Lester Flatt

Lester Flatt (born June 19, 1914, Duncan’s Chapel, near Sparta, Tennessee, U.S.—died May 11, 1979, Nashville) was an American bluegrass and country music guitarist and singer who often performed with Bill Monroe, Earl Scruggs, and other pioneering bluegrass musicians.

Flatt worked in textile mills until the late 1930s, when he and his wife, Gladys, began performing as a duo. In 1945 he joined Bill Monroe’s Blue Grass Boys. There he met innovative banjoist Earl Scruggs, and in 1948 the two men left Monroe’s band to form the Foggy Mountain Boys. They made dozens of records in the 1950s and ’60s and hosted their own syndicated radio and TV shows. Scruggs’s original instrumental compositions, including “Foggy Mountain Breakdown,” were especially popular. The tune was further popularized when it was featured in the 1967 film Bonnie and Clyde.

Flatt and Scruggs parted ways in 1969 when Scruggs joined his sons Gary and Randy (and later Steve) in the Earl Scruggs Revue.

Flatt and 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. 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.”