A Quote by Earl Scruggs
Earl Scruggs is the guy who really made that leap with using three fingers in a rotating fashion to create this fast rippling sound that had never been heard before.
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Earl Scruggs wears two finger picks and a thumb pick, and by alternating them, he can play about as fast as he wants. So it's this action. You know, you couldn't move one finger that fast, but all three, it's pretty easy, and it's kind of an incredible leap.
I mean if it wasn't for Earl Scruggs, guys like me wouldn't be doing what we're doing. I mean, he's changed so many people's lives, honestly. I was thinking about all the thousands of people that live in Nashville, like myself, that there's no reason a guy from New York would end up down there if it wasn't for the sound of Earl Scruggs' banjo coming over the airwaves and just changing my life.
Being from New York, I wonder why am I inspired by bluegrass and Earl Scruggs? But when I look at the whole history of the banjo, I feel really good about it, including the Earl Scruggs part.
My most powerful memory was hearing Earl Scruggs on 'The Beverly Hillbillies' as a 5 or 6 year old. That sound just blew me away, shook my head up.
I've heard of people stopping their cars, having car wrecks, all kinds of things. But most of the banjo players I know had that moment when they heard Earl Scruggs. So, for me, it transcends the technique. It's the musician in him and his personality, his musical personality, such great taste, such great technique, very, very creative.
It's made a lot of people richer from hearing Earl Scruggs. And I just think we're all very lucky to have him in the world.
I'll always remember when I first heard Lester [Young]. I'd never heard anyone like him before. He was a stylist with a different sound. A sound I'd never heard before or since. To be honest with you, I didn't much like it at first.
When we went into the New England states, people were talking about the new sound of Flatt & Scruggs, but we had been doing that sound for 20 years.
Earl Scruggs had this thing that it wasn't just the technique or even the instrument. It was him. There was this soulful quality that came through that made you - if you're somebody like me who was, I guess, supposed to play the banjo, it made you stop in your tracks, and you couldn't do anything until you got done hearing him play, and then immediately you'd have to go try and find a banjo.
I would go for the biggest guy on the team, dump the puck in. I would chase after it because I was very fast. If I wanted to get a big hit, I would have to leap into the guy. The guy would be maybe a 6-3 defenseman, 220, I would leap into this guy and plow him over. He would just fall to the ground. That was my thing.
The bottom line is, between Sonny Osborne and Earl Scruggs, I better know how to play banjo. I had the greatest teachers in the world.
It was right after 9/11 and I decided to walk around the grounds of the Pentagon, because I had never been there. Out of nowhere comes this speeding camouflaged golf cart and this guy starts yelling at me, 'What do you think you're doing!' The guy wrote my name down and began to follow me before I got really scared and took off as fast as I could.
There's a whole generation of women who never really heard the word investment before, when it came to fashion. They've been buying things because they were cheap.
I don't think punk fashion is a specter or overemphasized - it made a big impression, as there had never been anything like it before.
He [Earl Scruggs] was really cool because he was very quiet, and he wouldn't say much, but then he would come out with a quip that was like so perfect and so brilliant, very smart.
They began to tune up, and suddenly the auditorium was filled with a single sound - the most alive, three-dimensional thing I had ever heard. It made the hairs on my skin stand up, my breath catch in my throat....I felt the music like a physical thing; it didn't just sit in my ears, it flowed through me, around me, made my senses vibrate. It made my skin prickle and my palms dampen...It was the most beautiful thing I had ever heard.
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