Earl Scruggs (1924-2012) was one of the most influential American musicians of the twentieth century and perhaps the most influential 5-string banjo player of all time. As banjoist-comedian Steve Martin puts it, “Before him, no one had ever played the banjo like he did. After him, everyone played the banjo like he did, or at least tried” (155).
Essentially, Scruggs is famous for his radical innovations in 3-finger banjo playing (that is, thumb + two fingers), a style that had originated perhaps a half century before his birth as the formal approach now known as “classic banjo.” By the 1920s, several early country music stars such as Uncle Dave Macon, Charlie Poole, and Snuffy Jenkins had developed a version of 3-finger picking that was suitable both for accompanying and playing leads. While still a child living on a farm in Boiling Springs, North Carolina—and only vaguely aware of any musical models or predecessors—Scruggs worked out some “kinks” in the 3-finger attack, and he came up with a powerful, highly syncopated approach that could handle just about any tempo and turn of phrase. This approach would prove to be ideally suited for driving along and standing out within the high-powered country music ensembles that were developing in his region during the late 1930s and early 1940s.
In 1945, Scruggs joined Bill Monroe and the Blue Grass Boys, a band then prominently featured on Grand Ole Opry broadcasts out of Nashville. The resulting sound—driving banjo, smooth fiddle, and piercing mandolin passing around breaks like a jazz combo with bass and guitar support, and precise four-part harmony singing dominated by the tenor voice taken up an octave (the so-called high tenor)—would in fairly short order come to be known as bluegrass music.
Scruggs worked with Monroe for roughly two-and-a-half years; then he and guitarist Lester Flatt set out on their own to form the seminal bluegrass band, Flatt & Scruggs and the Foggy Mountain Boys. The band would go on to make several highly influential LPs, and provide the theme music for both the “Beverly Hillbillies” TV show and the cult movie, “Bonnie and Clyde.” Their best known piece, a Scruggs-original instrumental called “Foggy Mountain Breakdown,” was first recorded in 1949 and achieved hit-status when it was tapped as background music for several car-chase scenes in the film “Bonnie and Clyde.”
Scruggs dissolved his partnership with Flatt in 1969 and embarked on a number of other musical ventures, often involving his sons Gary and Randy as band members, and—in a nod to the burgeoning rock music culture—often featuring a drummer. Although his new bands incorporated contemporary “folk” songs, rock standards, and other non-bluegrass material in their repertoire, it doesn’t appear that Scruggs’s musical approach evolved much after this point. After 1970, further innovations in 3-finger banjo style would be carried out by such musical heirs as Bill Keith, Alan Munde, Tony Trischka, and Béla Fleck.
Those who are already fans of “Earl” and his astounding banjo work will certainly want to own this volume just for the informational tidbits it provides. We learn, for example, that Scruggs entered his first music contest at age 6; that he developed his famous composite-direction right-hand “roll” at age 12 while playing the bluesy number, “Reuben’s Train”; that he acquired his trademark 1930 Gibson Grenada banjo in 1949 via a swap with fellow bluegrass-banjo patriarch Don Reno; and that Foggy Mountain is not a real place, but instead refers to the Carter Family song, “Foggy Mountain Top.”
Scruggs comes across in this volume as an unassuming perfectionist who doesn’t much like to talk about himself. Although Thomas Goldsmith seems to have had ready access to Scruggs and his family over a prolonged period of time, he either didn’t succeed in getting his subject to open up or felt constrained about revealing what he had learned. Time and again, the author fills in gaps in the narrative by drawing from interviews with present-day banjoists and celebrities, few of whom are old enough to have much first-hand knowledge of Scruggs during his heyday.
Despite these shortcomings, Earl Scruggs and Foggy Mountain Breakdown certainly fills in some pieces of the puzzle and is a worthy addition to the library of any bluegrass, country, and acoustic-music enthusiast.
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[Review length: 706 words • Review posted on May 22, 2020]