In all the history of bluegrass music there are only two people, in the opinion of this writer, without whom bluegrass would not exist as it does today: one is Bill Monroe, the other is Earl Scruggs. In all the discussions of who was the most important, John Hartford said it best, “Here’s the way I feel about it. Everybody’s all worried about who invented the style and it’s obvious that three-finger banjo pickers have been around a long time—maybe since 1840. But my feeling about it is that if it wasn’t for Earl Scruggs, you wouldn’t be worried about who invented it.” The same can also be said about Monroe and perhaps others, as well. But few will doubt the importance of Earl Scruggs and his “fancy banjo”.
 Earl Eugene Scruggs was born in Shelby, North Carolina, in the Flint Hill community January 6, 1924. His family had five children. His father, George, frailed on the banjo. Earl’s memories about the first instrument he started playing is unclear, “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 playin’, 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 [other] brother who’s almost two years older than me (Horace), he played guitar. I believe I started the banjo some.
 
 
 
 
 
 

But when I would play with my older brother, he wanted me to play guitar with him because he wanted to play the banjo. So anyway, I started playing guitar back as far as I can remember. My idol at the time—the main person I loved the most—was Momma Maybelle Carter, so that’s who I copied.”  About 1930, Junie Scruggs and Smith Hammett (who played a form of three-finger banjo picking style) sparked Earl’s interest in the banjo. By age ten, Scruggs was picking the banjo in the local three-finger style and by his early teens was playing for local dances.
 According to Larry Perkins in a 1990 interview at IBMA, the Scruggs brothers, Earl and Horace,
 

developed their timing by starting a song then walking around the house and meeting at the point of origin. They did this on their songs until they consistently were in time with each other after their walk.
 
 
 
 
 
 

 Scruggs “credits as one of his most important musical influences was Dennis Butler, an elderly farmer and a ‘great old-time fiddle player,’ wrote Tony Trischka. “As a teenager, Earl ‘played many hours with him and got a lot of basic knowledge.’ Rather than giving pointers, Butler would fiddle one tune after another and let Earl experiment and find the best ways to complement his music. Despite references by Bill Monroe and Don Reno suggesting that Scruggs derived much of his style from Snuffy Jenkins, Earl consistently refers to his style as his own. However, he does credit Jenkins among the banjo players who influenced him most. Earl recalls seeing him as early as the fiddlers’ convention at which Earl first performed in public, and listening to him on the radio in the late thirties and forties.”  Other important musical influences were Roy Acuff and His Smoky Mountain Boys, the Carter Family, and Uncle Dave Macon (with whom Scruggs often traveled after joining the Blue Grass Boys). Of Macon, Scruggs said, “He never ceased to drop a bit of enjoyment whenever possible. It was my first experience of seeing a man so well loved by so many.”
 Don Reno described Scruggs’ early banjo playing as similar to that of Snuffy Jenkins. “In 1934 and ‘35, Snuffy could play ‘Cumberland Gap’ or ‘Sally Goodin.’ You couldn’t tell... If I had a recording of him then and then you put a recording of Scruggs on it you couldn’t tell the difference. Me and Scruggs were little boys, you know, then.”
 Up until Scruggs was a young man, he was on his family’s farm. Then, in 1939,  he began playing with the Morris Brothers (Zeke on mandolin and Wiley and George on guitars) featuring what was known then as “country” music or “hillbilly” music. Don Reno had just left the band as banjoist to soon join Arthur Smith and his Crackerjacks. Earl played with these men for a few months, then quit so that he could take care of his widowed mother at his home in Shelby. He worked for the Lily Mills textile mill near his home until the draft restriction of World War II was lifted. And his mother encouraged him to pursue music as a career.

 Returning to music in 1945, Scruggs joined the touring band of Lost John Miller and the Allied Kentuckians on WNOX in Knoxville, Tennessee, for about three months. They also had a weekly show on WSM in Nashville, one of many such lesser-known programs on WSM which was not the Opry. About that time, Jim Shumate first heard Earl play. Shumate remembered Scruggs well, and when Bill Monroe needed a banjo player to replace Stringbean, he asked Shumate if he had any ideas. He did. Shumate found Earl with Lost John and asked if he wanted to play with the Blue Grass Boys which had legendary status even then.

 Flatt spoke about the exit of Stringbean and the arrival of Earl Scruggs, “Well, I wouldn’t want to say exactly how long [Stringbean was gone] but it was several months, and I know as good as we all loved String—and I love that kind of banjo picking because I was raised on it. My daddy played that style and I tried to learn it and I couldn’t; that’s how come I quit fooling with a banjo—Bill told me one night after String had gone that he was trying out a new boy on the banjo. I hated to hear that because I was really enjoying the work that we was doing with a banjo. Poor old String—it just didn’t fit. He would really drag you [down] on that thumb string on those tunes like we’re doing today.”

 “We played in rain, we played in snow, we played where the power would go off and we would have to play by lantern light with no sound. We had two bad wrecks, but nobody got hurt. The way we had to drive to make dates, it’s a wonder we weren’t killed. But we made it, and it toughened you up to encounter and overcome these difficulties. It seemed to make Bill stronger and it brought out the deep feeling and love he had for what he was doing.”

 Seckler left Flatt and Scruggs in November to join the Sauceman Brothers. Everett Lilly became the mandolin player for the band from November 1950 until fall 1952. He was not, as many people have said, restricted to mainly rhythm in order to sound dissimilar to the Blue Grass Boys. (Seckler did very little lead playing, but then Seckler never claimed to be a great mandolin player. Seckler likes the story that Flatt used to tell of Seckler’s prowess on the mandolin as, “Well, you hold it real good.”) But Scruggs did insist on a style which ended up a little different that Monroe’s. While his mandolin players were not restricted to strictly rhythm, it may have seemed that way. Scruggs explained, “That’s a matter of interpretation. We never asked Everett to stick to rhythm at all ‘cause Everett was a good mandolin picker. Now, that’s exactly how it was. But if Everett interpreted that was what he was supposed to do, he never indicated that. I’ll tell you where that probably came in. What I always insisted on the band doin’ is, if you was backin’ up somethin’ for us to play rhythm and just one person was backin’ up. In other words, not everybody would be playin’ at the same time while the guy is up there singin’ his heart out, tryin’ to sing a song, and everybody tryin’ to play every lick they can play is like a lot of people tryin’ to talk at the same time. You can’t get a point across. So I did require, if I was backin’ up, for the fiddle and mandolin to lay off. Then when I drop off, give it to the fiddle player and then the mandolin, and the banjo player’d drop off. And then when the mandolin was doin’ it, the fiddle and banjo’d drop off. See, that cleaned it up a whole lot. That was just one requirement that was probably different than a lot of bands that was goin’ around then and still goin’ around today. I’m not speakin’ of anybody in particular, but sometimes you can hear them all playin’ at the same time in the background of a lot of records. Anyway, that’s the only reason Everett was put on rhythm.”

 In June 1953, Martha White Mills became the sponsor for Flatt and Scruggs on WSM’s daily, early-morning radio broadcast where they performed until September 1954.  They then moved to Crewe, Virginia, for a weekday radio performance. They continued their WSM Martha White shows by recording them on tape. “We were the first in country music to have a syndicated TV program,” said Earl. With the Pet Milk Company as a co-sponsor with Martha White, they were seen on more than forty television stations. During these appearances on WSM, they were simultaneously appearing in Nashville, Chattanooga and Jackson, Tennessee, and at Huntington, West Virginia.

 The band’s entry onto the Opry was actually as a direct result of Martha White’s Cohen Williams. He dumped a large sack of fan mail on the floor of General Manager Jack DeWitt  and threatened that either he put Flatt and Scruggs on the Opry or he was going to pull his company’s advertising from the station. But there is more to this story, much more. It is included in the Controversies chapter of this book. “The reason we wasn’t on the Opry was because of Bill Monroe,” said Scruggs. “That simply was how it was. The reason we got on the Grand Ole Opry was because of Cohen Williams. Because we was the only ones that he thought could have sold his flour for him. We did well (financially), and so did they.”

 Graves continued, “Flatt and Scruggs hired Joe Stuart to play bass and put me on Dobro® and comedy. They had seen Jake (Tullock) and me do a comedy routine when we were with Esco Hankins and we had a pretty fair act together. So, with all due respect to Joe Stuart, they wanted me to call Jake and see if he would work for them, doing comedy with me and also playing bass. I called him in Knoxville and he caught the next bus for Nashville. We dug out our old comedy outfits and started our routine all over again. I believe Flatt and Scruggs started us out at about eighty dollars a week.”

 On December 8, 1962, Flatt and Scruggs appeared at Carnegie Hall; an album of the concert soon followed. Late that year, “The Ballad of Jed Clampett” theme song for the “Beverly Hillbillies” television show (recorded September 24, 1962, and released October 12th) reached #1 on the country music charts. It was the only bluegrass recording to ever do this; it was nominated for a Grammy Award. The show ran on CBS-TV until 1971 and appeared in more than 70 countries. Flatt and Scruggs played the theme and made personal appearances on the show until 1968. In these appearances they acted as old friends of the Clampett family from their mountain home. The theme song on the television show was sung by veteran studio musician Jerry Scoggins; the Columbia recording used Lester Flatt as lead singer. Don Parmley, later replaced by Steve Stephenson, was the main studio banjoist for the show until it went off the air in 1973. They wrote “Pearl, Pearl, Pearl” and played it on the show. The record reached #8 on the charts in 1963 and was on the charts for eleven weeks. The show vastly increased the purse of Lester and Earl but didn’t help eliminate the “hillbilly” image that they, and many other bluegrass artists, tried so hard through the years to eliminate. In 1965, “Green Acres” began its reign on CBS-TV. Flatt and Scruggs recorded the song on an LP of that period. The band also recorded the theme for the “Petticoat Junction” television series.

 Soon Flatt and Scruggs were pursuing their own music; Lester Flatt formed the Nashville Grass and Earl Scruggs formed the Earl Scruggs Revue with his sons, Gary (bass, harmonica) and Randy (electric and acoustic guitars) and Jody Maphis (drums). The Revue played a music which some (but not the members of the Revue) have categorized as “folk-rock”. They performed at urban clubs, colleges, and some festivals until the early 1980s. They pursued the tunes of artists such as Bob Dylan and Joan Baez. Lester Flatt continued in the traditional bluegrass sound by hiring ex-Blue Grass Boys Vic Jordan (banjo) and Roland White (mandolin) as well as Josh Graves, Jake Tullock (bass) and Paul Warren (fiddle). Martha White Mills continued to sponsor them. Flatt left Columbia Records to record on RCA Victor. Lester Flatt and the Nashville Grass became the first country band to sign with RCA since the Country Pardners in the ‘50s. Flatt was very opposed to non-bluegrass music and associated those long-haired musicians with rock music and marijuana-smoking. In 1971, Flatt and his Nashville Grass recorded “I Can’t Tell the Boys from the Girls,” probably as an affirmation of their beliefs.

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