It was a time of musical change and innovation. I say that especially in country music. Most of it, or a lot of it, was attributed to Bill Monroe and his Blue Grass Boys, which is where the name [bluegrass] came from. And part of that band that Bill put together had Lester Flatt and Earl Scruggs in it. And one of the most significant parts of that was Earl Scruggs’s banjo work.
—Pete Kuykendall, banjoist and editor, Bluegrass Unlimited
Stepping onstage, sometimes in jodhpur trousers, riding boots, and a Stetson homburg hat, Earl Scruggs became a gigantic presence in the Blue Grass Boys from his historic debut on December 8, 1945. And unlike other banjoists, such as Uncle Dave Macon, whose talents were more defined by their clownish antics, Scruggs changed the rules of the game for future banjo players with a different philosophy. He expounded his position on National Public Radio’s (NPR) Fresh Air with Terry Gross in 2003 (printed with permission):
I used to try and see if [there] was some kind of routine I wanted to do as being a comedian ’cause [every] player, and there were very few, but they were all comedians and kind of used the banjo as a prop to get into their comedy routine. But all my interest was just in picking, not only tunes but songs behind the singers, not only in the lead part but doing a backup—playing an alto or something to support the singer. So that’s where my interest was as a lead picker with the banjo but also a supporter with a banjo.
“What made Earl great is that inside Earl there was a perfectionist with an intensely precise precision,” states documentary filmmaker David Hoffman, who chronicled the banjo man in Earl Scruggs: His Family and Friends. “So he’s like the culture he came from, but when he heard something that wasn’t exactly right, he knew it. He also knew who the great ones were. He knew that Flatt was great, he knew Bill Monroe was great, they knew he was great.” Bluegrass guitarist Peter Rowan (a subsequent member of Monroe’s band) also affirms how Earl’s strategy seriously improved the sound of the Blue Grass Boys and strengthened their camaraderie:
Earl’s genius was because of his syncopated timing. He let all this other stuff blossom. He let Bill blossom. Bill had it all in him, but he needed people around him to bring out every aspect. If you were Earl Scruggs, you could build a blossom, and all kinds of stuff would come out because of Earl, and whatever Earl took away from there was a life lesson.
Though Lester Flatt’s mellowed voice complemented Bill Monroe’s lonesome-sounding high-pitched vocals, it was still Scruggs who received the attention, with his greased-lightning three-finger roll that spawned an unfathomable following of banjo pickers who wanted to copy him. Though many of the well-known banjoists labeled as Earl’s disciples heard him after 1948 during his Flatt and Scruggs period, there were two noted followers whose first exposure came during his stint with Monroe. Country music star Roy Clark was just an adolescent when he first heard the buzz about Scruggs:
It was incredible. I was born down in the rural part of Virginia. When I think back on the first time I heard Earl play, naturally [it] was on the radio, and word-of-mouth was just getting around about this banjo player that was playing with Bill Monroe. You could hear him Saturday night on the Opry. So my cousin and my uncle and I, we were playing with a little Sears and Roebuck radio that we put high on the mantelpiece and waited standing there like Eagle Scouts trying to just imagine what this night was going to be—and when he started playing, that audience just came unglued, not any more than I did or my cousin because we both played [guitar] a little bit, and I was trying to envision what this was all about because I never heard anything like this five-string banjo and what was later known as Scruggs style. I figured it was just somebody that had seven fingers on one hand and ten on the other. It was just hard to imagine how unique this sound was coming from that one banjo.
The other follower was string musician Curtis McPeake, who later became Earl’s substitute in 1955 following a car crash in which Earl was seriously injured. As a young member of the Rhodes Brothers, his ear tuned in to Earl’s fancy five-sting banjo. He summed up the infectious effect that Scruggs had upon him:
I was playing steel guitar and mandolin and some regular guitar when I first heard Earl with Monroe. I could [also] play banjo then, but I didn’t play three-finger style. I played my dad’s old banjo. He was a two-finger player, and I could play two-fingered similar to what he played. But I never took the banjo seriously until I heard Earl with Monroe. And I said to myself, “That’s what I want to learn—I want to do that.”
During 1946 and 1947, Earl recorded twenty-eight songs as a member of the Blue Grass Boys, both secular and gospel (the latter featured him as part of Bill’s famous Blue Grass Quartet). In addition to the volume of songs recorded for 78-rpm releases, the group maintained an extensive performance schedule, as highlighted by Gary Scruggs:
“Heavy Traffic Ahead” [taken from a contradictory signpost in Flatt’s hometown of Sparta, Tennessee, where there was no traffic to be found[1]] was the first song Dad recorded with the Blue Grass Boys. Other titles among those twenty-eight songs include “Molly and Tenbrooks,” “Blue Moon of Kentucky,” “Toy Heart,” “Wicked Path of Sin,” and “Blue Grass Breakdown.” The band played primarily rural areas at venues such as schoolhouses, fairgrounds, and on top of concession stands at drive-in movie theaters.
“When Lester Flatt, Earl Scruggs, Bill Monroe, Chubby Wise, and Howard Watts were a band, they said they could play six nights a week, and pack them out twice a day,” adds professional banjo player and Scruggs historian Jim Mills. “It was just unbelievable how they could go anywhere they wanted to and fill up an auditorium.”
In 1979, Earl reflected on the good ole days with the Blue Grass Boys to Tim Timberlake in a radio interview, ironically on Monroe’s tour bus in Lanexa, Virginia (printed with permission). He also expressed how Bill Monroe helped him grow as a musician:
We had some great times together. Bill has always been a strong, happy-type guy, and we really had some good times. We worked awful hard. Bill used to work seven days a week; of course Lester and I did too—six and seven days a week; that’s including travel. We used to work Monday through Saturday and a lot of time, I believe, on Sunday. Back in those days we was all younger and the more picking was the merrier. We really had some good times.
Bill has his standards, which I appreciate. I like to know how a feller stands, and he has his dos and don’ts and I do the same thing with my group [the Earl Scruggs Revue]. And it’s something that I don’t ask somebody to do that I don’t do myself. We go out, we have fun, but we still take our music very seriously, and when it comes time to go onstage, everybody’s straight and goes out and tries to do what the people expect us to do, and that’s basically what Bill did.
During his travels across the southeastern United States, Earl never forgot his family and took time to visit them despite the band’s busy schedule. Horace Scruggs’s son, Elam, points out one such incident when his uncle used the company car to make an unexpected visit in 1946:
When Dad was drafted, he was stationed in [Crestview] Florida for a while. He and my mother went to a movie theater once a week, if possible. Dad had conveyed that to Earl. Earl was traveling with Bill Monroe at that time. One evening at the theater, Dad and Mother were surprised by Earl’s voice behind them saying, “I thought I would find you here.” Earl had borrowed Monroe’s show bus, really a stretched station wagon, and went to find them.
By the winter of 1948, the grueling schedule in a cramped, non-air-conditioned vehicle with meager pay began to take its toll on Scruggs. He was quickly becoming discouraged with showbiz and contemplating quitting, as he revealed to Terry Gross on NPR in 2003:
It was terrible. If I hadn’t have been twenty-one years old and full of energy, had just came off of a farm and a thread mill where I could—you know, I thought to do an hour show on the road was a pushover compared to eight hours in the mill or, from sun up to sundown, on the farm. And music was my love, so to get into a group that had good singing and playing, and Bill had that, especially good singing, and had a good fiddle player, so I went in, and it just seemed to make a full band, especially for that style of music. That was long before anybody had tagged it as bluegrass, it was just country music. But, it really made an outstanding group for that day and time especially.
Why did I hate it? It was because we did it twenty-four hours a day, practically. Back then there was only two-lane highways, and [we] traveled in a ’41 Chevrolet car and we’d leave after the Opry on Saturday night and maybe work down south. Georgia was about as far as you could get for a Sunday afternoon show. And on down to Miami someplace for Monday or Tuesday and worked till about Thursday and started working back to Nashville. So it was just—you’d only be in Nashville long enough to do the Grand Ole Opry and to get a change of clothes and pack your suitcase and head out again. I was single at the time, so I was living in a hotel and had one suitcase and so it—I had to really work on it to keep clean clothes for every night doing a show on the road.
Burned out from the road in February of 1948, Scruggs was ready to return to a more stable life back home in Shelby, North Carolina. He turned in his two weeks’ notice to Bill Monroe, who didn’t take the news very well. After failing to convince Scruggs to reconsider, Monroe told him that the name “Earl Scruggs” would never be heard from again. During those final weeks, Bill refused to speak to or look at Earl, even though Scruggs agreed to stay an extra two weeks beyond his notice.[2] However, just prior to exiting Nashville, Earl played a show with Roy Acuff, who offered him an opportunity at a much higher wage than Monroe.[3] Scruggs turned him down, as his decision was final. Gary Scruggs elaborates on his father’s disillusionment with the entertainment business:
When he left Monroe’s band, he was planning to quit showbiz permanently. He was exhausted from all the extensive and constant travel involved with going from town to town to play show dates. Sometimes the band would go for days without even seeing a bed, just sleeping in the car as they traveled from one town to another. Monroe paid no per diem, not even paying for a hotel room when the band would stay over in a town for a night. Dad never got a pay raise from the initial salary of sixty dollars per week. He was helping support his mother, sending her money to help with weekly expenses, and he was barely making ends meet.
After returning home to live with his mother, Earl resumed work at Lily Mills when he received a proposition from one of his now-former bandmates. “When my father left Monroe’s band, Lester Flatt told Dad that he too was going to quit Monroe’s band, and a short time after Dad returned to Shelby, Lester called and said he wanted to team up with Dad to form a new band,” explains Gary Scruggs. “Lester told him he didn’t think either would be happy going back to mill work—Lester had also been employed in a mill before getting into show business. Dad thought about it and decided to give it a shot with Lester.” Earl specified his reasons for accepting Lester’s offer in his 2003 NPR interview:
Well, I liked his singing, and his playing fit in good with that style of music. And we palled around together. You know, in a group you, kind of, find one or two guys that you like better than the other part of the group, or the other may be interested in things that you don’t care for. So, anyway, Lester and I got along with each other and roomed together [on the road], and so we did that for [over] two years. That’s when, we really never talked about starting a show ourselves, but I had made up my mind that I was just going to get off the road. So I worked two weeks’ notice, and when I started to leave that night, Lester turned in his notice. And while he was working his notice, he gave me a call over in North Carolina and said, “Why don’t we get on a radio station over close to your home and try it as a group ourselves.”
Of course, when their former boss received word that the duo formed a new band, he was less than pleased; in fact, he was outraged. “Monroe pouted around for years,” states bluegrass music entertainer Mac Wiseman. “He dropped the ball. He could’ve maintained his status and just have one good band. There was a lot of friction between Monroe and Flatt and Scruggs.” One of Monroe’s many subsequent banjo players, Bobby Atkins, further echoes the begrudging sentiment toward Lester and Earl by the gather of bluegrass music:
When they left Bill, they hurt Bill big because he could never find nobody else that could do what they done with him. They were just as good of singers and pickers as Bill was, and so when they left him, it hurt him. Then he took a grudge to them. He claimed that was his music. It started with him, but Lester and Earl was with him. It was not bluegrass music until they was with him. He didn’t have that same sound that he had when Lester and Earl was with him, and he never had it again.
As the only child of Ewing and Mamie Certain, Anne “Louise” was born on February 17, 1927, and raised on a farm in Grant, Tennessee, just outside of Lebanon, east of Nashville. Growing up, Louise dreamed of the world she heard through her grandparents’ battery-powered radio. Believing that a better life was awaiting her, she left the farm after graduating from high school to work as an accountant at a company office in Nashville while taking up residence in her grandfather’s house.
On Saturday nights, Louise occasionally visited the Grand Ole Opry at the Ryman Auditorium for an entertaining evening of country music. One particular night, on December 14, 1946, would change her life forever. Seated in the front row with her cousin, Louise was captivated by Bill Monroe’s young banjoist who picked his instrument with machine-gun precision to the thunderous cheers of the crowd. Their eyes met as Earl gave her a “fleeting smile,” and soon they would meet after the show through a friend of her grandfather, Opry member Kirk McGee of the McGee Brothers, in the Ryman’s back alley.[4] From that moment, Earl and Louise began a courtship for the next sixteen months, seeing each other on weekends when the Blue Grass Boys came home to play at the Opry after weeklong road trips. It was soon after Earl ended his tenure with Bill Monroe that he made up his mind to tie the knot with Louise. Gary Scruggs describes the circumstances that led to his father’s decision about matrimony and the unsettled life his parents endured in the early days of their marriage:
They got married pretty soon after he and Lester Flatt formed their band in 1948. The band was received well by audiences, and Dad became confident they were going to make a good enough living that he could afford to marry and support a wife. Mom and Dad married on April 18, 1948, in Gaffney, South Carolina, which is around twenty miles south of Shelby, North Carolina.
I think then they first lived together in Bristol, Tennessee. Flatt and Scruggs originally started out in Danville, Virginia, and soon moved to Hickory, North Carolina, and later to Bristol, Virginia, and then Knoxville, Tennessee. Flatt and Scruggs were also based in Tampa, Florida, and Raleigh, North Carolina, for a while. They first moved to Nashville in 1953, where they had an early morning live radio show on WSM. They then moved to Virginia a year or so later. They moved back to Nashville in 1955, becoming members of the Grand Ole Opry. There were a few other moves prior to the final 1955 move to Nashville.
Exactly thirteen months after taking the name Mrs. Earl Scruggs, Louise gave birth to the couple’s first child, Gary Eugene, on May 18, 1949, in Knoxville, Tennessee. Two more sons were born to the Scruggs family: Randy Lynn on August 3, 1953, and Steven Earl on February 8, 1958, both in Nashville. Surrounded by the music and fame of their father, each one of Earl’s sons expressed a desire to follow in his footsteps by learning and mastering musical instruments on their own. Spending some of their school breaks on the road with Flatt and Scruggs, the boys were quickly gaining exposure to a life they ultimately chose to live with their dad years later as the Earl Scruggs Revue under the management of their mother, Louise.
Like all bands, Earl and Lester needed a name for their newly formed ensemble. Both men were fans of the A. P. Carter song “Foggy Mountain Top,” which they enjoyed playing in their repertoire. According to Earl in his 2000 interview on WSM, he chose the name Foggy Mountain Boys as a tie-in to the song they would use as a theme and nothing more. Flatt, in particular, really liked the name, leaving no others to be considered. However, what did come under consideration was that the band would be fronted by Lester and Earl, thus placing their names at the top of the bill: “Lester Flatt, Earl Scruggs, and the Foggy Mountain Boys,” which eventually led to them being known simply as Flatt and Scruggs.
With upright bassist/comedian Howard “Cedric Rainwater” Watts also resigning from Monroe’s Blue Grass Boys, Lester and Earl enlisted him along with guitarist Jim Eanes as the Foggy Mountain Boys landed on WDVA radio in Danville, Virginia, for their debut in March 1948. Their stay in Danville lasted no more than a couple of weeks when they decided to relocate to Hickory, North Carolina, for the next month in order to recruit their choice fiddle player. It was around this time that Eanes suddenly left the group and moved to Nashville after being hired by Bill Monroe. The void from his departure was quickly filled by guitarist and tenor singer Mac Wiseman, who outlines his induction to the Foggy Mountain Boys and the purpose of their brief stay in Hickory:
They wanted [fiddler] Jim Shumate in their band because he had worked with Monroe and he was in Hickory, North Carolina, where he had a furniture store; he had family: a wife and three little girls. He wanted to be sure that the Foggy Mountain Boys was going to work or fly before he would quit his job. So they went to Hickory, North Carolina, to a little radio station—that’s where I joined them—and after we worked together there, things weren’t working out [as] it was just a 500-watt station and it wasn’t getting off the rooftops, so to speak. We were working to some very small houses [for] twenty dollars, and stuff like that was our percentage. So I suggested that we go to Bristol where I had been and use the territory. We went over there [to WCYB] and auditioned and they hired us immediately. We started on a Monday because I already had Friday, Saturday, and Sunday booked that week. I knew the territory from having been there the year before.
Lester, Earl, and the Foggy Mountain Boys were now part of the popular noontime show Fun and Farm Time. One of the many listeners of that program was a man named Cleo Lemons, who was preparing to organize a country music concert in Sandy Ridge, North Carolina. On March 19, 2011, Lemons stood before a crowd in Sandy Ridge delivering a monologue on the origin of what became a traditional venue for all subsequent bluegrass bands to this day (recorded by Doug Hutchens and printed with permission):
Lester Flatt and Earl Scruggs left the Bill Monroe show back in ’48. Well, I just happened to pick up the Lester Flatt and Earl Scruggs program on Bristol, Tennessee, radio one day in my car. And they said they were [the] Foggy Mountain Boys now, so I got to thinking a little bit about it. I wondered if they’d come to Sandy Ridge and put on a show sometime. I said, “Since I’m a member of the Ruralton Club, I’m going to write and ask them if they’ll come.” So I did and asked them if they’d put on a show in Sandy Ridge. So it wasn’t but a few days before I got an answer. They were ready to come. They sent me a date and the percentages they’d work on. So the day that date was, I rushed up to the school here that day. I wanted to see ’em when they’d come in. Well, when they did come in, it was a show. They were in an old beat-up ’37 model Ford two-door sedan, so you can imagine how much room they had. There were five men: there was Lester Flatt, Earl Scruggs, Howard Watts, Jim Shumate, and Mac Wiseman all in that car with a bass fiddle tied on top. It was one more thing to see, how they all got in that car!
“It was a very good date,” claims Wiseman about that historic event. “I remember distinctly we worked on a 70–30 percentage basis—the band got 70 percent, the sponsor would get 30—but [at] Sandy Ridge, which was a very good date, would only go 60–40. So we would bite the bullet and go ahead working for 60 percent and still make good money.” Earl Scruggs, from his 1989 interview with Doug Hutchens on Bluegrass Today (printed with permission), also revisited the popular schoolhouse locality he helped launch:
When Lester and I started in 1948, we went to WCYB in Bristol and we started working around that area and worked Sandy Ridge—went over there and had a packed schoolhouse full of people. We played Sandy Ridge, I guess, better than twenty times—always had a full house, part of the time two shows. It turned out to be one of—I guess, we played that place more than any other place, single place, that we ever worked.
Soon afterward, the band headed to a Kentucky courthouse, in the months following Earl’s April marriage to Louise, where the dividends of the boys’ hard work began to literally pay off, as Scruggs recollected in 1989:
I should, if I get enough chips together, should build a monument there because that was the first place—Well, I start a little bit preceding that. We had been married probably two or three months, and we [weren’t] making anything. We worked a little while in Hickory, North Carolina, and my wife was staying with my mother in Shelby, so we moved up to Bristol and I think about the second week, we played Hindman, Kentucky. And it doesn’t sound like a lot of money, but we did, I guess, close to four hundred dollars up there, and we were on a five-way split, and back then—of course I’d been used to working here with Bill Monroe for sixty dollars a week, so my split [eighty dollars] really looked good, and I think I took most [of] my part in one dollar bills. Anyway, I called Louise, down in Shelby, and I said, “Come up. I’ve struck it rich!” She came up and I showed her that bundle of money, and most of it was ones, but it looked as big as a limousine Cadillac as far as I was concerned. That is how we got started off, and from then on it seemed like everything fell into place. [We] really had a lot of listeners.
And while bookings and popularity were now beginning to take off for the band, Mac Wiseman remembers one particular show where they employed primitive technology to find their way home:
When I was working with them in Bristol, I booked us a schoolhouse over in the mountains out of Bristol there over beyond Damascus, Virginia. We went up there and played the shows. It’s just a dirt road up there, and on the way back in Lester’s old station wagon, the generator went out and the lights went out of course. The motor would run but the generator wasn’t working, and we were going to have to stay there till daylight to get out of the mountains. But we had stopped in Abingdon and picked up fifty or a hundred posters where we had our posters printed on the way up to that school. So after sitting there for a while realizing we couldn’t do anything else, we saw lights up on the side of the mountain in different houses, but we weren’t about to go up there at that time of night and wake anybody up. So I got those posters out, rolled them up one at a time sitting on the fender of that station wagon, and burned those posters till we got out of the mountains. We burned them so we could see! I’d roll the poster up and light it, Earl would drive, and we’d go a little ways till the poster burned down, then light another one.
After Wiseman’s departure from the Foggy Mountain Boys, his replacement in March of 1949, oddly enough, was a tenor-voiced mandolin player whom Lester and Earl knew from his time with Charlie Monroe prior to joining Mac’s band in 1947—John Ray “Curly” Seckler (originally spelled Sechler). The early exits of Wiseman and Eanes were just the beginning of a revolving door within the band that didn’t stabilize until the mid-1950s. Gary Scruggs illustrates much of the group’s transiency from the late 1940s to the early 1950s:
There was quite a bit of turnover in the early years. I suspect it had something to do with all the relocations that went on. Most if not all of the musicians and their families lived in mobile homes, and I’m sure there just came a time when they simply wanted to stop the moving from one location to another or perhaps just a case of not wanting to move to a particular area. And there was quite a bit of movement from one band to another back in those days.
Flatt and Scruggs always had a strong fiddle player, including, in no particular order, Jim Shumate, Benny Sims, Chubby Wise, Benny Martin, Howard “Howdy” Forrester, and Paul Warren. Ex–Blue Grass Boy Howard “Cedric Rainwater” Watts was the original Foggy Mountain Boys bass player. When Cedric left the band in the early years, bass player Charles “Little Jody Rainwater” Johnson joined the band, as did mandolin player Everett Lilly around that time.
In the early years, Flatt and Scruggs would have a live morning radio show in whatever town they lived in. It was a way to promote the band, and they would book themselves out to towns in that region that were in the radio station’s broadcast range. They would also supplement income by selling “song books” on the road and over the radio airwaves. The venues in which they performed were similar to what they had known while traveling with Monroe.
In addition to playing many of the same outlets they had learned from Monroe, they also sometimes donned similar apparel with regard to hats, ties, and the occasional jodhpurs with riding boots. During their stay in the Bluegrass State, Lester and Earl mesmerized two young Kentuckians who were so inspired by their music and stage presence that both grew up to become musical masters in their own rights as well as personal friends of Earl Scruggs. Veteran bluegrass banjo player J. D. Crowe reminisces about his first impression of Flatt and Scruggs:
I met Lester and Earl when I was just a kid, and I’ve known them since about 1950 or ’51, and they lived here in Lexington for about a year. Flatt and Scruggs had their radio show here, and that’s how I got to be around them a lot. It was a fifteen-minute radio show every Saturday morning in a little town called Versailles, Kentucky, and the radio station was in the library at the time, and my dad would take me down there, and we’d get to watch them rehearse in the studio before the show. Flatt and Scruggs were so aggressive when they played. When they kicked off songs, their breaks, and in their backup, I mean, they didn’t quit.
Storytelling singer-songwriter Tom T. Hall tells the tale of how his introduction to Flatt and Scruggs in a Kentucky courthouse became the subject of a song years later:
The first time I saw Earl Scruggs, I think my father and I went. My father was a Baptist preacher, and he was a closet clawhammer banjo player. He took me to a show and I remember it was in a courthouse, and since the courthouse was a public building, they used to have shows, I guess, in where they held trials—that sort of thing, the chambers or whatever. Anyway, we walked in the door and my father had given me some money, which I assumed was to pay my way into the show. We walked into the auditorium and I remember dropping my money into a King Edward cigar box, and there was a young man sitting there watching the box, and he’s seeing what you dropped in and waving you on down for a seat. We sat there for a while and then Earl and Lester and the Foggy Mountain Boys walked onstage, and I looked at the banjo player and told my father, I said, “Wow, Earl Scruggs is the guy I gave my money to when I came in the door.” I said, “I could have stopped and talked to him and asked some questions,” but my father shushed me down and we listened to the music.
I remember thinking at the time it was the shortest show I’d ever seen because I was so enthralled with the music that I guess that the time just—vroom—went away, and it seemed to me like a fifteen-minute show, but I’m sure it was about an hour and a half, but I remember how brief that show sounded to me. Later, my wife, Miss Dixie, and I wrote a song called “The Boys in Hats and Ties.” I don’t know, at this moment, all the words to the song, but the story of me going to see Lester and Earl for the first time is in that song.
When Earl Scruggs joined Bill Monroe’s Blue Grass Boys, he brought with him a Gibson RB-11 (RB is the Gibson acronym for Regular Banjo) that he purchased from a pawnshop, the very same make and model used by his predecessor, Dave “Stringbean” Akeman. By July 1946, Earl was in the market for a new banjo as his RB-11 had become weather-worn with the veneer loosened up. The opportunity came for him to acquire a Gibson RB-75 when he crossed paths with another banjo player who had one for sale.[5] In an interview from 2011 by Doug Hutchens, Haze Hall disclosed the transaction between himself and Earl Scruggs (reprinted with permission):
I went up here to Rocky Mount [North Carolina] one day. He [Earl] and Bill Monroe was supposed to be [driving] up there to play with Tommy Magness and the Hall Twins. They got in up there that evening about dark. I had done played there all day. I’d done give[n] out. I told Earl I had me a Mastertone banjo, and I reckoned that Saford [Hall] and Clayton [Hall] told him so too. He come down here that night about 10:30 to buy it. I sold it to him. My wife begged and cried for me not to sell it, but I’m an old hard head and sold it anyway.
Earl’s ownership of the instrument didn’t last more than two years, as a bigger prize in his eyes laid in wait. One of Scruggs’s early influences, DeWitt “Snuffy” Jenkins, had a Gibson Granada that carried a tone that always intrigued Earl. Bluegrass banjoist Curtis McPeake provides a brief history on Jenkins’s acquisition of the Granada:
He got it in a pawnshop. Snuffy was a barber, and [when] he’d go back and forth to work, every now and then, he’d stop in there and look at this banjo. It was for sale for a good while; of course banjos back then weren’t very popular. Snuffy offered a lower price and [the shopkeeper] wouldn’t take it. Snuffy kept stopping in and aggravating him about it until he got it for [$37.50[6]].
Years later, Jenkins sold that Granada to another notable three-finger picker from North Carolina, Don Reno. By the time Reno reported for army duty at Fort Riley, Kansas, in 1944, the shipment of the Granada back to his hometown took an unconventional turn. “What had happened is that he shipped his banjo back home by bus,” cites Doug Hutchens. “They slid it under the bed upside down, and of course with the hot summers in Spartanburg, South Carolina—there was fiddle rosin in the case, and it melted and ran around the tension hub.”
By the time Scruggs and Lester Flatt formed their new band, Earl was poised to make a trade with Don Reno in the late 1940s. As fate would have it, Reno very much liked Earl’s RB-75 and was willing to make an exchange when they met up at WCYB in Bristol. Considering the damage that had been sustained to the instrument from the melted fiddle rosin four years earlier, Don felt he was getting the better end of the deal, and to make it fair, he threw in a Martin D-18 guitar as part of the swap. Scruggs acknowledged the trade during his interview with Doug Hutchens in 1989 and recalled how he went to great lengths to refurbish what he referred to then as his “working banjo”:
Well, first off, back in [1949], Don Reno had the banjo that I have. And I had a good banjo, [an RB-75] I believe it was, and he came through Bristol, and he was wanting my banjo and his banjo that I have now was in bad shape. I mean, it was a Granada gold-plated, but it had looked like a penny would look after it had been laying out for ten years on the soil or something; it looked terrible. And part of—the metal part of it was broken on the thing, but I could hear a tone in it that I liked. And I didn’t like the neck on it because it was an extra-large neck, but anyway, I traded with him. I gave him my banjo for his banjo and a D-18 Martin guitar. Well, in a little while, I contacted the Gibson people up at Kalamazoo [Michigan]—that’s where they were at that time—and I asked them about cutting the neck down, and they wrote me back and said that they could do it but the neck would warp if they did it. Well, I was stubborn enough to believe that that older piece of wood might not warp, and I just didn’t want it the way it was. So I sent it back, and they cut it down and made it a nice-size neck, but it did warp and I had to have another neck put in it. But now, it’s all restored back the way it came from the factory back in [1930 when] it was made.
My problem with gold has been that it would tarnish and once it starts looking bad, it just looked pretty bad, and too, it went through a period of time when it was hard to get any repair work done on a banjo at all, much less gold plating. They didn’t understand what you needed, and to just solve the problem I just went to chrome metal, all except the tone ring. Now the basic part of the banjo, the tone ring and the resonator and the finish on the outside part of the resonator, has never been touched, and I wouldn’t touch that for nothing in the world. Because that’s where the sound is when the neck is—you got a good neck mounted in there good. But anyway, the tone’s still there.
Satisfied with their exchange in early 1949, Earl played his restored Granada for the remainder of his life, as did Don Reno with the RB-75 he nicknamed “Nellie.” In his 2003 appearance on NPR’s Fresh Air, Earl spoke candidly about the instrument he picked up from Reno without any regrets:
It produces the sound that my ear’s looking for. Maybe I’ve just gotten used to it, but I like the sound that I get out of that particular banjo. I feel at home with it when I take it out of the case and start—you know, when you start with another instrument, they all have their feel, and playing the same instrument, you know what it’s going to feel like when you take it out of the case and start to perform.
As Flatt and Scruggs and the Foggy Mountain Boys began to make strides in 1948 on WCYB’s Fun and Farm Time program along with their road shows, the next step was to start making records. However, 1948 was not the best of years in which to sign a recording contract. Mac Wiseman summarized the political condition of the music industry at the time, and how they finally got to cut their first record:
The union, the AFM—the American Federation of Musicians—was on strike during that time, and nobody could record because they were negotiating the different contracts and such as that. And King Records, who was very popular at that time, approached us about recording, [but] they only wanted to pay, like, one half of one percent. And not long [afterward], Murray Nash, who was the A&R man for Mercury Records, called us and wanted to bootleg a session. So we sneaked into Knoxville, Tennessee, and recorded in the radio station, WROL, in their studio. We did four songs: “My Cabin in Caroline,” “We’ll Meet Again Sweetheart,” “God Loves His Children,” and “I’m Going to Make Heaven My Home.”
With only a two-microphone operation, one for the bass and the other for the rest of the band, two of the four songs recorded in November 1948 were released on a 78-rpm vinyl disc on January 15, 1949, following the December end of the AFM strike. Oddly, it was the two gospel tracks where Earl’s banjo was noticeably absent, “God Loves His Children” and “I’m Going to Make Heaven My Home,” that Mercury chose to issue first. Scruggs played Wiseman’s Gibson guitar on both songs, which flushed out his aptitude for the occasional use of a lead guitar in their repertoire. Interestingly, those banjoless songs were the very first two songs the band recorded. “Earl was a fine guitar player,” says Curtis McPeake. “He had his own style, which not a whole lot of people play, his style today, on the guitar. It’s what we call kind of a thumb style, but it was a very good method.” Gary Scruggs reiterates his father’s six-stringed talent. “He enjoyed playing guitar on several different songs because it gave him a chance to adapt his picking style to the sounds of a couple of guitarists who had inspired him in earlier years, namely, Maybelle Carter and Merle Travis.”
Having never played guitar as a Blue Grass Boy, Scruggs now added a unique dimension to his new band that helped differentiate them from their competitive forerunner. Earl’s lead guitar work began to evolve more as the years went on. Some of his best guitar picking is heard in their later recordings of “Jimmie Brown, the Newsboy,” “You Are My Flower,” “Georgia Buck,” and eight out of the twelve songs from their 1961 Songs of the Famous Carter Family album, which includes the instrumentals “False-Hearted Lover,” “Pickin’ in the Wildwood,” and “Gathering Flowers from the Hillside.”
Another component in Flatt and Scruggs’s quest to establish their own musical identity, apart from Monroe, was original material. “Lester was the [initial] songwriter,” asserts Wiseman. “So he was constantly writing songs for us to sing on the radio as well as record when we had the time to do it.” However, it didn’t take long for Scruggs to become a partner in the compositions with Flatt, as the four songs from their first recording session were jointly credited.
While the goodbye ballad “We’ll Meet Again Sweetheart” and the wishful, cheery “My Cabin in Caroline” projected contrasting messages of optimism through their lyrics, their next original, “Down the Road” (recorded in May 1949), became a prime example of Earl’s ability to paint pictures through the notes of his banjo. His breaks on this recording give the impression of a leisurely walk down the road to see a girl named Pearly Blue. The way he played slide notes on the third string created a bouncy feel that was achieved often by bending the string slightly to give it a slurry, lazy, let’s-not-be-in-a-hurry sound that complements the song’s storyline (complete with old man “Flatt” who owned the farm). “I love the way Earl did ‘Down the Road,’” praises bluegrass guitarist Tim Stafford. “I love the way Earl could wrap his ideas around just about any tune and still state the melody.”
By the end of 1949, none of Flatt and Scruggs’s recorded songs had been an instrumental. Their third recording session at a radio station in Cincinnati on December 11 of that year produced the magnum opus from the sole creativity of Earl Scruggs. With plenty of ammo in his fingertips, Earl blazed the strings of his newly acquired (and cleaned up) Gibson Granada on that wintry day with a composition that would become the quintessential standard for the five-string banjo. Gary Scruggs depicts the evolution of his father’s iconic song “Foggy Mountain Breakdown”:
Dad has said that he actually wrote the instrumental “Blue Grass Breakdown.” I’m not sure if Bill Monroe contributed anything to the composing or arrangement of the instrumental, but Dad did not get any writer credit for it at all. Monroe was the only listed writer on the Blue Grass Boys recording. The opening lick of “Foggy Mountain Breakdown” is very similar to the opening notes in the banjo breaks of “Blue Grass Breakdown.” It’s played with a unique roll that a lot of banjo pickers refer to as the “Foggy Mountain roll.”
He composed “Foggy Mountain Breakdown” in 1949, the year Flatt and Scruggs recorded it. I don’t know how long it took to write, but I imagine it might have evolved over the time it was first written and then recorded because there are several banjo breaks, and almost all of them differ in some way, sometimes with significant variations. It’s truly an inspired and amazing work.
The deviation between “Foggy Mountain Breakdown” and its predecessor is the replacement of the F chord with an E minor. The chords in “Blue Grass Breakdown” are G, F, and D, whereas those in “Foggy Mountain Breakdown” are G, E minor, and D. That simple second chord substitution, as well as the change in arrangement (Earl’s banjo is secondary to Monroe’s mandolin in “Blue Grass Breakdown”), made a world of difference. Not only did “Foggy Mountain Breakdown” surpass “Blue Grass Breakdown” in popularity; it also showcased the very best in Scruggs’s musical agility as touted by Jim Mills:
The timing on Earl’s 1949 recording of “Foggy Mountain Breakdown” to this day makes me stop in my tracks, and I don’t care if it’s three o’clock in the morning in a truck stop and I’m listening to an eight-inch speaker, I’ll stop and listen to it all the way through. If you listen to that recording to this day, his right hand is like a jackhammer. I mean, every note is perfectly in time, a perfect separation of notes.
I told Earl one time in his house that that recording is almost anointed. It’s just one of those things that couldn’t be any better to me, and I’ve tried to play with that intensity that he played with on that song, but I’ve never been able to do it. If you listen to that recording now, the December 11, 1949, recording of “Foggy Mountain Breakdown,” he never lets up; his right hand is absolutely rock solid from beginning to end. When he backs away from the mic while the fiddle takes a break, he’s still digging in. He never loses that power and intensity. I never heard him play it like that again. I’ve heard so many great banjo players say that it was that same recording that made them want to play the banjo.
The imagery used to describe Earl’s performance is testimony to the significance of his creative abilities. Terms like machine gun and metronomic are but a few adjectives that have been used by musicians and critics. Earl Scruggs re-recorded this tune multiple times over the course of his career, yet all subsequent versions seemed to take a backseat to the original in the ears of his biggest fans. “The old original 1949 version of ‘Foggy Mountain Breakdown,’ the old Mercury version: it burned, it warped the grooves right off the record,” notes bluegrass banjoist Vic Jordan. “It was straightforward, and I guess forceful might be a good word for his playing in some instances.” Dr. Banjo, Pete Wernick, mirrors that very sentiment in saying that it was “an immaculate, powerful cut, recorded when he was just twenty-five. No one can deliver like that.”
In his NPR interview from 2003, Earl recapped the significance of his most recognized instrumental. “I’ve written several other tunes and had some pretty big hits, but nothing like ‘Foggy Mountain Breakdown.’ You’ll have a ‘ringer’ as I call it, one that might make a hit with just about everybody, and so ‘Foggy Mountain Breakdown’ was one of them. I will say that the one, I guess, that really launched the banjo further, as far as a tune that I had written, was ‘Foggy Mountain Breakdown.’”
In 1999, the prestigious National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences, also known as the Recording Academy, inducted Flatt and Scruggs’s 1949 recording of “Foggy Mountain Breakdown” into its Grammy Hall of Fame.
With sixteen tracks recorded for Mercury by the summertime, along with the departures of fiddler Jim Shumate (replaced by Art Wooten and then Benny Sims) and comedic bassist Howard “Cedric Rainwater” Watts (replaced by Charles “Jody Rainwater” Johnson), Lester and Earl received an offer to upgrade their recordings that was too good to pass up. Gary Scruggs details their contractual transition:
Columbia Records, a much larger recording company than Mercury Records in those days, offered Flatt and Scruggs a recording contract in the summer of 1950. Flatt and Scruggs wanted to accept the offer, and Mercury agreed to release them from their contract, provided Flatt and Scruggs record twelve more songs for Mercury. They did so in Tampa, Florida, in October of 1950, recording all twelve sides in one day.
And that twentieth day of October at Tampa’s WDAE, affectionately referred to as the “Hurricane Sessions” (named after Hurricane King, which was threatening to blow through the area while they recorded), not only completed the balance of their twenty-eight-song contract for Mercury, but it produced some of the duo’s more classic tenor harmonies. The result included such catchy songs as Lester’s “My Little Girl in Tennessee,” the Morris Brothers’ “Old Salty Dog Blues,” featuring fiddle player Benny Sims’s lead vocal, and the Monroe Brothers’ “Roll in My Sweet Baby’s Arms.”
On the flipside to these lively lyrical numbers is the duo’s cover of Jimmie Skinner’s morose prison tune “Doin’ My Time,” the story of a man who gets thrown in the big house and sings a song of lament about “doing his time” pounding rocks on a chain gang and about the girl waiting for him after he’s freed. In Skinner’s original recording, the frailing banjo lacks the pain Earl’s three-finger style adds to the song. Scruggs presents a sense of weariness, or even exhaustion, one can imagine, for the guy doing his time. There’s also several places in the song where Earl plants a boogie-woogie lick, one in his second banjo break and the other during Lester’s vocals in the third verse. Another creative use of Scruggs’s backup comes out in the same third verse, where Lester sings, “You can hear my hammer, you can hear my song,” as he plays harmonic chimes on the twelfth fret picking the fourth, third, second, and first strings.
Additionally, their final Mercury session included two instrumentals: a countrified cover of the 1920s jazz tune “Farewell Blues,” along with “Pike County Breakdown.” Composed by Rupert Jones, “Pike County Breakdown” is a tune that Lester and Earl played with Bill Monroe during their time as Blue Grass Boys. Interestingly, the duo’s version was cut and released before Monroe attempted his own recording, which further agitated their former boss. The melody of “Pike County Breakdown” has sometimes been referred to as a fast, instrumental take on the old song “Sweet Betsy from Pike,” as it bears a striking similarity. Another prominent feature is a series of single-string notes picked on the first string of the banjo. Scruggs used his thumb and index finger to pick the notes, yet he did not, as a rule, play single-string banjo as did Don Reno. At the end of Earl’s second and third banjo breaks, he plays a sequence of hammer-ons and pull-offs, left-hand techniques that weren’t used by other banjoists in that day, which made him sound years ahead of his contemporaries.
It was also during this period that Scruggs was without his Gibson Granada. Over a year earlier, when he and Lester decided to move to Knoxville to work at WROL, Scruggs knew he needed to find himself another banjo since he was planning to send the Granada back to the Gibson factory for repairs. After utilizing their media access to freely advertise on air about Earl’s hunt for a Gibson banjo, a local woman called to announce that her late husband left behind a Gibson banjo that she was willing to sell. Upon inspection, Scruggs noticed that it was a Mastertone model RB-3 in pretty good condition. He then purchased the banjo to use as a temporary replacement for his Granada from early 1950 until March 1951.[7]
When Flatt and Scruggs stepped into their new Nashville-based recording facility in November 1950, they were no longer subject to radio station makeshift setups with limited technical resources at multiple locations. They now had the luxury of state-of-the-art equipment in a central location where they dropped anchor for the next nineteen years (although Earl continued with Columbia for another fifteen years while Lester signed with RCA Victor after one solo album, Flatt Out, on the Columbia label, following their breakup in 1969). Some of the earliest releases on their new label included “Come Back Darling,” “I’m Head Over Heels in Love,” and “Jimmie Brown, the Newsboy,” backed with “Somehow Tonight,” which was the first vocal song credited solely to Scruggs. It wouldn’t be long into their new contract before Earl found a way to stretch the boundaries of the five-string banjo with an old idea that propelled a roster of new signature songs.
Earl Scruggs was more than just the grand master of the three-finger roll for the five-string banjo; he was also a true inventor and innovator. His ingenuity dates back to his childhood when he experimented with simpler ways to capo the banjo’s fifth string as opposed to retuning it to a higher pitch, which only stressed the string to the brink of breaking. Gary Scruggs describes the process:
As a child around ten or eleven years old, it was Dad’s idea to use “spikes,” also known as “hooks,” to change the pitch of the fifth string, which served the same function as a fifth-string capo would do. His first hook, or spike, was fashioned out of one of his mother’s hairpins and placed at the seventh fret in order to raise the fifth-string G note to A. The top of the spike was shaped at a right angle so that the string could be hooked beneath it. Today, HO-scale toy train railroad spikes are often used for that function. Dad used two spikes during his professional career, one at the seventh fret and one at the ninth fret. He also designed and built a banjo capo for the five-string banjo’s four long strings when he worked at the Lily Mills thread mill in the early to mid-1940s.
Earl’s understanding of the instrument’s mechanics in conjunction with his desire to create new sounds sparked a revolutionary device for detuning called a Scruggs Tuner, which enabled him to accurately change the pitch of a note while playing at full speed. As a boy, Earl and his brother Horace toyed with an idea of retuning the banjo from G tuning to D tuning as part of the melody for a song.[8] “Memories of those childhood musical experimentations stayed with him and indirectly led to his creation of Scruggs Tuners,” notes Gary Scruggs. “By 1951, he had thought of the design for a cam-type tuner that would accurately detune a string and then retune it back to pitch, but he hesitated in making it because installing it would involve drilling holes in the peghead of his banjo.”
Meanwhile, he recorded his first detuning composition, “Earl’s Breakdown,” on October 24, 1951, having to manually detune the second string B note down to A and then back up to B by ear while using the standard tuning peg. In 1989, Earl discussed the recording of his premiere detuning number with Doug Hutchens on Bluegrass Today (printed with permission):
I recorded that thing without a tuner at all, and my banjo at the time had bone buttons on it. And we went in the studio and we were using Howard Forrester as a fiddle player for the show, and Howard is a tremendous fiddle player, but he never plays a tune twice the same way. So we went into that tune. I had written [the] tune and I just about halfway knew it myself; I knew the tuning part had to go in there. We cut that thing, and I did real good; the tuner worked fine. I mean, I used the standard peg as opposed to a tuner that has stops on it. The tune went great up until the very end of the thing, and I goofed it. And Howard Forrester, he just outdid himself, I thought, with the fiddle break. And Don Law was the A&R man, and back in those days, we didn’t have twelve or twenty-four tracks; it was monaural. So I said, “Hold that. Let’s put a ‘shave and a haircut’ on it or let me ‘doop-de-doop’ it again and do that.” And I messed around and let Don Law—he said, “Well, Earl”—he was from England—he said, “Earl, it won’t take but three minutes to do it over.” And I said, “You can’t do things over like that,” and he said, “You can do it again.” I said, “Hold that one and let’s do it again and see which one turned out the best.” And I didn’t know it, but he ran the tape back to the very start and we had to do it a second time—I mean, do it again—but we erased over the first cut and that’s always been a sore spot every time I think about that because neither Howard Forrester [nor] I, either one, did it like we did that one take.
And not only was the second take of the tune played differently than the “lost” first track; the difficulty of manually retuning by ear at such a fast pace became evident as observed by bluegrass melodic-style banjo player and builder Bill Keith. “If you listen very carefully, you’ll hear that it doesn’t always go down to the right pitch—and at one point he doesn’t get it back up to the right pitch, so he finishes his break by completely staying off the second string. And then during the fiddle break after his break, you can hear him tuning the second string back up.”
Although slightly flawed to the “tuned” ear, “Earl’s Breakdown” became a huge hit and a frequently requested song for Flatt and Scruggs. This was all the inspiration Earl needed to create his new tuning device. Keith analyzes Earl’s installation process:
“Earl’s Breakdown” only involved [tuning] the second string. So Earl drilled a hole near the middle of the headstock and used an additional tuning peg and threaded the hole, where the string goes through, and put a slotted screw in it so he could adjust the offset by popping a string out of that groove and screwing the screw further in or further out from the tuning peg. So it was basically a cam operation. Then he had to drill another hole or two to put pins in to stop the cam from going past dead center. If you turn one way or raise it—continue to turn that direction—the string would go down in pitch because it would pass the high point of the cam. He decided [later] to move the tuner for the second string over near the edge so he’d have room for another tuner for the third string. He said it made a mess of his headstock, so as he told me, he took the cover off the little lamp on his wife’s floor polisher—a little rectangular box, and he attached it over the mechanism that he made. You can see it easily on a lot of those early [publicity] photos, especially [on] the Foggy Mountain Jamboree album. People thought he was hiding what was going on there, but he said, “No,” it was really to cover up a messy situation ’cause it disrupted some pearl, and it just wasn’t a pretty sight.
Realizing just how much he could expand his catalog of songs with the tuners, Earl’s second detuning composition involved a more complex arrangement of detuning and retuning both the second and third strings, which kicks off the tune “Flint Hill Special,” named in honor of his birthplace and recorded in November 1952. Though the instrumental features left-handed acrobatic-like finger work in the C chord, it was the rhythmic detuning that became the main focal point.
Noted singer-songwriters and musicians Leon Russell and Norman Blake collectively remember the impression Earl’s inventive ditty left on them, as it was also their introduction to the man himself. “I was fascinated with him—I mean, James Burton told me about him,” Russell comments. “James one day played ‘Flint Hill Special’ on his guitar by bending the strings up above the little bridge that goes in front of the tuning keys. He said that Earl had actually invented some tuners for the banjo that go on there to actually play that song. I was pretty fascinated by that, really.”
“The first time I ever heard Earl, we were boys, and this was back in the ’50s,” recalls Blake. “We were driving along in a car down here, close to where I live, and we had the radio on in the car and ‘Flint Hill Special’ came on the radio, you know, the record ‘Flint Hill Special,’ and we just had to stop and park the car. Man, we couldn’t believe what we were hearing.”
The fascination of bending the strings produced two more instrumental classics written by Scruggs: “Foggy Mountain Chimes” in 1953 and “Randy Lynn Rag” in 1955. Earl is also heard doing a little bit of tuning in between vocal breaks on “Till the End of the World Rolls Round” from 1954, “Joy Bells” in 1956, “Bound to Ride” from Flatt and Scruggs’s 1963 album Hard Travelin’, and their 1969 covers of Johnny Cash’s “I Walk the Line” and Bob Dylan’s “Honey, Just Allow Me One More Chance,” featured on the Flatt and Scruggs LP Final Fling—One Last Time (Just for Kicks). The addition of the Scruggs Tuners necessary for playing these new signature songs for bluegrass banjoists required serious alterations to their instruments’ headstocks. In 1964, Bill Keith and his friend Dan Bump discovered a way to improve upon Earl’s invention without drilling new holes into the banjo pegheads to accommodate an extra set of tuners. Keith defines the mechanical innovation that has become the standard D tuners for banjos and guitars to this day:
In my military [reserve] unit was a college friend [Bump] who was also interested in the banjo, and he suggested that we start a company making banjos. His ideas were to make banjos with fiberglass necks and aluminum rims. I thought the current bunch of banjo players that I knew would not be so receptive to that kind of construction. So I suggested, why don’t we make something that people that already own a banjo could use—and we focused right on the D tuners. So one of the times I was up in Boston, I spent more time in my reserve meetings with him, planning the making of what became known as the Keith Tuners. I finished a second prototype set before really going down and spending any time in Nashville, so [Dan] worked with a machinist I knew who had done some work for me in the past, and he finished off the D tuners and sent them to me. I showed them to Earl, and he was very impressed, and he said that if there was any way he could help then he would be happy to do that. Well, as it turns out, we wanted to use his name. So he said the way we’d be able to use his name was if he were part of the company. We incorporated and sold [Earl] some shares—and we went into production in early ’64. We started to use Earl’s name, and they were called Scruggs-Keith Tuners until about 1970.
Earl Scruggs, liner notes for The Essential Earl Scruggs (Sony Music Entertainment, 2004).
Scruggs, Earl Scruggs and the 5-String Banjo (2005), 162.
Stubbs, Tribute to Earl Scruggs.
Louise Scruggs, liner notes for Earl Scruggs and Friends (MCA Nashville, 2001). See also Louise’s words in Earl Scruggs: His Family and Friends (1970); James Orr, liner notes for Earl Scruggs with Family & Friends: The Ultimate Collection Live at the Ryman (Rounder Records, 2008).
There is much debate over whether the Gibson banjo that Earl Scruggs bought from Haze Hall and later traded to Don Reno in 1949 was an RB-3 or an RB-75. Jim Mills is a recognized authority on Gibson’s prewar Mastertone banjos. He has thoroughly researched and documented this controversy in his book Gibson Mastertone: Flathead 5-String Banjos of the 1930s and 1940s (Anaheim Hills, CA: Centerstream, 2009), 87–95, and has certified that the banjo Earl traded to Don Reno is an RB-75.
The price of $37.50 is noted in the “Earl Scruggs Biography,” http://www.earlscruggs.com/biography.html. Speculation exists that Jenkins may have paid a higher price (Mills, Gibson Mastertone, 51).
Mills, Gibson Mastertone, 57–58.
Scruggs, Earl Scruggs and the 5-String Banjo (2005), 19–20.