Earl was humble. He was a man of the people. He was a man who respected working men. He was a man who did not ever put himself above other people. This is a guy who could have been, at any point along the way, changed by the enormous success he had due to the fact that he was very precisely great in his art form.
—David Hoffman, documentary filmmaker
There was a sound. Though silent to the world, it was loud and clear in the southern Appalachian Mountains and the rural farmlands of southwest Virginia, West Virginia, Kentucky, Tennessee, North Carolina, and South Carolina. It happened at a time when the country was dry from Prohibition and Runnin’ Wild on Broadway spawned the most popular dance craze of the decade, the Charleston. While many in America’s big cities were swinging to the beat of jazz during the Roaring Twenties, another form of music was resonating without the echoes of horns, woodwinds, and percussion instruments. Instead, its repertoire was made up entirely from the soft sounds of stringed instruments: fiddles, guitars, mandolins, bass fiddles, autoharps, and five-string banjos.
Old-time “string music,” as it was commonly known, featured acoustic arrangements set behind an almost piercingly high-pitched singular voice bearing a lonesome quality in its raw delivery of gospel tunes or songs about events from life: love, family, and hardships. But unlike the grandness of the professional jazz ensembles that were then thriving, these smaller string bands were scarce, as the rural populace lacked the mobility of those in cities. Hence, most of the old-time string music was played within neighboring family circles.[1] Documentary filmmaker David Hoffman, whose first production, Bluegrass Roots: On the Road with Bluegrass Musicians, took him from New York City to Madison County, North Carolina, in 1964, characterizes the region’s seemingly unchanged musical heritage:
This was a time when America didn’t yet know bluegrass and really didn’t know country either. [Americans had] no understanding of it, and here I was, like other Northerners, coming down there and finding this was the most unbelievable music I have ever heard—but to them, it was just picking together. And the reason so many musicians came out of that culture was because the older people supported the younger people. They didn’t put them down; they didn’t send them to music school. You didn’t go see their performance in grammar school choruses. It was all inside these families. It’s unique—a wonderful, unique culture. There isn’t a culture I’ve ever seen in the world or read about as beautifully musical, dance-, or poetic-oriented as these people. In that family, everybody danced, everybody played something, just like all the other families.
In the small farming community of Flint Hill, North Carolina, in the Piedmont region, just outside of Shelby and Boiling Springs in Cleveland County, was one such musical family that bred a prodigy who ultimately became a pioneer of bluegrass music as well as the most transformative five-string banjo virtuoso of the twentieth century—Earl Scruggs.
With only a general store, a two-room grade school, and a church, Flint Hill was made up of farms where down-to-earth country folks made their living from the rich soil that God gave them. They were a community of Baptist Christians who believed in exercising respect and humility toward their family and fellow man.[2] George Elam Scruggs, son of David and Sarah (Green) Scruggs, was born on January 10, 1876, and grew up to become a farmer and bookkeeper. He also earned credentials in education that elevated him to the chairmanship of the Flint Hill community school board, where he occasionally lent assistance in teaching mathematics at the schoolhouse. By the age of thirty, he married Lula Georgia Ruppe on November 4, 1906. As the daughter of John David Ruppe, Lula was born on April 15, 1892 (d. October 26, 1955), and was only fourteen years old at the time of her marriage to George Elam. A year later, she gave birth to their first child, Bessie, on December 18, 1907, who sadly died in her infancy three months later on March 27, 1908.
In the subsequent years, George Elam and Lula would have more children: first a son named Junie Emmett, born on September 9, 1911 (d. December 15, 1995), followed by a daughter, Eula Mae, on December 4, 1912 (d. January 6, 1994), and another daughter, Ruby Genette, seven years later on August 4, 1919 (d. September 2, 1990). Then came two more sons, James “Horace” on March 10, 1922 (d. July 19, 2007), and Earl Eugene on January 6, 1924 (d. March 28, 2012).
Planting and picking cotton became the family’s primary source of income. While it’s not known when George Elam and Lula began farming in Flint Hill, Junie’s son, James Thamer “J. T.” Scruggs, highlights his grandparents’ acquisition of their forty-acre homestead:
Well, my great-grandfather [David Scruggs], as I understand it, owned quite a bit of land. My grandfather [George Elam Scruggs] was farming some property and had a home on the property before my great-grandfather died. My grandfather [actually] died first and then, when my great-grandfather died, my grandmother inherited some property, and that’s how they acquired the farm.
When Earl was just four years of age, his father George Elam, at the age of fifty-two, passed away after an eight-month bout of tuberculosis on October 10, 1928. With the eldest children, Junie and Eula Mae, in their mid- to upper teens, Lula was now a widowed mother of three children below the age of ten. But her status soon changed, if only for a brief period. “She remarried after Grandfather passed away, and Venie Mae was born with the other husband,” admits J. T. “And I don’t think they really stayed together very long.”
Raised among multiple siblings, Earl’s strongest bond was with his brother Horace, who was a year and ten months his senior. “Horace and Earl remained close their entire lives,” says Horace’s son, Elam Scruggs. “They were six and four when their father died. The other children were older. Eula Mae got married the year their father died.” Yet, despite the age gap, Earl also formed a close relationship with his sister Ruby, who often helped the two boys in their daily household chores. And during this period of Earl’s childhood, older brother Junie became less present, according to J. T. Scruggs:
Dad was real close to both girls, and he was close to Horace and Earl too, but not as close as Earl and Horace [were]. They grew up together, and they were very close. Dad moved away not long after Grandfather died. He got married and moved out. And so Dad, he was home for a while after Grandfather died and did help raise the crops. But then Dad went to work at Public Work and moved away.
Without a father figure in their formative years, Earl and Horace became the men of the house. Their shared responsibilities served, in part, as a catalyst for the ties that bound them permanently together, as explained by Elam Scruggs:
They grew up in extreme poverty, and many of the chores were assigned to them at a very young age. I remember Dad talking about how he and Earl would cut stove and firewood and plant corn, cotton, and a garden. They also had fishing lines, “throw lines,” as they called them, in Broad River, which was near their house.
Dad and Earl often told this story: One day after the morning chores were completed they came into the house, and their mother had baked an apple pie. She had to leave for a couple of hours, and she told them they could have one piece of pie each. They waited for her to leave and they cut the pie down the center. Each of them ate half of the pie, but it was one piece each!
They remained very close, visiting each other two and three times a year. Our family normally went to Nashville at Christmas, and they would come to see us in the summer. They shared a compassionate love for each other. If one of them had a medical issue, the other one was burning down the roads to get to them. They were always there for each other.
When it came to faith, the Scruggs family attended Flint Hill Baptist Church, where all of Lula’s children were baptized in the Broad River (Earl was eight years old at the time of his baptism). And even though the family was unified in their church attendance, their public schooling levels varied due to differentiating circumstances, affording Earl the honor of being the only high school graduate in his family. Scruggs’s eldest son, Gary, briefly sketches his father’s formal education:
His early school years were at the little two-room Flint Hill community school. Both rooms were sectored off relative to the age and/or grade level of the students. When a teacher addressed one group, the other students would be kept busy studying another topic relative to their grade level. He attended high school in Boiling Springs, which is a couple of miles or so from the Flint Hill community. I think it was in his senior year that he helped lay the sidewalk in front of the school.
Though the Scruggs family consisted of farmers, many were also amateur musicians who saw music as a means of escape from the labor and economic hardships of farming. Everyone in the family was blessed with the gift of music according to Gary Scruggs:
Father George Elam mostly played an open-back five-string banjo and fiddle. He also knew chords on the guitar. Mother Lula played a pump organ. All the siblings played guitar and banjo. Brother Junie gravitated toward banjo, and brother Horace gravitated toward guitar. The sisters, Eula Mae and Ruby, played mainly guitar and frailing-style banjo, but not to the degree that the brothers played. Dad, of course, took up banjo and guitar as well as learning to play fiddle. The family also had an old autoharp that I think everyone would pick up and strum on now and then.
With all of this talent flowing through the Scruggs household, Earl fondly recalled, in a 1979 interview with Tim Timberlake in Lanexa, Virginia (printed with permission), the everlasting impression music made upon his childhood:
I was raised up at the tail end of the depression days, and I know the banjo and the family get-togethers, and the music and singing, played a big part in making us forget about the hard times and that with music and family reunions got us right through. I remember, in addition to the music, they used to have what they call “all-day singing and dinner on the ground” at some rural church. And I like good gospel singing, and you know it’s so relaxing and you can just forget all of the worldly things. It’s just good.
And [also] quite frequently, like Sunday afternoon is referred to or a certain time of the year when we could all get together, [and] we would all find ourselves having a little family session and usually wind up using our instruments, picking and singing, and that was kind of a typical afternoon for us. If we all got together before the day was over with, we’d be all picking together.
Earl’s son Gary touches on his dad’s recollection with further insight:
I think most people are exposed to music in one way or the other, and some simply are inspired to learn to play an instrument and some aren’t. As in Dad’s case, I suppose being the youngest of several siblings, with all the older ones playing music to some degree, might have had something to do with how he became interested in the five-string. His father also had an old fiddle that Dad was somewhat interested in and practiced on from time to time, but not anywhere near the degree in which he played banjo and guitar.
Around the time of Earl’s discovery of the five-string banjo at the age of four when his father passed away, there were two main styles of playing the instrument: one was a method commonly known as frailing or claw-hammer (where, by definition, a banjoist uses a downward stroke motion with the back of the fingers/nails to strum the strings, then strikes the top string with the thumb); the other was two-finger picking with the thumb and index finger. The three-finger roll (thumb, index finger, and middle finger) was virtually nonexistent, with the exception of a few banjoists in the Carolina Piedmont region where the Scruggs family resided. It’s difficult to pinpoint exactly where and when this style of banjo playing originated, but there has been speculation among banjo historians that three-finger style may go back as far as the early 1800s. Exactly why there was a concentrated number of three-finger stylists in this one particular region is not really known; however, some of them had a profound impact on young Earl. The primary players who laid the foundation on which he built are designated by Gary Scruggs:
Smith Hammett was a local banjo picker married to a woman named Ola, who was a cousin of Dad’s mother. The Hammetts and the Scruggs family members often visited one another in the 1920s and ’30s. Smith played a primitive three-finger style on his five-string banjo that Dad was drawn to. Smith died when Dad was six, but Dad’s memory of him stuck with him forever. Smith was the first banjo player that Dad knew of who picked with three fingers. Smith also had a small-scaled banjo that he would let Dad play on during visits. At an early age, he also had heard another three-finger banjo player, a blind man named Mack Woolbright who had recorded with an old-time musician and singer named Charlie Parker for Columbia Records in the late 1920s. Dad absorbed those banjo influences and pretty much lived and breathed playing the banjo.
Earl’s dedication to the banjo at such a young age and his small size meant practicing in an awkward position, as he could only play it while sitting on the floor with the round body along his right side, sliding it around to accommodate his left hand’s position on the banjo’s neck.[3] At the same time, Scruggs was also learning the guitar, as he recounted to Doug Hutchens in a 1989 radio interview for Bluegrass Today (printed with permission):
Actually, I don’t remember which instrument I started trying to play first. My father died when I was four, so I don’t remember his playing, but we had in the house a banjo, a guitar, autoharp, fiddle, and instruments like that. But my older brother [Junie] picked banjo, and my brother that’s almost two years older than me [Horace], he played guitar. I believe I started playing the banjo some. But when I played with my older brother [Junie], he wanted me to play the guitar with him because he wanted to play the banjo. So anyway, I started playing guitar back as far as I can remember, and my idol, at the time—the main person that I ever loved most—was Mama Maybelle Carter, and so that’s who I copied.
By the time Earl reached ten years of age in 1934, his love for the banjo had grown to the point where he was picking either his father’s old-fashioned open-back banjo (circa 1900) or his brother Junie’s modernized resonator banjo (purchased for approximately seventeen dollars) with two fingers.[4] Yet it was that three-finger rolling style he heard from Smith Hammett, Mack Woolbright, and his brother Junie that fascinated him most. Even though he won first or second prize for his rendition of “Cripple Creek” in a banjo contest at a local fiddlers’ convention a few years earlier, he wasn’t going to be satisfied with his playing until he learned the three-finger method.[5] Oddly, his incorporation of the middle finger into his technique evolved somewhat serendipitously as the result of his “pouting and picking” after an argument he had with Horace.[6] “Dad told this story many times,” recalls Elam Scruggs. “Earl went in the front room picking alone for quite some time. Finally he came out excited saying, ‘I’ve got it!’ I think he had finally found the sound and note progressions he was searching for to make the sound he wanted to make.” “The first tune he played with three fingers at the age of ten was ‘Reuben,’ also known as ‘Reuben’s Train’ and later ‘Lonesome Ruben,’” adds Gary Scruggs. “He played it in D tuning.”
Excited about his newfound ability to roll with three fingers, young Earl left the banjo in D tuning for a week while he practiced nothing but “Reuben” to improve the coordination of his middle finger. Standard G tuning for the five-string banjo from the fifth string to the first is G, D, G, B, D (the short fifth-string G is an octave higher than the third-string G), whereas D tuning is F#, D, F#, A, D (the fifth-string F# is an octave higher than the third-string F#). In D tuning the banjo has a more bluesy, sad, and dark sound, which is what gave the tune “Reuben” that lonesome feel (hence “Lonesome Ruben”). “Reuben” also has an old-steam-engine feel, and the way Earl eventually picked it, you could almost imagine a big locomotive “balling the jack” (railroad slang for “going at full speed”) down a stretch of track. This particular tune became one of his favorites throughout his life.
Soon after learning “Reuben,” his brother Junie dropped by and asked him if that was the only song he knew. Stunned by the question, Earl changed his banjo back to the standard G tuning and began practicing other songs while developing different right-hand rolls, which he understood as being critical to the flow of melody lines. However, his determination to pick melodies correctly didn’t come until his mother redirected his concentration from youthful showboating with hot licks on the banjo to playing a song so it could be recognized.[7] “He practiced and played for many, many hours,” notes Gary Scruggs. “I would say thousands and thousands of hours—a lot of time alone and a lot of time picking with his brother Horace. He also picked ‘for fun’ with other players in the area.”
To ensure he was always in sync, Earl adopted an unusual approach with Horace. “To work on timing they would start playing a tune and walk in opposite directions around the outside of the house,” Elam Scruggs describes. “When they met they would know if they kept time. ‘Reuben’ and ‘Cripple Creek’ were two of their early favorite songs.” Much of what Earl heard throughout his youth in songs and favorite artists contributed significantly to his skillful progression with the five-string banjo, as Gary Scruggs outlines in specificity:
Dad greatly refined and redefined the three-finger method of picking he had heard. He developed different syncopated roll patterns of the picking hand that added additional speed and clarity to a song’s melody that the more primitive method could not [do].
From hearing recordings, he was a big fan of the “original” Carter Family, which consisted of Alvin Pleasant “A. P.” Carter, A. P.’s wife, Sara Dougherty Carter, and Maybelle Addington Carter, who married A. P.’s brother, Ezra. Sara and Maybelle were also cousins. Dad also enjoyed the recordings of Jimmie Rodgers, the “Father of Country Music.” Dad especially liked Jimmie’s song “T for Texas,” also known as “Blue Yodel No. 1,” and that song became an early fixture in our Earl Scruggs Revue concerts.
It was in 1937 when he bought a “mail-order” banjo from the Montgomery Ward company. It cost ten dollars and ninety-five cents [and was the first one he ever owned]. When Dad was around fifteen or sixteen years old, his family got a battery-powered [Sears Roebuck] radio. He listened to it when he could, and one artist he was especially drawn to was Jesse “Blind Boy” Fuller, who was also a product of the Piedmont region of North Carolina. Blind Boy Fuller recorded a song titled “Step It Up and Go” that had a jazzy, early “boogie-woogie” beat that Dad really loved, and which he adapted for playing on the five-string banjo. “Step It Up and Go” became a fixture in the set lists of the Earl Scruggs Revue, and later, the Earl Scruggs with Family & Friends band. With the radio, Dad was also able to listen to a three-finger banjo picker named DeWitt “Snuffy” Jenkins, who sometimes played on a radio station [WIS] in Columbia, South Carolina.
He began “playing for money” very early on in his life. But I would deem those times as “semiprofessional”—playing at local dances, parties, and local radio shows, et cetera. Many times those types of gigs would pay only two or three dollars, but it was a good experience for a young player. When he was fifteen years old, he began playing in a local band called the Carolina Wildcats. The band played for fun and also locally for parties, dances, et cetera, and was together for several months. They also made some Saturday morning radio appearances on a radio station in Gastonia, North Carolina.
At fifteen years of age, Earl was not only playing in his first band; he also spent Saturday nights performing at house parties with an old-time fiddler, Dennis Butler, who was a World War I veteran and had been slightly gassed during the war. The scarcity of pickers in the rural areas, due to a lack of transportation in those days, brought the young banjoist to Butler as an accompaniment for the fiddle.[8] The harmonious sound of the banjo and fiddle playing together brought Scruggs a level of joy that stayed with him for the rest of his life. The pleasurable experience gave him the idea to include banjo and fiddle duets in the repertoires of his subsequent bands.
Another impressionable moment came in that same year, 1939, when Earl connected with the Morris Brothers—Zeke, Wiley, and George—a professional band that appeared on WSPA radio in Spartanburg, South Carolina, whom he greatly admired. After becoming acquainted with them personally, Scruggs eagerly accepted their invitation to pick with them on their early morning program for several weeks that winter.[9] Zeke and Wiley’s adaptation and rearrangement of the old song “Salty Dog Blues,” also known as “Old Salty Dog Blues,” would become a mainstay in the Flatt and Scruggs catalog. And while Earl satisfied his need to play semiprofessionally through the winter months, he was still grounded to the farm during the crop season for the remainder of his adolescence.
In 1941, the year he graduated from high school, Scruggs upgraded his banjo from Montgomery Ward to a Gibson RB-11 he saw hanging in a pawnshop. This was a highly decorative, fancy looking banjo with a resonator back that had a veneer made of celluloid and a silkscreened flower design on the peghead and fingerboard. Following in his older brothers’ footsteps, Earl sought to leave the dawn-to-dusk drudgery of farming for hourly employment in a factory. “I think he began working in the mill in 1942, which was around the time he and his mother moved from the farm to Shelby,” says Gary Scruggs about his father’s first steady job. “It was in the Lily Mills thread mill in Shelby. His job was to take care of the machinery and repair any problems that might arise with the equipment. He worked there until World War II ended in 1945.”
As a machine mechanic working seventy-two hours a week, Earl’s wages helped to support his mother and younger half-sister, Venie Mae. While the lengthy hours prevented him from playing in the types of venues he had grown accustomed to, Scruggs made the most of his spare time.[10] His niece Grace Constant mentions, “When Uncle Earl worked at Lily Mills, he was always playing on breaks, during his lunch break, and any chance that he could.”
It was during those break times that a fellow mill worker and friend, Grady Wilkie, who helped Scruggs acquire his employment there, joined in with his guitar to jam in the backseat of Earl’s ’36 Chevy. Their informal sessions quickly drew the attention of the other employees, one of whom threw his hat on the ground and excitedly shouted, “Hot damn!”[11] The unsuspecting crowds at the mill became another added ingredient toward Earl’s decision to play professionally as he realized folks were showing an interest in his talent. When World War II ended, he terminated his employment at Lily Mills to pursue music full-time.
With none of the children born to George Elam and Lula Scruggs left to work the family farm, the property was eventually sold. And despite the musical talent the family had developed over the years, twenty-one-year-old Earl would be the sole Scruggs to become a career musician. Junie’s son, J. T., explains why his musically accomplished father never traveled the same path as his youngest brother:
My mother did not want Dad to pursue music, and so he did not. My understanding is that when Mother and Dad was first married and for a few years after that, Dad played a lot of weekend music at different places. He done some fiddlers conventions, he done a lot of square dances on the weekends, and then he didn’t play for a while. So I remember when he picked it back up, he played banjo and he played guitar and he did do, actually, one recording, which had several different people on it. A guy came around and spent two days at the house, and Dad done two numbers on that piece [“Sally Goodin”/“Sally Ann” medley and “Cripple Creek”[12] ].
Dad was a very friendly person, had a good personality. He never liked farming, and so he went to work at Public Work, and he worked construction work for a number of years. When he was in Virginia working, he had meningitis and almost died. In fact, the nurse who was his nurse did die; she caught it from Dad and did die. But he pulled through it and came back home, and he went to work for Duke Power for the rest of his career, which was thirty-some-odd years before he retired. For a long time he was a control technician at the plant and then ten years maybe, before he retired, they made him a supervisor. So when he retired he was a shift supervisor.
Earl’s talented sister Ruby also chose a life apart from music according to her daughter Grace Constant:
My mother Ruby was a stay-at-home mom while my dad worked on the railroad. In later years they divorced and she went to work as a nurse’s aide at Royster Memorial Hospital in Boiling Springs, North Carolina. She worked very hard to make ends meet and see that her children got a good education. My mother was a Christian lady and always saw to it that we attended church at Boiling Springs Baptist. She later went to work at the Cleveland Sandwich Company in Boiling Springs, where she retired. In 1988 she married my stepdad, Coleman Vinesett. They both enjoyed music, dancing, and, most of all, spending time with family. Her hobbies were working in her flowers.
And what of Earl’s closest sibling and main practicing partner, Horace? Elam Scruggs discusses the circumstances that prevented his father from playing professionally and how he never lost his affinity for music:
Dad never played professionally. He married and then he was drafted, so providing for his family became his priority. For several years after he left home, he did not own a guitar. After serving our country in the army, Dad worked as the maintenance supervisor for Gardner-Webb College and Crawley Memorial Hospital. He enjoyed picking with everyone, and he spent a lot of time practicing and playing for benefits, fund-raisers, et cetera. He remained true to the string music that he grew up on, and his timing was always perfect. He also had a gift to tune instruments to near perfect pitch very quickly.
“My uncle Horace was an excellent rhythm guitarist,” echoes Gary Scruggs. “When it came to playing bluegrass and old-time music, he was as good as any rhythm guitar player I’ve ever heard.”
By the time Earl Scruggs was ready to embark on a musical career, old-time string music had already undergone a few stylistic changes: vocal harmonies ranging from duets to quartets and alternating instrumental breaks within a tune, similar to jazz, were implemented.[13] The music also included comedy bits in between song sets, usually by the banjo player. Though Scruggs himself wasn’t a comedian onstage, his mastery of the three-finger roll secured him a paid position with a country band in September 1945, as referenced by Gary Scruggs:
His first salaried music job began when John “Lost John” Miller hired him to join his band, “Lost” John and His Allied Kentuckians, in 1945 after World War II had ended. Lost John’s band was based in Knoxville, Tennessee, and Dad’s salary was fifty dollars a week. He first came to Nashville as a member of Lost John’s band to do a live Saturday morning radio show. The band came in from Knoxville to do the show and would then go back to Knoxville soon after the show was over.
While Scruggs was commuting back and forth between Knoxville and Nashville in the autumn of 1945, one of the Grand Ole Opry’s headliners, Bill Monroe, was given notice by his comedic banjoist, Dave “Stringbean” Akeman, that he wanted to leave the Blue Grass Boys (named in honor of Monroe’s home state of Kentucky) in order to team up with the Opry’s one-man band vaudevillian Lew Childre. Monroe founded his famous musical act after the breakup with his brother Charlie (the Monroe Brothers) in early 1938. Over a year later in October 1939, Monroe and the Blue Grass Boys impressed the Opry’s founder and announcer, George D. Hay (known as the “Solemn Old Judge”), and his associate, David Stone, so much with their renditions of “Mule Skinner Blues” and “Fire on the Mountain” that they immediately became part of the show’s featured acts.
At the time of his inclusion in the Grand Ole Opry, Monroe didn’t have a five-string banjo player in his group. By 1942, Stringbean (Akeman had a tall, lanky physique) joined the ensemble as their first banjoist. However, unlike Scruggs, Akeman wasn’t a three-finger picker; he primarily frailed the ole five-string. That same year, Bill’s fiddler, Howard “Howdy” Forrester, was drafted into the navy and replaced by Robert Russell “Chubby” Wise (on a trial basis initially) until March 1943, when he became a full-fledged member. Jim Shumate took over upon Wise’s exit in 1944. After Stringbean’s resignation, comedic tenor banjoist Jim Andrews filled in briefly, and by late November Monroe asked Shumate if he knew of a banjo player who could assume the vacancy.[14] Shumate recommended Earl Scruggs, with the disclosure that he didn’t play banjo at all like Stringbean.
In the years prior to his joining the Blue Grass Boys, Jim Shumate had his own Saturday evening program on WHKY radio in his hometown of Hickory, North Carolina. It was during that period when he first met Earl Scruggs, who came to see his show with Grady Wilkie. Both Scruggs and Wilkie performed a tune on Shumate’s program that very evening. As Shumate recalled decades later, he thought Earl was the best banjo player he had ever heard. When he learned that Scruggs was part of Lost John Miller’s band, he approached him to audition for Bill Monroe. Scruggs declined at first, as he was satisfied with his spot in Miller’s group. However, an unforeseen circumstance prompted him to call Shumate back for a second chance.[15] “On December 1, 1945, a Saturday, Lost John told the band that he was quitting the road,” says Gary Scruggs. “At that point, Dad asked for an audition with Monroe, and he auditioned on that very day.”
Knowing his style was radically different from Stringbean’s, Earl chose to play a couple of tunes he thought likely to be unfamiliar to Monroe.[16] Gary Scruggs recalls Earl’s induction into the Blue Grass Boys:
He auditioned at the late Tulane Hotel in Nashville and played two tunes, “Sally Goodin” and “Dear Old Dixie.” I think maybe Monroe wasn’t sure what to think, because he asked Dad to come to the Grand Ole Opry that night so that he could play along backstage with his band, the Blue Grass Boys. Lester Flatt, who was a member of the band [hired earlier that spring], was not happy when Monroe told him a banjo player was going to be at the Ryman that night because Lester thought a banjo hurt the sound of the band. Previously, David “Stringbean” Akeman had played five-string banjo in the band, and Lester had thought Stringbean couldn’t keep up on the more up-tempo songs. After hearing Dad pick with the band, Lester heartily encouraged Monroe to hire Dad. Monroe did so, and Dad’s first appearance with Bill Monroe and his Blue Grass Boys was on the following Saturday night, December 8, 1945. He received the same salary that other band members received, which was sixty dollars a week.
Within days of Earl’s audition, fiddle player Howdy Forrester returned to Nashville after his discharge from the navy. In accordance with a government statute, drafted servicemen were guaranteed their previously held civilian jobs upon their release from military duty. The fiddler, Jim Shumate, who served as the conduit linking Scruggs to Monroe, was now on his way back to Hickory as Forrester went onstage at the Ryman Auditorium the following Saturday when Scruggs made his historic debut.
Just about the time Earl Scruggs was ready to enter the doors of the Ryman in early December, the country was ripe for entertainment, which played a pivotal role in launching the success Scruggs was about to achieve. Professional banjo player and Scruggs historian Jim Mills paints a picture of the atmosphere:
If you think of the timeline of Earl Scruggs, it’s amazing. He joined Bill Monroe in December 1945. World War II had ended just a few months before, and this was the beginning of a huge boom for the music industry as a whole, simply because for the preceding three or four years these boys had been away from home, [most] of the population in America was women, and everything was being rationed. Gas was being rationed, tires were being rationed—I mean, everything was being rationed. Entertainment in general was rationed. I mean, nobody could even go to barn dances since the husbands and boyfriends were off to war. At the exact moment that Earl Scruggs joined Bill Monroe’s band, all these boys were returning home. They’re starved to death for entertainment. America was starved to death for entertainment.
On Saturday night, the skinny twenty-one-year-old from Flint Hill, North Carolina, who was unsure if his style of banjo picking would even be accepted by the crowd in the auditorium as well as the massive audience tuning in to WSM radio’s 50,000-watt clear-channel signal crossing multiple state lines, unwittingly triggered a response that forever changed the course of the five-string banjo. Bluegrass banjoist Butch Robins depicts the vibe of this unforgettable moment in time:
Nobody had ever made that sound before. It’s like Jimi Hendrix walking out onstage at the Grand Ole Opry for hillbillies back in those days, the way Earl did, because, pretty much, the way he played the banjo hadn’t been heard before. Most of the folks were out frailing banjos. All of a sudden here comes some guy, and I mean he’s dynamic, and he had a certain poker-faced charisma about himself.
While the audience was fortunate enough to witness this musical revelation, thousands heard it over the radio and buzzed about it for days on end, as North Carolinian banjo picker Jay Adams recalls:
I have friends who lived around the area that I live [Spray, North Carolina], and they can remember back to the first time that Earl Scruggs performed on the Grand Ole Opry as a part of Bill Monroe’s Blue Grass Boys. They heard him on the radio back on December 8, 1945, and after hearing him, that’s all people talked about for like a week. “Did you hear that guy playing banjo on the Opry?” They had never heard anything like it.
And as Hurricane Earl ripped through the airwaves on that wintery night to remember, the man caught up in the eye of the storm could not have predicted the revolutionary transformation of his beloved five-string banjo that followed in the wake of his evening’s program. Gary Scruggs confirms his father’s energetic performance and the lifeblood it pumped into a seemingly dying instrument:
Dad was excited by the audience’s reaction. The Ryman Auditorium was by far the largest room in which he had ever played at that time. I’ve heard him say the first tune he played as a soloist was “Dear Old Dixie.” I’m sure the audience’s reaction to his playing during his debut on the Opry and soon after must have thrilled him. I’ve heard that the applause was thunderous whenever he took a break at that time. On that debut night, I’m sure George D. Hay was as surprised and stunned as anyone in the Ryman audience to hear Dad play his three-finger style. I’ve heard several radio transcriptions where George D. Hay [later] introduced the band as “Bill Monroe and Earl Scruggs and his fancy five-string banjo,” but no mention of other band members other than Bill Monroe and Earl Scruggs.
Before his Opry debut, five-string banjos had become widely thought of as mere stage props used only by country comedians playing rowdy old-time banjo styles. The manufacturing of new five-string banjos had all but ended. Dad’s refined musicianship electrified audiences and banjo sales soon skyrocketed. His way of picking became known around the world as “Scruggs style.”
One of the many banjoists seriously impacted by the arrival of Scruggs on the Opry was Ralph Stanley. Hailing from the mountains of southwest Virginia with his older brother Carter, Ralph learned the clawhammer technique of banjo playing from his mother. In retrospect, Stanley revisits the awakening he felt that altered his method of picking. “I believe it was on the Grand Ole Opry around 1945. Well, I liked what I heard. Nobody in the music world was playing the banjo like Earl was. Earl had a unique drive when he played the banjo. It was something that caught people’s attention when they heard it. He brought something new to everybody.”
That same night, when Earl Scruggs “stole the show” on the Opry with his spitfire three-finger rolls, another phenomenon ensued as a consequence of the band’s epic performance—the Birth of Bluegrass, although it would be many years before the name bluegrass took root in the music industry and general public.[17] What was planted in 1939 by Bill Monroe in his effort to create a new brand of music was now harvested by Earl Scruggs in 1945. His endless hours of practicing and perfecting three-finger rolls on the five-string banjo that he loved so much paid enormous dividends when he blended it with Monroe’s mandolin, Flatt’s guitar, and Forrester’s fiddle as a new musical sound was created.
By March 1946, Howdy Forrester headed for Texas and, in the interim, Chubby Wise returned along with Howard “Cedric Rainwater” Watts on the upright bass, who had previously been in and out of the group. Together with Bill Monroe, Earl Scruggs, and Lester Flatt, these five men, all of whom came from different regions—Kentucky (Monroe), Tennessee (Flatt), North Carolina (Scruggs), and Florida (Wise and Watts)—would become the original bluegrass ensemble in the genre bearing the name of the band given to them by their “founding father,” Bill Monroe. And for the next two years, the humble banjo man from the cotton farm in Flint Hill would experience a whirlwind of highs and lows that forced him to contemplate his stamina in showbiz.
The origin and elements of old-time string music are documented in Neil V. Rosenberg, Bluegrass: A History, rev. ed. (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2005), esp. 6–10, and verbalized by Camp Springs Bluegrass Festival organizer Carlton Haney in the film Bluegrass Country Soul (Washington Film Group, 1972).
Descriptions of Flint Hill and its people are drawn from a 1961 radio interview with Earl Scruggs by Ernie Knight of WLOE as well as Scruggs’s book, the revised and enhanced edition of Earl Scruggs and the 5-String Banjo (Milwaukee: Hal Leonard, 2005), 158–60, and from Cleveland County disc jockey Hugh Dover’s comments in the NET documentary Earl Scruggs: His Family and Friends (1970).
On Earl’s awkward positioning of Junie’s banjo at an early age, see Scruggs, Earl Scruggs and the 5-String Banjo, 159.
The purchase price of Junie’s banjo is listed in Earl Scruggs’s first edition of Earl Scruggs and the 5-String Banjo (New York: Peer International, 1968), 149.
Scruggs, Earl Scruggs and the 5-String Banjo (2005), 159.
Scruggs recounted this argument on WSM’s Intimate Evening program on March 26, 2007, and it was included in Eddie Stubbs’s on-air Tribute to Earl Scruggs on WSM 650-AM on April 4, 2012, from WSM’s official website (wsmonline.com). It is also described in Scruggs, Earl Scruggs and the 5-String Banjo (2005), 158.
Accounts of Earl’s weeklong practice of “Reuben,” Junie’s visit, and Earl’s mother’s advice are chronicled in “Earl Scruggs Biography: Chapter 1—The Early Years,” http://www.earlscruggs.com/biography.html, and in Earl Scruggs, Earl Scruggs and the 5-String Banjo (1968), 155.
Earl’s banjo/fiddle duets with Dennis Butler were recalled in an interview with Eddie Stubbs on December 8, 2002, and also featured in Tribute to Earl Scruggs.
See Earl Scruggs: His Family and Friends.
Scruggs, Earl Scruggs and the 5-String Banjo (2005), 161.
Peter Cooper, “Earl Scruggs, Country Music Hall of Famer and Bluegrass Innovator, Dies at Age 88,” Tennessean, March 28, 2012; Bob Carlin, “Roots of Earl and Snuffy: Searching for the Banjo along the North/South Carolina Border,” Bluegrass Unlimited, May 2009, 54–60.
Junie Scruggs’s recordings appear on a compilation album called American Banjo: Tunes and Songs in Scruggs Style (Folkways Records, 1957) and on the CD American Banjo: Three-Finger and Scruggs Style (Smithsonian Folkways, 1990).
See Rosenberg, Bluegrass, 7.
Rosenberg, Bluegrass, 35–36, 45–46, 55–56, 59, 61, 70–72; Scruggs, Earl Scruggs and the 5-String Banjo (2005), 161–62.
Shumate recalled his meeting with Scruggs and arranging his audition with Bill Monroe at MerleFest in Wilkesboro, North Carolina, on April 30, 2005; see also Scruggs, Earl Scruggs and the 5-String Banjo (2005), 161.
Earl explained choosing “Dear Old Dixie” and “Sally Goodin” to play for Bill Monroe on Tribute to Earl Scruggs.
The Birth of Bluegrass is commemorated by a historical marker outside of the Ryman Auditorium in Nashville, which was placed on September 27, 2006, by the Tennessee Historical Commission (Marker Number 3A 209).