Earl Scruggs and Foggy Mountain Breakdown: The Making of an American Classic
200
Earl Scruggs and Foggy Mountain Breakdown: The Making of an American Classic
200Hardcover
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Overview
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780252042966 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of Illinois Press |
| Publication date: | 09/30/2019 |
| Series: | Music in American Life |
| Pages: | 200 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.70(d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
OUT TO FOLLOW SCRUGGS'S PATH
In Cleveland County, North Carolina, a few years ago, a worn white farmhouse stood neglected and unmarked on a two-lane road outside the small town of Boiling Springs. In November twilight, the house in the old Flint Hill community evoked a fine glow of memory and history, though its paint was peeling and its masonry crumbled. A visitor could walk down into fields that a boy named Earl Scruggs plowed for the family cotton crop in the 1930s. Cars and trucks drove by, and people waved, perhaps accustomed to visitors at the modest home.
The scene brought back the years in the 1920s and '30s when Scruggs, born in 1924, lived on the farm with his parents, George and Lula, and his two brothers and two sisters. It was here that Earl had a substantial musical breakthrough on the five-string banjo when still a child. And just a few minutes' walk away, on the wooded banks of the Broad River, Scruggs gave some of his earliest performances. He played for diners at a "fish camp," an open-air, lamp-lit eating place that he could still conjure up decades later.
It was here, in Flint Hill, in Boiling Springs, and along the Broad River, that the story of "Foggy Mountain Breakdown" began. The banjo tune was to play a major role in making Scruggs famous and in preserving the country string music and the banjo he picked so well.
* * *
The second floor of 811 Race Street in downtown Cincinnati, Ohio, contains the former home of the Herzog Recording Studio, where the forward-thinking record man Murray Nash made the first recording of "Foggy Mountain Breakdown" on December 11, 1949. Scruggs on banjo was backed by his guitarist partner Lester Flatt and the rest of their Foggy Mountain Boys band.
The walls of the Herzog studio, where Flatt and Scruggs, Patti Page, Hank Williams and others cut records, remain intact, although the control room and recording space are no longer separated. Only a piano said to have been played by Williams keeps its place from the studio's heyday.
Second-floor windows overlook downtown Cincinnati. A visitor can get a sense of what it was like for the Foggy Mountain Boys to pull up on Race Street, on a day off from their busy touring schedule out of Lexington, Kentucky. Although the original equipment is gone, the place still offers a bluegrass fan the chance to "stand on the rock where Moses stood," in the words of an old gospel song.
These places, and many others, were part of my journey to track the story of "Foggy Mountain Breakdown" and to understand the impact it has made. Of course, that meant tracing the story of Earl Scruggs as well.
Recorded in that basic studio in Cincinnati, the tune has won singular status through the years. In just a few examples, honors came in 2000 from National Public Radio, which named "Foggy Mountain Breakdown" one of the 100 most important American musical works of the 20th century. On April 5, 2005, Librarian of Congress James H. Billington named "Foggy Mountain Breakdown" to the National Recording Registry, denoting recordings that are "culturally, historically or aesthetically significant." And it's the only tune to win two Grammys in performances by the same artist.
* * *
The trail of "Foggy Mountain Breakdown" has led me down a thousand paths I wouldn't otherwise have encountered. It meant doing what I love — chasing facts and shreds of facts until I believe I've put them into a meaningful whole. I've spent much of my career in hard news but have gotten the chance to write about bluegrass music off and on since 1985, when I was moved to the full-time staff as a reporter for The Tennessean, Nashville's morning daily. Most of the field's important artists lived around Nashville and were willing to talk to a journalist about their music. Among those were singers and pickers whose stories dated to the years when this style of music came together, just after World War II. I got the chance to talk to figures such as Scruggs, Bill Monroe, Mac Wiseman, Jim & Jesse McReynolds, Ralph Stanley, and Bobby and Sonny Osborne, as well as up-and-comers such as Sam Bush, Jerry Douglas, Béla Fleck, Ricky Skaggs, Claire Lynch, Alison Krauss and Union Station, and the Nashville Bluegrass Band.
Years later, Neil V. Rosenberg approved my picking up work on a book that he had conceived, a collection of good writing in the field. The University of Illinois published The Bluegrass Reader in 2004 to good response, including the International Bluegrass Music Association's award for print journalist of the year.
This book began with the idea of bringing together several resonant stories about the best-known songs of bluegrass, numbers like "Blue Moon of Kentucky," "Rocky Top," and "Foggy Mountain Breakdown." When I decided to concentrate instead on Scruggs's banjo tune, the process involved gathering previous interviews and lore, and then hitting the road and phone for more research and further interviews. Another chunk of fact gathering took place on line, where newly digitized newspapers and magazines from the 1930s and beyond offered details and insights into Scruggs's origins and life path.
* * *
Earl Eugene Scruggs, born January 6, 1924, came from a deeply country background to touch American music and culture during many decades. His picking started "winning little awards" when he was six years old and garnered wild, shouted responses by the time of his first appearances at the Grand Ole Opry in 1945. Scruggs's long career brought his music to live audiences, regional and national radio, top-selling records, syndicated and network television, and the soundtrack of the genre-disrupting movie Bonnie and Clyde.
Even the banjo he played, a prewar Gibson Mastertone, became the center of a cult of players and collectors who still come together in meetings, seminars, and stores to learn ever more about Scruggs and these banjos.
A soft-spoken man and an acute thinker, Scruggs made a singular contribution to perfecting and keeping alive the rural, almost primal music of the Carolina piedmont. The story of "Foggy Mountain Breakdown" stretches from the Carolinas of the 1930s to the present day. Its saga took place in locations from Boiling Springs to Manhattan, from a Parisian restaurant to small Texas towns of the 1960s. The voices and places along the way showed me the variegated influences that came together in the lasting success of "Foggy Mountain Breakdown."
CHAPTER 2"I GREW UP AROUND A BANJO"
Boiling Springs, North Carolina, had but one stoplight in the 1920s and '30s, when Betty Jenkins Washburn was growing up not far from Earl Scruggs's home. In an interview in 2015, Washburn, 89, remembered Earl as an elementary school classmate. People already knew he was a banjo picker.
"He was really shy, real nice, clean-cut, a farm boy," she said. "They lived down in the country toward the river on a farm."
Flint Hill was just a mile or so from "downtown" Boiling Springs, but people there knew who was from "down in the country" and who was from the town. Eighty years later, Washburn, the daughter of a traveling evangelist, laughed at the idea that little Boiling Springs counted as "town." When she was grown, Washburn and her husband became close to Earl's brother Horace and his wife, Maida. As time passed, people in Boiling Springs heard firsthand about Earl's steady rise to stardom.
"He had talent, didn't he?" Betty Washburn said. "We didn't know it then. Just knew that he and Horace and some of the boys got together and played music."
Pictures of young Earl show a round-faced, thoughtful boy. He was the youngest in a brood of three boys and two girls, later joined by stepsister Venie Mae. All were expected to work around the farm. Scruggs's stories of those days entwined music with accounts of plowing, milking, and getting breakfast for the mules. Often the work came between Earl and music, especially when he had to complete his schoolwork, too.
The nearest place of any size was Shelby, the county seat and a courthouse town where families like the Scruggses might go to shop and visit with friends on Saturdays. Although politics and business bustled in Shelby, Cleveland County people mostly worked in raising and processing cotton. During the decade when Scruggs was born, Cleveland County went from producing 8,000 bales a year to 80,000 bales.
"I was grown before I ever knew that North Carolina was the tobacco state," Scruggs said. "Where I was raised, it was cotton. We didn't grow tobacco up there. That showed you how rural it was."
Scruggs's roots ran deep in this country. His father, George Elam Scruggs, child of David and Sarah Green Scruggs, was born in Cleveland County on January 10, 1876. George Scruggs was a landowner, bookkeeper, churchman, and farmer. In 1920, according to Census records, the household also included a hired man, Clifton B. Hamrick.
On November 4, 1906, at 30, George Scruggs married the former Georgia Lula Ruppe, known as Lula, a bride at 13. Late to marry, George Scruggs died early, at 52, on October 10, 1928. As the youngest child of his family, Earl knew his father for the fewest years.
"My dad played a little bit with the banjo and fiddle, but he died when I was four, so I don't remember any of his playing," Scruggs said. "He died of lung cancer, but he was in bed eight months before he died, so I wasn't much past three years old when he was up on his feet." An October 18, 1928, obituary in the Forest City Courier called George Elam Scruggs "a Prominent Man of Boiling Springs Community and Church Clerk.
"Mr. Scruggs was clerk of the Boiling Springs Baptist Church for a number of years, and his quiet unassuming manner won the respect and admiration of all with whom he came in contact," the paper said. He had been "one of the best known and popular citizens of Boiling Springs."
* * *
Brother Horace, nearly two years older, supplied Earl with pieces of the memories he had lost so painfully.
"He said Dad used to come in the room — Mama wanted everybody up for breakfast, you know, while it was hot. He'd come in taking a banjo to wake me and Horace up in the morning."
Along with this wonderful image, Earl inherited his father's legacy of achievement and musicality. Blessed with musical parents, the Scruggs siblings all played music. George Scruggs had played fiddle, and banjo in the down-picking style, of African origin, that was common all over the South. Lula Ruppe Scruggs played pump organ and piano. Older brothers Horace and Junius, or Junie, as well as sisters Eula Mae and Ruby all played banjo and guitar. The ideas, techniques, and sounds of music were all around him.
"I grew up around a banjo," Earl Scruggs said.
Gary Scruggs, the oldest of Earl's three sons, often heard about the times when the Scruggses of Flint Hill gathered for music. "The family members in Dad's youth all played music to some degree," he said. "Dad and his brother Horace especially played a lot together. Horace played rhythm acoustic guitar, and he played it very well. The older siblings, brother Junie and sisters Eula Mae and Ruby, all married at young ages and moved out, so there was not as much playing music with them as there was with Horace."
The family's life took an irreparable turn when George Scruggs died of cancer.
"My mother raised us, me being the youngest," Earl Scruggs said. "We mainly raised what we ate and then grew the cotton for a cash crop. That was just our country lifestyle. Getting by was really what we were doing." Earl began playing the banjo about the time his father died. "I loved music long as I can remember," he said. "I played before I even knew what radio was."
Because Earl was so small, he couldn't hold the banjo in his lap, the way older players did. He developed a method that involved sitting with legs crossed, resting the banjo's body on the floor and stretching his left hand up to reach the instrument's frets. "The only way I could pick Junie's banjo, or the old one my father played, was to sit on the floor with the body part of the banjo to my right and slide it around quite a bit, depending on what position on the neck I was attempting to play."
In addition to that sitarlike approach, Scruggs tried another method to play an instrument that was really too large for him. He explained it to student journalist Norman Draper of the University of North Carolina's Daily Tar Heel in 1972.
"Most of the time I would use a chair, you know, sit in a chair and put the box part of the banjo in another chair and pick it like that," Scruggs said. "My oldest brother had kind of a fancy banjo. It was cheap, but it was expensive for him at that time. When he was gone, I'd get on the bed or pull up a couple of chairs and put it in one chair and I'd sit in the other chair and pick the banjo."
In a home that in its early years had no radio or record player, music provided diversion and relief from the work of farm life. "Well, we had a banjo in the house, along with guitar and autoharp," Scruggs said. "My father's old open-back. It's in the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum now; about a three-dollar banjo. And you know, sitting by the fire in the winter time by yourself, it made pretty good noise."
George Scruggs's banjo has been moved from the Country Hall of Fame and Museum to the Scruggs Center in Shelby. The instrument Earl used for most of his career, the 1930 Gibson Granada Mastertone called "The Banjo" by the faithful, attracts visitors at the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum in Nashville.
* * *
By age six, according to his brother Horace, Earl took part in his first picking contest, held in Hamrick Auditorium on the grounds of what's now Gardner-Webb University in Boiling Springs.
"Hamrick was the only place around here that was large enough for any kind of gathering," Horace said. Young Earl walked the two miles from Flint Hill to Boiling Springs for the contest, banjo on his back. He won, but later came to think it was his youth that won him recognition.
"I got some kind of little prize that night, playing 'Cripple Creek' or something," he said.
The music that Earl heard continued to play in his mind, over and again, sometimes taking on new forms as it repeated.
"The banjo stayed on my mind just about all the time," he said. "One reason, I guess, that it stayed on my mind so much is that on the farm, we didn't have the privileges that young boys have now. They can sit around and practice five or six hours a day. Back then, we couldn't hardly get our schoolwork in for the farming.
"So about the only times I got to pick was a little bit before breakfast and sometimes, if I felt like it, a little bit during the noon hour while I was resting. And a little bit on weekends or on rainy days, when I could sit and pick all I cared to.
"But I would plow from one end of the field to the other with tunes running through my head. When I'd get back to the house, as soon as I could get hold of the banjo I'd see if it would work out. That's the way I worked a lot of tunes out."
Talking to banjo players and devotees Béla Fleck and Tony Trischka, Scruggs said of his practice time: "Well, that varied. I was in school. We were on the farm. We'd have to milk cows, feed the mules and slop the hogs, as they call it, and if you had any time left, you'd probably get in a few minutes with the banjo."
Scruggs attended primary school at Boiling Springs, a two-room building with separate privies for boys and girls. With music always on his mind, he occasionally performed at school events, parties, and the like. Shelby resident William Hugh Dover recounted get-togethers where Earl and his friends played music, and Dover, a future radio broadcaster, "announced" the band by speaking into the end of a broom handle. That showed that the young musicians had some notions of show-business success.
Tom Burrus, a Chapel Hill resident whose mother was born the same year as Earl and went to school with him, recalled family stories about the way the young banjo player was initially received in his hometown. "My mom told me a long time ago that when Earl Scruggs would play at talent shows in their school, many of the kids would just giggle at his 'picking' a banjo,'" Burrus said. "I guess in her youth, the banjo was supposed to be strummed."
Throughout Scruggs's life he was to overcome obstacles that could have crushed someone with less fire, ambition, talent, and, perhaps, a smaller share of countervailing good fortune. A Flatt and Scruggs number bore the title "The Good Things Outweigh the Bad." And despite the toll of the Depression, the early death of his father and the burden of simply helping his family survive, Scruggs plowed ahead, not only to endure, as in Faulkner's phrase, but also to prevail.
Though Scruggs would become likely the famous native of Cleveland County, the area's formal history takes little recorded notice of farm families such as his. Less than 60 years after the end of the Civil War, the county was known as a powerhouse in North Carolina politics. It reflected changes seen across as the South as the region completed its move into the 20th century.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Earl Scruggs and Foggy Mountain Breakdown"
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Table of Contents
Acknowledgments ix
1 Out to Follow Scruggs's Path 1
2 "I grew up around a banjo" 5
3 The Piedmont's Rich Musical Soil 12
4 Early Professional Days 22
5 Joining Bill Monroe 27
6 Working as a Blue Grass Boy 34
7 Flatt and Scruggs Build a Career 43
8 Recording "Foggy Mountain Breakdown" 50
9 "Like a Jackhammer"-How the Tune Works 60
10 The Number-One Banjo Player 72
11 The Beverly Hillbillies Welcomes the Banjo 91
12 Riding with Bonnie and Clyde 101
13 Scruggs without Flatt: A Period of Transition 117
14 Scruggs's Banjo Gains a Cult Following 131
15 Reaping the Harvest 144
Notes 159
Index 169