(Editor’s Note: For Earl Scruggs’s birthday, Thomas Goldsmith revisits a star-studded bluegrass festival tribute to the banjo legend from 1971 in Camp Springs, North Carolina. The 102nd anniversary of Scruggs’s 1924 birth in Flint Hill, North Carolina, is January 6, 2026.)
Like speakers at a testimonial dinner, each musician strode to the microphone in turn.
But instead of heaping on words of praise, a stage full of well-known pickers and up-and-comers used banjos to pay a lively tribute to Earl Scruggs.
The scene was the 1971 Labor Day weekend bluegrass festival in Camp Springs, North Carolina, at a performance where some of the best banjo players around joined Scruggs on stage. Led by the five-string king himself, banjoists including Sonny Osborne, J.D. Crowe, Bill Emerson, and Alan Munde jointly played Scruggs’s signature tune “Foggy Mountain Breakdown,” some 22 years after its first recording.
The performance is a highlight of the 1972 documentary Bluegrass Country Soul, which enjoyed a 50-year deluxe re-release five years ago. Watch the clip here.
Promoter Carlton Haney invited more than a dozen banjo players on the festival schedule to play along with Scruggs, who was then 47. (A second group performance, of “Dear Old Dixie,” doesn’t appear in the film. And a couple of the “Foggy Mountain Breakdown” performers didn’t make it to the screen.)
Millions of viewers have seen the clip as part of the movie or on YouTube, with Osborne bringing Scruggs on with an introduction that sounds starstruck.
“(It’d) be only right to call out probably the man that has made all of us guys up here play the banjo, or either has been a great influence, as he has in my complete life,” Osborne said. “In my whole banjo-playing ability … I could probably credit to this one man.
“Let’s all give a tremendous welcome to probably the best in the world, Earl Scruggs!”
Scruggs seemed overwhelmed by the audience’s ovation. The cheering feels as though it lasts forever, but took only a minute and a few seconds.
“That really fills my heart with joy,” Scruggs said after Osborne introduced him. “I did want to say one thing: Thank you, and guys like this is what keeps me going, my boys who works with me and you people who keep preaching music.
“I just don’t know what to say, except I’m picking with some guys that plays a tremendous amount of banjo. Don’t underestimate anybody up here. Man, they’re great.”
Earl at a Crossroads
In 1971, Scruggs had only broken up with his longtime duet partner Lester Flatt less than two years earlier. Not even a month before Camp Springs he had recorded along with other greats for Nitty Gritty Dirt Band’s country-roots-popularizing Will the Circle Be Unbroken set. He was venturing into a country-rock sound with his band the Earl Scruggs Revue, along with his sons Randy, Gary, and Steve.
However, Scruggs’s work as a musical innovator remained – and remains – fundamental to the way a large share of bluegrass banjo players address the instrument. That’s true despite the introduction of a single-note style most associated with Don Reno and a chromatic or melodic approach heard in the playing of Bill Keith and Bobby Thompson.
Most of the pickers in the 1971 “Foggy Mountain Breakdown” performance used the three-finger picking style Scruggs introduced in a band with Bill Monroe and Flatt on the Grand Ole Opry in 1945. The exception among the Camp Springs pickers, Rick Riman of the New Deal String Band, caused something of a stir with his chromatic rendition of the tune, not to mention his long hair, full beard, and striped shirt and pants.
How did Riman, who had also studied Scruggs style closely, decide to use the flowing melodic style for “Foggy Mountain Breakdown”?
“I just thought, “OK, let’s see if I can make this work,’” Riman, 83, said on the phone from Denver, Colorado, speaking to BGS in January 2026. “Because I had not prepared anything, and I didn’t even know what was on the program. They just said they want all the banjo players up there to pay tribute to Earl. And I said, ‘OK, I’ll get up there and do it.’”
And what has the reaction been?
“Mostly negative,” he said, with a touch of humor.
“One person said they were really glad to see somebody step out of the standardized [method], and that felt very, very good. Somebody else said, ‘You won’t believe how many people thought that you shouldn’t have been on stage at all.’
“And I get that a lot. That’s mostly the reaction I get, that I shouldn’t have been on stage. I shouldn’t have even been in the parking lot, like the least talented person on the stage and probably the least talented person in the whole park.”
The chromatic style remains one effective tool in the hands of players such as Béla Fleck and Noam Pikelny, but Riman, 28 that day in 1971, has gotten a load of grief over his choice to add some variety to the line of Scruggs-style players. “I would say, over the years, it’s pretty much been like 50-plus years of derision,” he said.
Riman has had one regret. “I should have practiced more,” he said. “I should have been better, but I had no idea.”
Although at Camp Springs he performed in the more recently created melodic and chromatic styles, like everyone on the stage that day in North Carolina, Riman was schooled in the style of the man honored beside them.
“I was really fascinated by Earl and anybody else who played his style pretty well,” he said.
“Everybody Headed for the Stage”
We were fortunate to reach three of the banjo warriors who performed that day. Sadly, most of the players heard then have since died. Eddie Hoyle, then 14, the youngest of the Camp Springs lineup, is among the survivors and is still actively performing. He talked to BGS on the phone in December from his home in Georgia.
“I was up there playing with Curtis Blackwell and the Dixie Bluegrass Boys and I just remember them telling me that Carlton wanted all the banjo players to come down on the stage and play a tune with Earl,” said Hoyle, now 68. “So I got my banjo out, and everybody headed for the stage.
“I didn’t know if I’d get to take a break or not, but somebody got me in the line that was walking up to the mic. So it was pretty cool. And I remember I was not nervous; OK, probably didn’t know enough to be nervous.”
Most of the players that day stuck fairly close to Scruggs’s own licks on “Foggy Mountain Breakdown,” but Hoyle and others ventured a bit from the classic performance.
“I always tried to learn the right way, as Dad told us to do, but then I would try to put my own twist on it,” Hoyle said.
Nearly half the banjo players that day have been inducted into the Bluegrass Music Hall of Fame. They include Scruggs himself, of course, as well as J.D. Crowe, Bill Emerson, Alan Munde, Sonny Osborne, and Don Stover. Another banjo picker, Saburo Watanabe Inoue, founder of the pioneering Japanese band Bluegrass 45, won the IBMA’s Distinguished Achievement award along with his brother Toshio, in 1995.
Alan Munde Remembers it Well
Munde, 79, still a player and teacher, also spoke to BGS about the experience from his home in Springfield, Missouri. He recalled that he was playing with Jimmy Martin and the Sunny Mountain Boys at the festival and took part in the group performance because Martin wanted him to.
“Thinking back on it and also remembering at the time, I didn’t really want to be a part of it, just because, then and now, I thought I would be so unworthy,” Munde said. “But I think Jimmy wanted me to do it, and you notice he’s there [in the film.] He thought I needed to be there, so I did it.”
Munde remembers the day as a landmark for him, the only time he heard Scruggs play live. Given all the great banjoists and backing musicians including Martin and Charlie Waller, it was an enchanting moment from the sound of Scruggs’s first lick.
“The thing that I remember so much about it is … we’re all standing there and Earl’s talking, and then he’s going to start to play,” he said. “And he, I always call this his ‘chang,’ where he just plays the first, third, and fifth string together and starts into the tune.
“As soon as he did that, I thought, ‘Oh my God, there’s that sound.’ It just was immediately apparent that he was the one.”
Like the first players to tune into Scruggs’s playing in 1945 and like players from Béla Fleck on, Munde appreciates Scruggs’s sound in a way that seems almost mystical. Scruggs produced something that no other banjo player could.
Jimmy Martin, Munde’s boss at the time, used to tell a story involving the great banjo man Vic Jordan to illustrate the way Scruggs’s beautifully nuanced playing and full tone stood above the crowd of his followers.
“Jimmy was kind of down on Vic Jordan a little bit,” Munde said. “And he would tell this story to show that Vic didn’t know the right way. He said when Vic met Earl, he asked him what kind of microphone he used.
“And Earl said, ‘Sometimes I use those little bitty ones, and sometimes I use those real big ones.’
“And Jimmy’s point was that, in his mind, Vic was asking because he thought it was the microphone. But it didn’t matter. It all sounded like Earl every time.”
And hearing Scruggs’s sound that day at Camp Springs, not through a mic, not on a record, but right there next to him on stage, made Munde think the whole exercise was somehow wrong.
“When he did that pinch, I thought, ‘Oh, God, I don’t want to be a part of this.’ What we should have done is just stood back and listened to him, and then said, ‘Do it again.’”
Despite his misgivings at the time, Munde has wound up glad that he took part in the Earl-fest that day.
“Looking back on it, it’s been nothing but good for me, that I got to be there,” he said. “Here it is, 50 years later, people still bring it up. It’s helped get me a little legacy recognition, that I was there, so that’s been real good.”
A Star-Studded Lineup
The career of Sonny Osborne has been well documented, but Bluegrass Country Soul makes clear his admiration and friendship with Scruggs. During the tumult of applause following his introduction, Scruggs asked if he could say something, and Osborne appears to grin and say, “Not yet.” And Osborne cracks up when Scruggs uses his up-the-neck solo from “Foggy Mountain Breakdown” during the last time around for the tune.
Bill Emerson, whose long career included membership in the Country Gentlemen and much more, was interviewed at the time of the re-release of Bluegrass Country Soul. He talked about the pantheon of great banjo players.
“Don Reno, he had his style on the banjo; Earl Scruggs, he had his style on the banjo; Ralph Stanley, he had a style on the banjo,” Emerson said in the set’s booklet. “And on the radio, I could listen to any of them, just the first few notes of an intro, and tell you who was playing. Just by the style that they were playing, the tone that they had, and the timbre. Most people, when they started out playing the banjo back then, they got a bunch of Earl Scruggs’s records and sat down and tried to learn to play like Earl. But it’s mighty hard to sound like Earl, I can tell you. I was never able to do that, so I just tried to sound like Bill Emerson.”
Also on the show was multi-instrumentalist Jimmy Arnold (1952-1992), whose career was one of a kind, including excursions into Southern rock and solo albums on guitar and banjo as well as stints with Cliff Waldron, Charlie Moore, and the New Tradition, according to a 1983 Bluegrass Unlimited story. The article, by Chris Wathen, quoted Arnold on Scruggs: “When you learn all of what you think is hard stuff and then go back and try to play one of his tunes, you find out what the hard stuff really is. It’s his stuff. To play with that much power and volume, you’ve really got to be on top of things.”
Another of the clip’s well-known pickers, Don Stover (1928-1996), had been an early convert to Scruggs style, learning it not long after Scruggs’s first performances with Monroe, according to the Bluegrass Music Hall of Fame.
Stover was known for his work with brothers Bea and Everett Lilly during many years of performances in Boston. He played and recorded as a member of Bill Monroe’s Blue Grass Boys in 1957, even contributing harmony vocals to “In Despair.”
Earl’s son Randy, who appears playing an archtop banjo just before the end of the clip, went on to a distinguished career as a musician, songwriter, and producer.
Doing Their Times
The 55th anniversary of this notable moment in bluegrass will arrive in September. Looking back, the picking ranges from respectable to spectacular, but doesn’t maintain the dead-even tempo that’s supposed to prevail in bluegrass music. Fans remember the story that Earl and brother Horace Scruggs, as boys, used to start playing a tune, then separate to walk around their Flint Hill house in opposite directions. The idea was to check if they were still in time with each other after being out of earshot.
The dozen players on the Camp Springs group number would not have passed this test, based on a stopwatch run-through. While Scruggs’s December 1949 original recording had consistent solos of right at 11 seconds, he started the round robin at about 12.69 seconds and tempos wavered from there.
By the start of Riman’s melodic solo, near the end, the time was more than half a second slower. Randy and Earl Scruggs wrapped things up at roughly the same tempo.
But that’s just a quibble.
Remembering Earl
Bluegrass Country Soul director Albert Ihde did bluegrass lovers a real service by capturing these moments and others at the Camp Springs festival. And promoter Haney had another brainstorm resembling the story, pronounced “stoah-ry,” that he recreated of Bill Monroe and former band members six years earlier at Fincastle, Virginia.
Viewers will keep calling up the video for its closeups of Earl, smiling and even bobbing up and down for his breaks, and for the scenes of several of his outstanding followers, appreciating their moments on stage as they rolled their way through “Foggy Mountain Breakdown.”
Many videos of Flatt & Scruggs can be found on the web that illustrate Earl Scruggs’s unmatched musicianship. In the Bluegrass Country Soul segment viewers can also see a strong memorial to Earl Eugene Scruggs the person, his warmth, humor, and unselfishness as well as his brilliance as a musician.
Thomas Goldsmith is an award-winning journalist based in Tennessee and North Carolina. In addition to producing many hundreds of articles for newspapers and magazines, he edited The Bluegrass Reader and authored Earl Scruggs and Foggy Mountain Breakdown: The Making of an American Classic, both books for the University of Illinois Press.
Learn more about Bluegrass Country Soul and purchase a Golden Anniversary Legacy Edition box set of the film here. Read more about the box set and the making of the film here.
All photos courtesy of Albert Ihde, Ellen Pasternack, and Bluegrass Country Soul, Inc. Lead image: Earl Scruggs (left) and son, Randy Scruggs (right), perform “Foggy Mountain Breakdown” flanked by bluegrass banjo stars of 1971.
