. My parents thought if I learned the banjo, my brother and I could make music with each other. So they suggested the banjo, and I was fine with that. So I was just a little kid learning clawhammer, old-time banjo, and it was probably my brother’s twelfth birthday, and I went to a music store to buy him a record, and the salesman there struck up a conversation with my dad and I, and [my dad] told him I played the banjo. He asked if we had heard the new Béla Fleck and the Flecktones album. We said no, we had not, and had never heard of him. So he sold us the album, and I couldn’t believe the sounds that I was hearing out of that banjo. As a little kid, I didn’t believe that he was playing the same kind of Gibson Mastertone banjo as, like, Earl Scruggs, and I couldn’t believe he was using the same three-finger picks as Scruggs used.
I remember going to see Béla with my family here in Chicago to see him play live and to see with my own eyes how he was pulling those sounds off. Lo and behold, he was playing a Gibson Style 75 Granada banjo and wearing three-finger picks like Earl Scruggs would have used. That’s what I wanted to do. I wanted to play modern music like Béla.
The symphonic appeal for young Pikelny was reversed, compared to most banjo players who were first impacted by Earl Scruggs. Noam’s objective right out of the gate was to emulate Fleck. Fortunately, there were some thoughtful people in his life to give him the proper wisdom and guidance he needed to accomplish the goal of mimicking Béla Fleck, as Pikelny elaborates:
Everybody in the community suggested that if that is what I was interested in, I should take several steps back and learn the fundamentals of Earl Scruggs–style banjo [because] all the modern players like Béla, Tony Trischka, and Bill Keith, all had cut their teeth on Earl Scruggs before they started pursuing their own exploration of the banjo. At first I just thought that was just a means to an end, and I thought, well, if I have to, I’ll do it. Then I started to work out of the Earl Scruggs book, and I ordered the Flatt and Scruggs box set recordings.
So I started to learn the Flatt and Scruggs tunes, and I just really fell in love with it, with the bluegrass style. I kind of lost my focus on what the original goal was—to learn this traditional stuff in order to get back to the more modern stuff. Now I was mostly focused on the traditional stuff. I think I took for granted the brilliance of Earl Scruggs. I think, as a kid, Earl Scruggs was playing sounds so elemental to me that it’s, like, you hear it and can’t imagine bluegrass banjo playing sounding any different. When someone thinks of bluegrass banjo, or if you ask someone, what comes to mind when you think of bluegrass banjo? It’s the sound of Earl Scruggs. I don’t think it made an impact on me as a little kid like it did as I grew older and started to realize that he actually developed this style, and these musical phrases, and rolls and licks that we use right now are the result of his creativity.
Born in 2000, native East Tennessean Willow Osborne (no relation to the famed Osborne Brothers) is an astounding banjoist who’s had the honor of appearing with Rhonda Vincent and the Rage on PBS and participated in a documentary on the life of Swiss banjoist Jens Kruger. As one of the youngest rising talents to emerge in the wake of Scruggs, Willow’s musical skills were nurtured from the age of four when she began taking lessons from Gary “Biscuit” Davis, a four-time international banjo champion. By age ten, she was proficient enough to play professionally in live shows, and within a few short years she gained endorsements from the Deering and Neat banjo companies, along with GHS Strings and BlueChip Picks.
For as rapidly changing and tech savvy as all musical genres have become in this new millennium, Willow credits the man who pioneered a revolutionary new sound more than a half century before she was born with being at the core of her musical identity:
Earl was very, very influential to me. I grew up listening to him, and he’s one of my heroes. Honestly, he’s my biggest hero. Even though I’ve listened to all of his stuff, I go back and listen to it and study it. I mean, he’s just that player that everybody wants to sound like and I want to sound like. I look up to him definitely, and also as a person and a player. Earl’s playing is just so clear and he’s got such a polished tone. I mean, the way he plays, he always executes exactly what he wants and he makes it seem so easy, but whenever you try to play it, it’s like, wow! What Earl played, like, his notes and choices of licks and clarity, is just what every banjo player really strives to be today.
Opinions differ greatly among banjoists on how long the Scruggs influence is going to last. No doubt, Earl can still be heard in the repertoire of today’s emerging bluegrass banjo players. Osborne, though, offers her opinion on those willing to sacrifice the banjo’s soul for pizazz:
Honestly, there’s two groups of people in bluegrass, where if you go to, like, a bluegrass festival and you start walking around, you can hear the music that has the heart—what bluegrass really is. Earl, honestly, he put that heart into it, in the drive, and I feel like a lot of younger players are losing that because they’re just kind of trying to be flashy [to] get everybody’s attention. Earl was just very simplistic, yet complex, and that’s just a weird way of putting it—but it’s just what made him and just gave bluegrass that distinct sound.
Anyone questioning whether or not young people are supporting traditional bluegrass needs to attend the IBMA or SPBGMA conference or any bluegrass festival in the United States. The number of young kids jamming and performing in their own bands is more than impressive. You’ll find these youngsters playing more progressive forms of bluegrass, yet even in that you can hear the echo of Earl Scruggs in every banjo solo.
Whether professional or amateur, known or unknown, fluent or just beginning, all living three-fingered five-string banjoists are disciples of Earl, proving that the current generation is not moving away from Scruggs. They continue to demonstrate the connection between what Earl pioneered and the advanced techniques that arise generation after generation. As bluegrass artist Sam Bush reaffirms, “There’s a Scruggs influence everywhere for everyone who wears a thumb and two finger picks.”
The Frets interview with Sonny Osborne appears in Kochman, Big Book of Bluegrass, 52, 54.
Fred Bartenstein’s comments come from the DVD bonus track of Bluegrass Country Soul, 35th Anniversary Collector’s Edition (Time Life, 2006).
David L. Russell, “Alan Munde: Banjo Pickin’ Gentleman,” Tri-State Bluegrass Journal, July 2005.
The rise of newgrass with Bill Emerson and guitarist Cliff Waldron’s New Shades of Grass in 1968, which “emphasized ‘contemporary’ repertoire (particularly rock songs)”; Walter Hensley’s banjo album Pickin’ on New Grass; and the 1970 Bluegrass Alliance album Newgrass are chronicled in Rosenberg, Bluegrass, 298.
See “Biography,” CharlieCushman.com, http://charliecushman.com/BIO.htm.
Ibid.