Earl Scruggs, the bluegrass great, died on Wednesday at the age of 88. A pioneering banjo player who helped create modern country music, his sound is instantly recognizable and as intrinsically wrapped in the tapestry of the genre as Johnny Cash’s baritone or Hank Williams’ heartbreak. His string-bending, mind-blowing way of picking helped transform a regional sound into a national passion.
Scruggs was born in Shelby, North Carolina, in 1924. He was a self-taught musician who shot to prominence after he joined the Blue Grass Boys in late 1945, quickly popularizing his syncopated, three-finger picking style. In 1948 he and guitarist Lester Flatt left the Blue Grass Boys and formed the Foggy Mountain Boys, later known simply as Flatt and Scruggs. They won a Grammy Award in 1969 for Scruggs’ instrumental “Foggy Mountain Breakdown” and were inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame in 1985. He would go on to win three more Grammys: for “Same Old Train” (1998), a new version of “Foggy Mountain Breakdown” (2001) — featuring artists such as Steve Martin, Vince Gill and Albert Lee — and for “Earl’s Breakdown” (2004).
