Music legend Earl Scruggs died Wednesday at a Nashville hospital of natural causes. The bluegrass great was 88. Scruggs popularized a three-fingered style of playing banjo that became a central element in what is now known as bluegrass music. Scruggs' adaptability and open-minded approach to musicality and to collaboration made him a bridge between genres and generations.
Earl Scruggs was best known in the 1950’s and 1960’s as half of the bluegrass/country group Flatt & Scruggs. Earl Scruggs crossed all music genres though. He played at folk festivals, with Bob Dylan, Joan Baez and The Byrds. Scruggs partnered with sax player King Curtis, sitar virtuoso Ravi Shankar, piano man Elton John and anyone else whose music he fancied.
"He was the man who melted walls, and he did it without saying three words," said his friend and acolyte Marty Stuart in 2000.
Asked about recording with Baez during a time when Baez was viewed by many in Nashville as hyper-liberal and undesirable, Scruggs said, "Well, I didn't look at it from a political view. And I thought Joan Baez had one of the best voices of anybody I'd ever heard sing."
Of course, none of that would have been notable or possible had Scruggs not mastered the banjo in a way that no one before him had, and in a way that almost everyone after him sought to.
When a 21-year-old Scruggs auditioned for Bill Monroe, the bandleader heard the final piece in a sound he'd been working to construct. And Scruggs' first performance with the Blue Grass Boys, on Dec. 8, 1945, was the "Big Band of Bluegrass," offering a template — guitar, mandolin, upright bass, fiddle and Scruggs-style banjo —still employed today.
During Monroe's performances, Opry boss George D. Hay often introduced Scruggs as "The boy who made the banjo talk." If others had made it speak, Scruggs taught it a master class in what must have seemed a foreign language, offering a vocabulary and clarity of expression never before attained and rescuing the instrument from creeping oblivion.
