By DAN ARMONAITIS
When Raleigh, N.C.-based journalist, musician and author Thomas Goldsmith, better known as Tommy, thinks about the area of the country he’s headed to this weekend in promotion of his new book, “Earl Scruggs and Foggy Mountain Breakdown: The Making of an American Classic,” he immediately recognizes how special it is.
“The road between Spartanburg and Shelby (N.C.); if there’s a bluegrass banjo axis, that’s it,” Goldsmith said. “So many of the great players came from there. From Earl to Don Reno to Snuffy Jenkins, it was really just a center of that kind of music.”
Goldsmith will read from and discuss his book about Scruggs and one of the most famous instrumentals ever recorded during afternoon appearances on Saturday, Nov. 23 at the Earl Scruggs Center in Shelby and on Sunday, Nov. 24 at Hub City Bookshop in Spartanburg.
The former is a museum housed in a building that used to serve as the Cleveland County Courthouse not far from the nearby Flint Hill community where Scruggs was born and raised, while the latter is in the downtown area of the Upstate South Carolina city in which Scruggs made his radio debut on WSPA.
Years in the making, “Earl Scruggs and Foggy Mountain Breakdown” draws from countless hours of research by Goldsmith as well as personal interviews with everyone from Scruggs and Scruggs’ wife Louise to banjo disciple Bela Fleck and sidemen such as Curly Seckler, Mac Wiseman and Jerry Douglas.
“It was originally conceived as a book about a lot of different bluegrass songs, maybe 13 or 14 that I thought had not gotten their due, like ‘Rocky Top’ and ‘Blue Moon of Kentucky’ — songs that have been done so much that it’s kind of like you can’t see the tree for the forest,” Goldsmith said. “Of course, first among them was ‘Foggy Mountain Breakdown.'”
Recorded by Flatt and Scruggs and the Foggy Mountain Boys for Mercury Records in 1949, “Foggy Mountain Breakdown” changed the face of American music with Scruggs’ instrumental wizardry essentially transforming the folk culture that came before it while helping to energize bluegrass’s entry into the mainstream in the 1960s. It was famously used as the driving force to the soundtrack for the landmark 1967 film, “Bonnie and Clyde,” starring Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway.
“It showed that banjo in the hands of Earl Scruggs could have this galvanizing, electrifying impact on people to the point that it converted many musicians and even young people who were not musicians at all to attempt to play Earl style,” Goldsmith said. “And that created a wave of interest in bluegrass music and folk-country music to the point that the banjo was able to survive at a point when it had mostly been relegated to being used as a comedic prop.
“And it also helped preserve this music from the region we’re talking about, because who knows what would have happened to old-time string music if it had not been transformed to bluegrass?”
Before “Foggy Mountain Breakdown,” Scruggs and his musical partner Lester Flatt had been members of the Blue Grass Boys, a highly-influential group led by Bill Monroe, the man considered by music historians as “the father of bluegrass.”
While the book, published by University of Illinois Press, contains plenty of biographical details and interesting anecdotes, it’s not a biography, per se. Instead, it focuses primarily on how the two minutes and 43 seconds that comprise the classic recording of “Foggy Mountain Breakdown” came to be and how its impact revolutionized American music.
There’s even an entire chapter devoted specifically to how the tune works musically.
“You can still hear Earl’s playing in just about any banjo player,” Goldsmith said. “I mean, I can’t think of a banjo player of note who doesn’t employ some of those licks and techniques, whether he learned them directly from Earl or secondhand from J.D. Crowe or Bela Fleck.”
Of course, Goldsmith is fascinated by the biographical details of Scruggs’ childhood.
“Here’s a guy who lived in a suburb of Boiling Springs (N.C.), which was not a huge place either, but he lived out in Flint Hill and his family farmed,” Goldsmith said. “His parents, I think, were reasonably educated; his dad was a bookkeeper as well as being a farmer and his mom played organ in the church, so they were by no means slack-jawed hillbillies. But here came Earl, the youngest son — his dad died when he was four — and he had this incredible musical aptitude and worked and worked and worked at it while also working on the farm and later at the thread mill in Shelby, and he became acclaimed and wealthy and famous.
“I don’t think it’s a Horatio Alger story, but it’s certainly inspiring to think that he — like Robert Johnson or Woody Guthrie or some other notable examples — was able to sort of rise to the top. I mean, he played for a number of presidents and was honored with pretty much every award that you can get, and he did it out of a modest background.”
Goldsmith, whose own music background includes having played with Spartanburg natives Walter Hyatt and Champ Hood in a roots-oriented band called The Contenders, said he’s fortunate to have had the opportunity to interview Scruggs, who died in 2012 at age 88, for the book.
“I had known Earl for several years and interviewed him several times, but I wanted to talk to him specifically about this tune,” he said. “Now, of course, there are a hundred questions that I wish I had asked.”
Goldsmith then noted how humble and unassuming Scruggs was as a person.
“You’ve met stars before where they’re kind of talking to you but their eyes are kind of casting around the room to see if somebody more important is there,” Goldsmith said. “Well, that was not Earl. He would focus on you and talk to you. And he had a great memory, not for everything, but for lots of stuff about his childhood and the community in which he was raised. … He lived through a whole lot of change but had retained his essential graciousness and good manners and consideration of other people.”