Earl Scruggs "Foggy Mountain Breakdown" with JD Crowe Bill Emerson Sonny Osborne and More

The world's most influential banjo player, Earl Scruggs was born on this date in the Flint Hill community of Cleveland County, North Carolina. He popularized a three-finger banjo picking style, now called "Scruggs style", which is a defining characteristic of bluegrass music. His style of playing was radically different from the traditional way the five-string banjo had previously been played. Earl Scruggs died March 28, 2012 in Nashville at age 88. | GatorRock

Earl Scruggs (born January 6, 1924, Flint Hill, North Carolina) earned a place in the history of Bluegrass and Country Music as the developer of a unique instrumental style that helped to popularize the five-string banjo. 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. In 1948 S