Earl Scruggs is the best bluegrass musician ever.
After spending a few months in North Carolina studying bluegrass, I discovered that you should never ask a banjoist to play a particular tune for you. Foggy Mountain Breakdown is Earl Scruggs’s most famous instrumental. It is so well-known and so often played that if you suggest it in a jam, people will think you are a newbie who doesn’t know anything. This is the same as calling yourself a Trekkie when the correct term should be Trekker.
You may only be familiar with Duelling Banjos if that’s all you know. It was featured in Deliverance or one of the many pastiches available on YouTube. My favourite is the one from Father Ted. If you only know two, the other, I bet, was composed by Earl Scruggs. Scruggs is the most influential banjoist of all time: he’s like a banjo version of Bach, Beethoven and Bob Dylan. He invented the three-finger picking style that is responsible for the jangling, fleet-fingered sound of the banjo. Scruggs, who used the third finger to play driving arpeggios, was the first banjo player to use the three-finger style of picking.
His virtuosity brought the banjo into the spotlight of the new country music that emerged in the 1940s. It had been an accompaniment instrument (just like guitars or, as the mountain people say, gee-tars). Scruggs gave the banjo its distinctive sound. Steve Martin, in his tribute to Earl Scruggs, wrote in the past year: “Few musicians have changed the sound of an instrument as much as Earl has. He is in the same category with Miles Davis and Louis Armstrong. Chet Atkins and Jimi Hendrix.” Martin’s description of Scruggs is “unmistakable”.
On my bluegrass journeys, I visited Shelby, where Scruggs’s birthplace is located. The place wasn’t exciting: it was a typical shopping strip, where you had to drive from one lot to another to shop. Its annual festival of liver mush is a popular event. It knows its place in the world, which is why you will see the sign “Birthplace Of Earl Scruggs“ as soon as you enter the city limits. Everyone in the town with a banjo is going to be playing on their porches today as a tribute. For once, I think there will be a Foggy Mountain Breakdown amnesty.
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