Earl Eugene Scruggs was an American musician noted for popularizing a three-finger banjo picking style, now called "Scruggs style", which is a defining characteristic of bluegrass music.
67 Facts About Earl Scruggs
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Earl Scruggs popularized the instrument across several genres of music.
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Fellow band member Lester Flatt resigned as well, and he and Earl Scruggs later paired up in the duo Flatt and Earl Scruggs.
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The duo broke up in 1969, chiefly because, while Earl Scruggs wanted to switch styles to fit a more modern sound, Flatt was a traditionalist who opposed the change and believed doing so would alienate a fan base of bluegrass purists.
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Earl Scruggs received four Grammy awards, a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award and a National Medal of Arts.
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Earl Scruggs became a member of the International Bluegrass Music Hall of Fame and was given a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.
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In 1985, Flatt and Earl Scruggs were inducted together into the Country Music Hall of Fame and named, as a duo, number 24 on CMT's "40 Greatest Men of Country Music".
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Earl Scruggs was awarded a National Heritage Fellowship by the National Endowment for the Arts, the highest honor in the folk and traditional arts in the United States.
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Four works by Earl Scruggs have been placed in the Grammy Hall of Fame.
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The center is a $5.5 million facility that features the musical contributions of Earl Scruggs and serves as an educational center providing classes and field trips for students.
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Earl Scruggs was born January 6,1924, in the Flint Hill community of Cleveland County, North Carolina, a small community just outside of Boiling Springs, about 10 miles west of Shelby.
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Earl Scruggs's father, George Elam Scruggs, was a farmer and a bookkeeper who died of a protracted illness when Earl was four years old.
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The father played an open back banjo using the frailing technique, though as an adult Earl Scruggs had no recollection of his father's playing.
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Earl Scruggs recalled a visit to his uncle's home at age six to hear a blind banjo player named Mack Woolbright, who played a finger-picking style and had recorded for Columbia Records.
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Earl Scruggs moved it around depending on what part of the neck he was playing.
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Earl Scruggs is noted for popularizing a three-finger banjo-picking style now called "Earl Scruggs style" that has become a defining characteristic of bluegrass music.
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Earl Scruggs did not invent three-finger banjo playing; in fact, he said the three-finger style was the most common way to play the five-string banjo in his hometown in western North Carolina.
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At age ten, when Earl Scruggs first learned the technique, he recalled that he was at home in his room after a quarrel with his brother.
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Earl Scruggs was idly playing a song called "Reuben" and suddenly realized that he was playing with three fingers, not two.
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At age 15, Earl Scruggs played in a group called The Morris Brothers for a few months, but quit to work in a factory making sewing thread in the Lily Textile Mill near his home in North Carolina.
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Earl Scruggs worked there about two years, earning 40 cents an hour, until the draft restriction for World War II was lifted in 1945, at which time he returned to music, performing with "Lost John Miller and his Allied Kentuckians" on WNOX in Knoxville.
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Bill Monroe, 13 years older than Earl Scruggs, was prominent in country music at the time.
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Earl Scruggs's career started with the "Monroe Brothers", a duo with his brother Charlie.
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When Earl Scruggs was 21, Monroe was looking for a banjo player for his group, because David "Stringbean" Akeman was quitting.
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Earl Scruggs turned in his resignation, planning to go take care of his mother in North Carolina.
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Earl Scruggs later gave his two-week notice, but, before the notice was up, the bass player Howard Watts announced that he was leaving too.
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Monroe thought Flatt and Earl Scruggs had a secret understanding, but both men denied it.
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In 1948 Lester Flatt and Earl Scruggs formed the duo Flatt and Scruggs and chose the name "the Foggy Mountain Boys" for their backing band.
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Previously, Earl Scruggs had performed something similar, called "Bluegrass Breakdown" with Bill Monroe, but Monroe had denied him songwriting credit for it.
30.
Earl Scruggs received a phone call from the show's producer and star, Warren Beatty, first asking Earl Scruggs to write a song for the movie.
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Earl Scruggs covered the holes with a piece of metal, which can be seen on the album cover of Foggy Mountain Jamboree.
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About this time, country music television shows, on which Flatt and Earl Scruggs appeared regularly, went into syndication, vastly increasing the group's exposure.
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Flatt and Earl Scruggs appeared in several episodes as family friends of the fictional Clampetts.
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Earl Scruggs said, "I love bluegrass music, and still like to play it, but I do like to mix in some other music for my own personal satisfaction, because if I don't, I can get a little bogged down and a little depressed".
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Earl Scruggs wanted to play concerts in venues that normally featured rock and roll acts.
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Earl Scruggs answered yes, but told Flatt they would talk when he was better.
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In early 1969, Scruggs formed the Earl Scruggs Revue, consisting of two of his sons, Randy and Gary and later Vassar Clements, Josh Graves and Scruggs' youngest son, Steve.
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On November 15,1969, Earl Scruggs performed live with the newly formed group on an open-air stage in Washington, DC at the Moratorium to End the War in Vietnam.
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Earl Scruggs was one of the few bluegrass or country artists to give support to the anti-war movement.
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The Earl Scruggs Revue gained popularity on college campuses, live shows and festivals and appeared on the bill with acts like Steppenwolf, The Byrds and James Taylor.
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Scruggs had to retire from the road in 1980 because of back problems, but the Earl Scruggs Revue did not part ways until 1982.
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In 1994, Earl Scruggs teamed up with Randy Earl Scruggs and Doc Watson to contribute the song "Keep on the Sunny Side" to the AIDS benefit album Red Hot + Country.
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Earl Scruggs released a live album The Three Pickers with Doc Watson and Ricky Skaggs, recorded in Winston-Salem in December, 2002.
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Earl Scruggs had made banjos since before 1912 and already had a Pete Seeger model.
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Earl Scruggs participated in Vega's marketing campaign that claimed that the banjo was constructed to Earl Scruggs's design specifications, which was true, but the finished product fell short of his expectations.
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When Scruggs acquired it, the instrument was in poor condition and he sent it to the Gibson Company for refurbishing, including a new fingerboard, pearl inlays, and a more slender neck.
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Earl Scruggs went backstage after the performance to meet some of the performers, including Scruggs, who had been with Bill Monroe's band about a year at that time.
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When Flatt and Earl Scruggs formed the new group, Earl Scruggs had done most of the bookings for the band, but being on the road for hours in a car and stopping at a phone booth to communicate with venues, often at odd hours, was difficult.
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Earl Scruggs eventually became the booking agent and ultimately the group's manager, Nashville's first woman to become prominent in that role.
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Earl Scruggs turned the band into TV personalities and helped propel them into what today would be called rock stars, touring with Joan Baez and performing at the prestigious Newport Folk Festival.
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Earl Scruggs recruited noted artist Thomas B Allen, who had done covers for The New Yorker and Sports Illustrated to create cover illustrations for 17 of the group's albums.
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Earl Scruggs helped market the group to younger audiences at college campuses and arranged a live album to be recorded at Carnegie Hall.
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Earl Scruggs helped shape music up as a business, instead of just people out picking and grinning.
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In 1955, Earl Scruggs received word that his mother, Lula, had suffered a stroke and heart attack in North Carolina.
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The children were not hurt, but Earl Scruggs suffered a fractured pelvis and dislocations of both hips, which would plague him for years, and Louise had been thrown into the windshield, receiving multiple lacerations.
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Earl Scruggs returned to music in January 1956, about four months after the injury, but after working a week or so, one of the hips collapsed, and he returned to the hospital for a metal hip to be implanted.
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Earl Scruggs was involved in a solo plane crash in October 1975.
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Earl Scruggs was flying his 1974 Cessna Skyhawk II aircraft home to Nashville around midnight from a performance of the Earl Scruggs Revue in Murray, Kentucky.
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The automatic crash alert system in the plane did not function, and Earl Scruggs remained without help for five hours.
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Earl Scruggs crawled about 150 feet from the wreckage with a broken ankle, broken nose, and facial lacerations, afraid that the plane might catch fire.
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Earl Scruggs's family was driving home from the same concert and was unaware of the crash, but his niece became worried when he did not arrive.
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Earl Scruggs recovered, but was in a wheelchair for a few weeks, including for the premiere of the Scruggs documentary Banjoman at the Kennedy Center.
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Earl Scruggs died in September 1992 of a self-inflicted gun shot after killing his wife, according to prosecutor Dent Moriss.
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Earl Scruggs is the best there ever was and the best there ever will be.
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At age 88, Earl Scruggs died from natural causes on the morning of March 28,2012, in a Nashville hospital.
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Earl Scruggs's funeral was held on Sunday, April 1,2012, at the Ryman Auditorium in Nashville, Tennessee, and was open to the public.
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Earl Scruggs was buried at Spring Hill Cemetery in a private service.