The great banjo player, co-founder of bluegrass, and country music legend Earl Scruggs died today in Nashville at 88, reports Billboard. With a career spanning from 1945 — when his signature three-finger picking style first made its mark on the genre alongside Bill Monroe’s Blue Grass Boys — until last fall — when I had the good fortune of seeing Scruggs perform for the third time in as many years at SF’s Hardly Strictly Bluegrass Festival — his indelible influence on music cannot be understated.
Tributes and obits will be arriving in the days to come, but in the meantime, Steve Martin’s biographical essay, The Master From Flint Hill: Earl Scruggs, was published in The New Yorker in January, and it’s a must-read.
Also, per Rawkblog’s suggestion, check out an excellent 1972 PBS documentary called The Complete Earl Scruggs Story below: