Earl Scruggs

Earl Scruggs was an American musician who perfect the three-finger picking style with The Blue Grass Boys. He, singer Jerry Scoggins and Lester Flatt performed "The Ballad of Jed Clampett", the theme for the television show The Beverly Hillbillies.

Scruggs and Flatt would form the Foggy Mountain Boys, also later known simply as Flatt and Scruggs and became members of the Grand Ole Opry in the 1950s. In 1969, they broke up, and he started a new band, the Earl Scruggs Revue, featuring two of his three sons.

On November 15, 1969, Scruggs played "Foggy Mountain Breakdown" on an open-air stage in Washington, D.C., at the Moratorium to End the War in Vietnam.

In 1994, Scruggs with Randy Scruggs and Doc Watson contributed the song "Keep on the Sunny Side" to the AIDS benefit album Red Hot + Country. In 2002, Scruggs won a Grammy award for the 2001 recording of "Foggy Mountain Breakdown", which featured artists such as Steve Martin, Vince Gill and Albert Lee, Paul Shaffer, Leon Russell and Marty Stuart . The album, Earl Scruggs and Friends, released in 2001, featured artists including John Fogerty, Elton John, Sting, Johnny Cash, Don Henley, Travis Tritt, and Billy Bob Thornton. It includes the song "Passin' Thru" which was written by Johnny Cash and Randy Scruggs.

Scruggs died from natural causes on March 28, 2012, in a Nashville hospital.

Music Videos

 * Foggy Mountain Breakdown (Earl Scruggs and Friends)
 * The Dirt Road (with Sawyer Brown)