Earl Scruggs 100th birthday concert celebrates bluegrass' legacy at Ryman Auditorium
For four hours on Saturday evening, Nashville's Ryman Auditorium hosted the persistent, echoing crescendo of a capacity crowd of foot-stomping bluegrass devotees celebrating banjo player Earl Scruggs' 100th birthday.
The timeless pioneer is a Grand Ole Opry-beloved Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award, National Medal of Arts winner, and Country Music and International Bluegrass Music Hall of Fame inductee.
In celebration, three dozen iconic performers played almost three dozen songs -- and played with minutes to spare near midnight -- at country music's Mother Church.
Scruggs passed away in 2012. But, as noted from the stage in a reading from his 1970s-era organizer by his granddaughter, he desired his work to inspire happiness, love, togetherness, and warmth. Those notions being derived from a unique, three-finger picking style that event emcee and preeminent bluegrass historian Thomas Goldsmith noted, informed his songs with an iconic "ferocity, fever, and inventiveness" comparable in impact to the innovative work of Louis Armstong, Jimi Hendrix and Charlie Parker, is unique.
These are four takeaways from the spirited event.
Saturday night's festivities follow in a lineage, aid in establishing a timeless legacy
Saturday evening's event was similar to the informal buffet dinner and "pickin' session" at Scruggs' former annual birthday celebration at his nine-bedroom, 10,000 square-foot home on "First Lady Acres," and 8-acre spread 10 minutes south of Music Row.
Every January for many years, Scruggs' birthday was celebrated by a party at his home on Franklin Road in Nashville. Names including "Whisperin'" Bill Anderson, Jerry Douglas, Béla Fleck, Vince Gill, Josh Graves, Tom T. Hall, Emmylou Harris, Tim O'Brien, Marty Stuart, Travis Tritt, Porter Wagoner and Mac Wiseman attended that event.
A smattering of those names was present on Saturday evening (namely dobro legend Douglas and jazz-inspired bluegrass legend Fleck), alongside Gena Britt, Alison Brown, Sam Bush, The Earls of Leicester band, Sierra Hull, Michael Cleveland, Del McCoury, the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band's Jeff Hanna, Jerry Pentecost, Tony Trischka and Abigail Washburn, among many.
Proceeds from the event benefitted the Earl Scruggs Center, founded in Shelby, North Carolina, near his birthplace. The $5.5 million facility celebrates Scruggs' musical contributions plus is a bluegrass educational center.
The breadth of reach of Scruggs' art celebrated
When regarded in retrospect, The Ryman's Saturday evening playlist foremost celebrated how Earl Scruggs' sound and style are fundamental to the permanent entrenchment of country and folk music's soulful authenticity in the American and global pop cultural consciousness.
Scruggs began his career replacing David "Stringbean" Akeman in bluegrass godfather Bill Monroe's Bluegrass Boys band. Thus, hearing Bush, Stuart Duncan, McCoury, Jim Mill and more play Monroe's 1945 waltz "Blue Moon of Kentucky" obviously wakes echoes to the lineage between Monroe and crew's Appalachian blues-defined "high lonesome sound" and Elvis Presley's proto-rock and roll style cover of what is now Kentucky's state song.
Then, hearing a 10-piece band mimicking Scruggs' final mainstream-successful act, the Earl Scruggs Revue, play a take on Jimmie Rodgers' country classic "Blue Yodel No. 1 (T for Texas)" offered both why Rogers was a key influence on artists including Johnny Cash, Béla Fleck, George Harrison and Lynyrd Skynyrd's Ronnie Van Zant, but how Scruggs' stylings expanded interest in folk-styled blues to artists including The Byrds, Arlo Guthrie, the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band (and inspiring their 1973 album "Will The Circle Be Unbroken"), Linda Ronstadt, Steppenwolf and James Taylor.
More profound yet, the night closed with a full-stage jam session familiar to his 25-year pairing with guitarist and mandolinist Lester Flatt. Hearing both their multigenerational smash "Foggy Mountain Breakdown" and "The Ballad of Jed Clampett," the theme music for 1960s era television sitcom The Beverly Hillbillies (and Scruggs' first No. 1 Billboard hit) highlighted how a nation's earnest truths can be told within three chords.
Del McCoury, a keeper of the flame
Twenty-five years after Flatt and Scruggs left Bill Monroe's Bluegrass Boys, Erie, Pennsylvania native McCoury became linearly tied to Scruggs once he was hired as a banjo player, like Scruggs was prior for the band, in 1963. Notable, too, is how McCoury evolved as a lead vocalist and rhythm guitarist in the act -- and over the next six decades of his standard-bearing and setting career.
To wit, McCoury was onstage for roughly half of the evening.
It's powerful to watch a virtuoso in concert with other peerless craftspeople. When paired with McCoury's blend of noble bluegrasser and honky-tonk rocker, Sam Bush's unique gift of almost picking and shredding notes on a mandolin adds flexibility to a song. Those notions, aided by layers of grooves, harmonies, and melodies, allow a composition to emerge past whatever reserved, staid notions songs nearly a century old conjure in one's mind.
Dig into McCoury onstage alongside New York-based psychedelic bluegrass performer and music educator Tony Trischka and the mellow intricacies of his style -- as opposed to the more direct and dynamic playing of McCoury -- creates an interplay that elevates the connectivity and quality of the song while also highlighting the players' unique strengths.
The Earls of Leicester
The evening featured extended performances by three combos that celebrated Scruggs' most prominent tandem work. Decade-old Grammy-winning sextet The Earls of Leicester (pronounced Lester) playing songs from the Flatt and Scruggs catalog was an ideal choice.
Foremost, the group averages four decades of experience apiece between them. Notable, too, is Cushman and Warren's work as a tandem mirroring the influence of Flatt And Scruggs. Key to this is Warren's late father, Paul, playing in Flatt and Earl Scruggs' Foggy Mountain Boys band between 1954 and 1969. Banjo picker Jeff White also toured with Scruggs at various points in his career.
There's something about them being a tall-hatted and polyester suit-wearing unit that would imply they could be an "awkward cover band." However, their fundamental knowledge of the genre, honest adoration for the legacy of the sound (and the aesthetics it inspired), plus knowing what of that legacy has bled into the work of artists including Guy Clark, Alison Krauss, Loretta Lynn, Ricky Skaggs and more evolves their art to meet a timeless standard.
This article originally appeared on Nashville Tennessean: Earl Scruggs 100th birthday concert celebrates bluegrass' legacy at Ryman Auditorium
