Earl Scruggs

Earl Scruggs (born January 6, 1924, Flint Hill, North Carolina, U.S.—died March 28, 2012, Nashville, Tennessee) was an American bluegrass banjoist who is celebrated as the developer of a unique instrumental style that helped to popularize the five-string banjo.

Scruggs, who came from a musical family, began to play his father’s banjo at age 4, and by the age of 15 he was playing on local radio broadcasts. During his early teens Scruggs experimented with and eventually perfected a picking technique involving the thumb and first two fingers of the right hand—a technique that came to be called the “Scruggs style.” In December 1945, he joined Bill Monroe’s Blue Grass Boys. The group became the prototypical bluegrass band and was often heard on the Grand Ole Opry radio show.

In 1948 Scruggs and Lester Flatt, the guitarist and tenor singer in the group, left to form their own band, the Foggy Mountain Boys. Flatt & Scruggs became one of the great bluegrass bands in its own right, making dozens of records in the 1950s and ’60s. Scruggs’s original instrumental compositions—including “Foggy Mountain Breakdown,” “Flint Hill Special,” and “Earl’s Breakdown”—were especially popular. “Foggy Mountain Breakdown” was also famously featured in the 1967 film Bonnie and Clyde.

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Flatt and Scruggs parted ways in 1969, and Scruggs joined his sons Gary, Randy, and later Steve in an electrified country-rock ensemble, the Earl Scruggs Revue. In 1980 Scruggs left full-time performing but continued to record music in a variety of styles.

Flatt (who died in 1979) & Scruggs were inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame in 1985, and in 1991 they were—with Monroe—the first inductees into the International Bluegrass Hall of Fame. Scruggs received the National Medal of Arts in 1992.

In 2004 the U.S. Library of Congress added “Foggy Mountain Breakdown” to the National Recording Registry, a list of audio recordings deemed “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant.” In 2008 Scruggs received a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Recording Academy. The Earl Scruggs Center in Shelby, North Carolina, and the Earl Scruggs Music Festival, which was inaugurated in 2019 in North Carolina, are notable tributes to his legacy.