Tag: Jody Maphis

Bluegrass Memoirs: The Earl Scruggs Revue Early Recordings

Posted on by Justin Hiltner

In our last Bluegrass Memoir, “Beginnings,” I described David Hoffman’s documentary, Earl Scruggs with his Family and Friends. By the time NET aired it, the Revue was already off and rolling with Earl’s new music.

In 1970, bluegrass festivals – the first was in 1965 – were becoming quite popular. The music’s supporters had discovered that such events could present their favorite music to broader, younger, urban audiences. These larger crowds brought their tastes and preferences with them. At these booming festivals, new acts like the Earl Scruggs Revue spoke to musical perspectives shaped by contemporary popular music.

The Revue played to large numbers at Monroe’s Bean Blossom Festival that spring and to Carlton Haney’s Camp Springs Festival on Labor Day weekend. Earl’s solo album, Nashville’s Rock, and Randy and Gary’s solo album, All the Way Home, were released that year.

The Earl Scruggs Revue at Bill Monroe’s annual Bean Blossom festival, Bean Blossom, Indiana, June 1970. (L-R) Unidentified bassist, Jody Maphis, Randy Scruggs, Earl Scruggs, Gary Scruggs, and Leah Jane Berinati. Photo by Carl Fleischhauer.

In 1971, Columbia released Earl Scruggs: His Family and Friends (C 30584), a soundtrack album that included much of the content of Hoffman’s documentary along with two additional fine vocals by Doc Watson. In its liner notes, Don DeVito characterized the show’s topic:

Earl Scruggs is a man who has paid his dues. You can forget the generation gap … Earl has always been an innovator and an adventurer…

Also in 1971, newgrass music emerged. Its key figure at that time was singer-songwriter and banjoist John Hartford, whose “Gentle on My Mind” had been a 1967 Glen Campbell hit. John had flourished in the LA television business as a writer for The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour and a performer on The Glen Campbell Goodtime Hour.

Hartford and Scruggs – they’d met in 1953 – had developed what Bob Carlin, in My Memories of John Hartford (University Press of Mississippi) calls “a deep friendship.” When Hartford returned to Nashville in 1971, he recorded what is now considered the first newgrass album, Aereo-Plain. The Revue’s Randy Scruggs played bass on this ground-breaking disc alongside Tut Taylor, Vassar Clements, and Norman Blake.

The Revue and Hartford were at the center of Nashville’s jam-based music, which embraced musicians from new scenes blending rock and older genres – folk, bluegrass, and country. Both bands appeared at a number of bluegrass festivals in 1971 and the Revue was busy recording in Nashville.

I Saw The Light With Some Help From My Friends (1972)

Earl was working on his next album, I Saw The Light With Some Help From My Friends: Earl Scruggs with Special Guest Stars. The back liners of the album (Columbia KC31354) described it as “Earl Scruggs and The Earl Scruggs Revue in performances with Linda Ronstadt/The Nitty Gritty Dirt Band/Stacey Belson and Arloff Boguslavaki.”

Stacey Belson was a pseudonym for blues singer Tracy Nelson, then with the band Mother Earth. Arloff Boguslavaki was Bob Dylan’s pseudonym.

Bill Williams’ liner notes describe the fabulous jam sessions that were happening at the Scruggs family house – hence the album’s concept:

Picture, if you will, the group sitting around together at the Scruggs home (although the actual locale was shifted to Columbia Studios) …

For this album, the studio became the living room and the producer was Don Law, the Nashville vet who’d worked in the ’30s with blues legend Robert Johnson and western swing pioneer Bob Wills and in the ’50s with Flatt & Scruggs.

At this Scruggs family jam session were Earl and sons along with their Madison High School contemporary, drummer Jody Maphis. Also in the room were fiddler Vassar Clements, in the process of moving from Hartford’s band to join the Revue, and several others who’d later join the Revue, including pianist Bob Wilson, a Detroit R&B musician who’d moved to Nashville and subsequently recorded with Bob Dylan.

Each of the featured star guests are heard in solo, sometimes singing in harmony with each other. Earl plays on every cut. Great to hear his backup work with all its nuances! Randy’s lead guitar and Vassar’s fiddling appear throughout.

It was as if these people had showed up at the Scruggs home one evening to play for and with each other – an old-fashioned domestic music session, with the host going around the room inviting each to perform and providing musical backups for all. The evening’s repertoire was the kind of stuff you might expect at such an event: mostly recent country, folk, blues and rock – things you might have heard on the radio lately in 1971.

The sound was that of contemporary popular music, suggesting that this was what you’d hear if the Earl Scruggs Revue came to your living room, festival, or auditorium.

The album’s first side opens with an LA country soul rock tune, Bonnie and Delaney’s “Lonesome and a Long Way From Home.” Gary is singing lead and playing bass; Nelson adds harmony. This is rocking R&B – Wilson’s piano opens the break and, with fiddle and drums, keeps it rocking to the end. Earl’s banjo is out front throughout.

Next comes Merle Haggard’s “Silver Wings,” sung by Linda Ronstadt with harmony by Nelson. The backup piano and Dobro are joined by a fiddle break. Straight-ahead Nashville country.

Track three features “Boguslavaki” (Dylan) singing Charles E. Baer’s 1896 hit, “It’s a Picture From Life’s Other Side,” a song that had gone into the folk tradition and been frequently recorded by hillbilly and gospel singers in the ’20s and ’30s. The laid-back fiddle, bass, and drums, along with Nelson’s harmony on the chorus, mark this as a parlor folksong.

It’s followed by Nelson’s performance of “Motherless Child Blues,” where accompanying musicians Earl, Norman Blake, Randy, and Vassar stretch out with some nice blues breaks.

This side closes with Mike Nesmith’s “Some of Shelley’s Blues,” performed with members of the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band, with Gary Scruggs and Jeff Hanna doing the singing and Earl and Randy both taking instrumental breaks.

The second side of the album opens with a vocal by Gary on another Bonnie and Delaney cover, “Never Ending Song of Love.” Ronstadt sings a county cover, Cash’s “Ring of Fire.”

Dylan brings out another pre-war country folk oldie, a great “Banks of the Ohio.” While Nelson is featured singing folksinger Bruce “Utah” Phillips’ “Rock Salt and Nails,” a song first recorded by Flatt & Scruggs in 1965, with Ronstadt adding harmony on the chorus.

The Nitty Gritty Dirt Band contributes another Nesmith song, “Propinquity.” The side closes with the album’s title track, a sing-along for everyone, “I Saw the Light.” The album was released in 1972.

Will the Circle Be Unbroken (1972)

Around the same time as I Saw The Light was made, banjoist John McEuen of the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band asked Earl to be on their new three-LP concept album, Will The Circle Be Unbroken. Scruggs was playing in Denver with the Revue when he and McEuen met. The Dirt Band’s sound, with McEuen’s skilled Scruggs-style banjo, appealed to him, as did their project to honor and make music with the earlier generation’s pioneers. That had been his own goal in bringing Maybelle Carter into the studio to record with Flatt & Scruggs back in 1961.

Earl, well-connected in Nashville as an Opry star with record, television, and movie hits, helped bring a number of his country music friends into the project. Both Gary and Randy were also involved, as were several of Hartford’s Aereo-Plain band members, notably fiddler Vassar Clements and Dobro player Norman Blake.

Unlike Earl’s Nashville’s Rock album, which covered recent rock and pop hits on the banjo with Nashville studio backing including electric instruments and, on several cuts, a soulful female vocal trio and a string section, this album had completely acoustic backup by the Dirt Band as they covered legacy hits by country, bluegrass and folk pioneers like Roy Acuff, Maybelle Carter, Doc Watson, and Jimmy Martin.

Earl played a pivotal role in the making of these recordings, playing guitar or banjo on sixteen tracks. The whole Scruggs family can be heard: Randy contributed guitar, autoharp, or voice on eleven tracks, Gary sang on eight, and Louise and Steve sang on one track.

Of the many interesting performances on this award-winning album, Randy Scruggs’ acoustic guitar version of “Both Sides Now” was perhaps the most remarkable; the final selection in the set, it followed a group sing-along of the title track, similar to the closing on the Earl’s I Saw The Light, in which all of the Scruggses sang. These recordings, released in 1972, were made in August 1971.

The Scruggs Brothers (1972)

Also recorded in 1971 was Gary and Randy’s second Vanguard album, The Scruggs Brothers (Vanguard VSD 6579). Some of the same musicians who played on I Saw The Light performed here, like Tracy Nelson, the Dirt Band’s Jeff Hanna and John McEuen, pianist Bob Wilson, and drummer Karl Himmel; but the album had more of a country rock sound. It opened with “Little Maggie,” a song Flatt & Scruggs had recorded at Carnegie Hall in 1962. With Gary’s bass and Jody Maphis’ drums leading the way, it sounded something like the Nashville studio A-listers Area Code 615’s 1969 version.

Throughout the album, Randy played a majority of the solo breaks, some on acoustic guitar but most on electric, in a heavy metal style similar to what I heard him playing in Maine in 1975. Four tracks were their own compositions, two by Gary and two collaborations.

On one, the instrumental “Trousdale Ferry Rag,” Earl played banjo. This up-tempo, bluegrass-style piece has an unusual ending, shifting to a slow blues beat. Most notable is Gary’s “Lowlands,” a great ballad set to the tune of Earl’s “Sally Ann,” which both brothers had been hearing at home all of their lives (Flatt & Scruggs recorded it in 1960). Gary plays guitar, Randy picks banjo.

Covers of older (dare we say traditional?) material includes a rocking version of Jimmie Rodgers’ “T for Texas,” and the other cut on which Earl played banjo, “Hobo’s Lullaby,” which features a sing-along chorus similar to that on the closing of the I Saw The Light and Will The Circle Be Unbroken albums. Another older piece was “The Johnson Boys” (Flatt & Scruggs did it 1962) on which John McEuen’s frailed banjo created the album’s most old-timey sound.

The Earl Scruggs Revue at Bill Monroe’s annual Bean Blossom festival, Bean Blossom, Indiana, June 1970. Randy Scruggs, Earl Scruggs, and Gary Scruggs. Photo by Carl Fleischhauer.

The boys’ continuing involvement with country rock is reflected in two songs that originated in 1967 with the LA band Hearts and Flowers. “Rock and Roll Gypsies,” which closes the first side of the album, seems to have been an attempt to garner radio play – it’s the only track on the record to include string section backup. The other Hearts and Flowers-connected track, “Bugler,” a sad song about the death of a dog, had recently been covered by Clarence White with the Byrds.

Live at Kansas State (1972)

During this year of extensive studio recording, the Revue was also out playing on the road. Although Earl Scruggs: His Family and Friends included a few examples of the group in action outside the studio, Live at Kansas State (Columbia KC 31758) was their first full show album.

Many of the songs the Revue did at this 1972 concert remained in the band’s regular repertoire and showed up, for example, at the 1975 Maine concert, including “T for Texas,” “Paul and Silas” (they titled it “Bound in Jail All Night Long”), “Sally Goodin[g],” “Carolina Boogie,” “Everybody Wants to Go to Heaven,” and “Foggy Mountain Breakdown.”

Several were on their recent albums, like “You Ain’t Going Nowhere” and “Both Sides Now.” Bluegrass classics included “Good Woman’s Love” and “Bugle Call Rag.”

In 1998, a reviewer for No Depression wrote that Live at Kansas State was “probably their album most deserving of a full reissue … a surprisingly cohesive ‘bluegrass-rock’ blend, the likes of which has seldom been heard since.”

In 1972, the band included fiddler Vassar Clements and Dobroist Josh Graves, a bluegrass icon who’d just left Lester Flatt’s band. The album package has several photos of the band; these are notable in that they include everyone but pianist Bob Wilson, who is very much present in the album’s audio.

Wilson had moved to Nashville from Detroit’s R&B scene. His first years in Nashville were slow going, but that changed when Bob Dylan came to town to record Nashville Skyline and wanted “a funkier piano sound than the usual Nashville cat could produce.” The success of his work on Dylan’s album gave him plenty of studio work and he also found time to go on the road with Scruggs.

“When I was with the Earl Scruggs Revue,” he recalled, “Earl always introduced the band, and when he came to me, he always told the crowd, ‘And this is the man who played piano on Nashville Skyline, Bob Wilson.’ I must admit the applause felt really good.”

In his memoir, Bluegrass Bluesman, Graves spoke of the challenges he enjoyed while rocking with the Revue: “Earl and that bunch forced you to work up new licks. You had to come in there on the stuff they were playing. It was so loud I couldn’t hardly stand it, but I really enjoyed it. It opened a lot of doors for me. They were into a lot of things. …”

“Earl was doing the same old tunes with a little modern touch. Earl got bored with bluegrass – I’ll tell you that. He just didn’t want to play it anymore. They had that big beat, that sound behind it, and that’s what he liked.”

“He’d play ‘Foggy Mountain Breakdown’ with that band and people would go wild.”

I saw this, too, in Orono in 1975.

The Revue carried on into the early ‘80s, with albums that drew from contemporary pop music and brought younger country, folk, and rock stars in as guest artists. We’ll touch on a few of these next time.

(Editor’s Note: Read our prior Bluegrass Memoir on the Earl Scruggs Revue here.)

Neil V. Rosenberg is an author, scholar, historian, banjo player, Bluegrass Music Hall of Fame inductee, and co-chair of the IBMA Foundation’s Arnold Shultz Fund.

Photo of Rosenberg by Terri Thomson Rosenberg.
Inset black and white photos by Carl Fleischhauer, courtesy of Carl Fleischhauer.

Edited by Justin Hiltner.

Bluegrass Memoirs: The Earl Scruggs Revue Beginnings

Posted on by Justin Hiltner

Nearly 50 years after the Earl Scruggs Revue concert I saw at the University of Maine, an internet search led me to Jaime Michaels of the opening act, Beckett. He still has vivid memories from that night in Orono. I sent him a copy of my report. He wrote back, saying:

I have no idea about the song titles but it was nice that my ’63 Gibson J50 got a mention … I still have it.

He has vivid memories of his time backstage with Scruggs.

… at the very end of Earl’s set as he walked back out for his 3rd or 4th encore he stopped and said to me “If I’d just play the darned thing right, I wouldn’t have to keep going back out …”

A little later as we were all loading out Earl came up to us and said, “Do you guys want to see my new bus?” He took us for the grand tour. I was still pretty young and had never seen a real tour bus before.

He was such a sweet guy with this humble self-effacing humor.

Earl was proud of that bus, I reckon; he’d named an instrumental after it.

When I saw them in 1975, the Earl Scruggs Revue was a polished Nashville rock act that had been together since 1969. Debuting at a folk festival that May, not long after Scruggs split from Lester Flatt, it featured Earl’s sons.

The two oldest, Gary (then 20) and Randy (then 16) were already Nashville recording studio veterans. They’d been in the Columbia studios multiple times (Gary 11 sessions, Randy 15 sessions) since May 1967, helping on the last three albums Lester and Earl made before their split (Changin’ Times, The Story of Bonnie & Clyde, Nashville Airplane).

Also new to Flatt & Scruggs, in the fall of 1967, was Columbia producer Bob Johnston, then 35. Concerned about declining record sales, Columbia had replaced Frank Jones and Don Law, highly regarded Nashville veterans who’d been producing F&S since the fifties, with Johnston, who was producing Bob Dylan.

Dylan had stunned the folk world when he went electric at the Newport Folk Festival in 1965. He first recorded in Nashville in 1966, completing Blonde On Blonde there using mainly Nashville studio musicians. In the next two years he returned, making John Wesley Harding and Nashville Skyline.

Flatt & Scruggs’ final albums reflected their move to Johnston, a leading producer at forefront of Columbia’s move from acoustic folk into electric folk rock.

Later, when asked about what led to the split with Earl, Flatt spoke of his difficulty in singing the band’s new songs. “Johnston,” He said, “…also cut Bob Dylan and we would record what he would come up with, regardless of whether I liked it or not. I can’t sing Bob Dylan stuff. I mean, Columbia has got Bob Dylan, why did they want me?”

Of the final three F&S albums, both Changin’ Times and Nashville Airplane had folk-rock repertoires. At the very first session for Changin’ Times, four folk-rock favorites were cut, three Dylan hits, one by Ian Tyson: “Don’t Think Twice,” “Four Strong Winds,” “Blowin’ In the Wind,” and “It Ain’t Me Babe.” Here, Earl’s boys Gary (singing) and Randy (lead guitar) were together for the first time in the studio with Flatt & Scruggs and Johnston.

Imagine the dismay of Lester (who, soon after splitting with Earl, would record “I Can’t Tell The Boys from the Girls“) at this session! It seemed as if the young longhairs with their strange new music were taking over.

Released in January 1968, the back cover of Changin’ Times was filled with the image of a rock poster. Unsigned notes beside it read:

With their smash appearance at the Avalon Ballroom (a West Coast temple of rock and light-shows) when they turned on the whole of San Francisco, there are no new worlds left for Flatt and Scruggs to conquer. Flatt and Scruggs are for everyone.

One of the album’s 11 tracks was a remake of Earl’s “Foggy Mountain Breakdown,” which had just become a hit through the soundtrack of Bonnie and Clyde. Five tracks were by Dylan; the album closed with Woody Guthrie’s “This Land is Your Land.”

Gary and Randy Scruggs personified the Lovin’ Spoonful’s “Nashville Cats,” but also in the studio for that album were other, older, Nashville cats – Charlie Daniels, Grady Martin, Bob Moore, Charlie McCoy and other A-team studio musicians. Randy and Gary would come to know these men well as they built life-long careers in the Nashville studios. These careers were forged during their years (1969-82) with the Earl Scruggs Revue.

Fortunately, the Revue’s earliest days were chronicled in a television documentary. David Hoffman’s ninety-minute NET TV special, Earl Scruggs: The Bluegrass Legend – Family and Friends, was recorded in 1969-70. It has been issued on DVD several times since then and can be seen on YouTube.

It’s fascinating to watch Hoffman’s documentation of Scruggs as he narrates his past, voices his present, and sets out his future directions. Along the way, Hoffman captures Earl’s music-making with a wide variety of performers and audiences. By the end of those 90 minutes, Scruggs’ cultural and political perspectives are manifest; likewise the breadth of his musical tastes.

Hoffman filmed in New York, North Carolina, Nashville, Washington, D.C., and California. The documentary opens with a five-minute jam session: Earl, Gary, and Randy are in upstate New York visiting Bob Dylan at the home of illustrator and sculptor Tom Allen, who had done many Flatt & Scruggs album covers. After Bob sings “East Virginia Blues,” Earl asks him if he’d like to hear their version of “Nashville Skyline Rag,” the instrumental title track from Dylan’s most recent album. I don’t know when this jam took place, but in mid-August of 1969, when Earl was in the studio with Lester to record Final Fling: One Last Time (Just For Kicks), an album they’d agreed to make after their split, the first track they recorded was “Nashville Skyline Rag.”

The tune became a fixture in the Revue concert repertoire, used, for example, as the show opener at Orono in 1975 and in 1977 when they played PBS’s Austin City Limits. Earl had recorded it again in 1970 for his first solo album, Nashville’s Rock.

After the jam with Dylan, the film’s next twenty minutes take the viewer with Earl and the boys to his North Carolina home with visits to the Morris Brothers (the first group he’d worked with), Doc Watson, and Scruggs family and friends in the Flint Hill community. It closes with a shot in which Earl speaks of how he’d taken the banjo to different types of music: “Now it’s easy to blend with today’s music. It works very well. I’m really happy. I had dreams of this.”

The next five minutes come from a jam session with the Byrds at a ranch outside Nashville. It begins with them doing “Nothing To It” (the title Earl used for “I Don’t Love Nobody,” when he recorded this tune with Doc Watson) followed by “You Ain’t Goin’ Nowhere,” a Dylan tune that was on the Byrds’ Sweetheart of the Rodeo, the 1968 album that is often thought of as a foundational statement of country rock.

It’s followed by four minutes with electronic music pioneer and composer Gil Trythall, who plays along on Moog synthesizer with Earl and Randy doing “Foggy Mountain Breakdown.”

Then comes an interview with Charlie Daniels, at the time an associate of Bob Johnston, soon to become one of country rock’s leading figures. The focus shifts as he, Earl, and the Revue attend the second Moratorium to End the War in Vietnam, held in Washington, D.C. on November 15, 1969 – generally considered to be the largest demonstration ever in Washington. After performing “Foggy Mountain Breakdown” there, Earl speaks of his opposition to the war.

Back in Nashville, Daniels is co-producing (with Neil Wilburn) All The Way Home, the first Scruggs Brothers album, for the New England folk and classical label Vanguard. The film follows them into a Nashville studio.

Earl is also working on an album, his first post F&S solo project, Nashville’s Rock. After listening to a demo of one track at the Scruggs home, we see an old friend of Earl’s, Dr. Nat Winston, give testimony to his character, and then Earl demonstrates how he creates his music, explaining that he’s self-taught. Next, we meet Earl’s wife Louise, who’s worked as his manager for fifteen years. She points out that Earl was immersed in the music from age five and that their son Randy has had the same experience.

A shift of focus to Randy follows, as we see him picking “Black Mountain Rag” (a guitar performance reflecting the Scruggs affinity for Doc Watson), and then go with him to class at Madison High and have a chat with his principal, who talks about Randy’s “skipping school.”

After hearing from Louise about how she met Earl at the Grand Ole Opry, we drive on a spring afternoon (in 1970) with the Scruggs family from home to the Ryman Auditorium in downtown Nashville. Inside, Earl, with Randy, joins Bill Monroe and the Blue Grass Boys in a backstage dressing room for a jam and then we witness the Revue’s debut on the Opry stage.

In the center is Earl on banjo, flanked by Randy on guitar and Gary on bass and vocals. Also in the band is Jody Maphis, a contemporary of the Scruggs brothers and son of country stars Joe and Rose Maphis, on guitar. He would subsequently move to drums and remain in the Revue for about a decade. On piano and tambourine is Leah Jane Berinati. Except for Earl, this was a group of kids, dressed like young flower power types. They perform two very conservative old traditional songs, “Nine Pound Hammer” and “Reuben,” to an enthusiastically appreciative audience.

The last twenty-five minutes of the documentary follow the Scruggs family as they travel, early in 1970, to California’s Bay Area for a visit and a jam in Joan Baez’s home. Joan, with her young newborn son Gabriel nearby, chats with Earl about their 1959 meeting at the first Newport Folk Festival. She sings two songs (both are Dylan compositions) and then, while photos are shown of her husband – Gabriel’s father David Harris, whose Vietnam protests had led to federal imprisonment for draft refusal – she sings “If I Was A Carpenter” with Gary. A heady mix of politics and music.

The film closes with Earl back in North Carolina talking again about his musical aspirations:

Keep up with the times and make as much progress with the banjo along with other instruments as long as it blends in as possible.

As the credits roll, we hear Earl playing “Folsom Prison Blues” using his tuners.

This documentary, aired at the height of the Vietnam war, included a forthright statement of opposition from a leading figure in Nashville, where there was considerable support for the war. The documentary was also a carefully crafted showcase of the Revue’s folk/country rock repertoire, musical style, and cultural connections.

The albums that Earl and his two oldest sons were working on while Hoffman was making the documentary released before its broadcast and both contain songs and tunes that appear in the film. A couple of examples: “Train Number Forty-Five” (F&S’s radio theme in the early days), which is heard in Earl and Randy’s backstage jam with Bill Monroe, is also heard on Earl’s album Nashville’s Rock. Similarly, Randy’s version of “Black Mountain Rag,” an acoustic guitar solo in the documentary, is heard on the Scruggs Brothers’ album, All The Way Home, in an extended version with not only acoustic and electric guitar breaks but also a banjo break in his father’s style.

In the next Bluegrass Memoir we’ll see how, by 1971 and 1972 when this documentary was broadcast, the Earl Scruggs Revue was appearing on a series of albums that realized Earl’s aspirations and helped launch his touring.

(Editor’s Note: Read our prior Bluegrass Memoir on the Earl Scruggs Revue here.)

Neil V. Rosenberg is an author, scholar, historian, banjo player, Bluegrass Music Hall of Fame inductee, and co-chair of the IBMA Foundation’s Arnold Shultz Fund.

Photo of Rosenberg by Terri Thomson Rosenberg. 

Edited by Justin Hiltner.

Bluegrass Memoirs: The Earl Scruggs Revue in 1975

Posted on by Justin Hiltner

Soon after Earl Scruggs and Lester Flatt ended their partnership and their band The Foggy Mountain Boys in 1969, Earl created The Earl Scruggs Revue with his sons. They recorded for a major label, Columbia, and toured regularly until 1980, disbanding in 1982. This is the story of how I came to see, hear and take extensive notes about their 1975 concert at the University of Maine.

In 1969 I was living in St. John’s, Newfoundland, working at Memorial University’s folklore department where I taught a yearly course, Introduction to Folk Song. I knew that bluegrass drew from folk traditions in the U.S. Southeast, for I had been playing bluegrass and writing about it for a decade. But I could tell my students little about the Canadian milieu. So, in the early ‘70s I began research in Canada’s Maritime provinces of Nova Scotia, Prince Edward Island, and New Brunswick

In August 1974, I moved to New Brunswick for a year’s sabbatical. My research project was a study of regional and local relationships between country music and folk music traditions. I did extensive fieldwork – interviews and documenting events, collecting music.

That fall, I met a singer-collector of country records and song folios, a perfect example of the kind of folk-country connection I was studying. I recorded several hours of his songs and began contemplating publishing them in an album.

I thought at once of Rounder, a new record company that had been publishing innovative roots albums. I’d met the Rounders – Ken Irwin, Bill Nowlin and Marian Leighton, a music collective – at an American Folklore Society meeting. They knew me as a writer about and collector of bluegrass.

Early in the new year I arranged to visit them. In February 1975, I set out in the family pickup with my ten-year-old daughter Lisa from our farmhouse in Pleasant Villa, New Brunswick to Brooksville, Maine, where we visited relatives. Lisa stayed with them while I drove further south to Somerville, Massachusetts, to visit the Rounders.

David Menconi, in his new book, Oh, Didn’t They Ramble (U of NC Press), describes well the scene at the Rounder collective’s big old Somerville house, with their newly flourishing roots music record company. We discussed projects, they took me down to the basement to see their mail order records inventory, and I came back to Brooksville with a load of LPs and lots of news about the contemporary bluegrass world.

Brooksville is a little over an hour away from Orono, site of the University of Maine, where my friend, Edward D. “Sandy” Ives, lived. Sandy was a great writer, a folklorist who’d studied and published books about 19th century singer-songmakers in Maine and the Maritimes. I was looking forward to discussing my ongoing research with him. After I returned from visiting the Rounders, we drove up to Orono to see Sandy and his wife, Bobby.

When we got to Orono, a young friend and former student of mine at Memorial, Lisa Feldman, was staying with the Ives. It was she who alerted us about the Earl Scruggs Revue concert and went along with us to it.

In St. John’s, I regularly bought new bluegrass albums by mail order from County Sales. I don’t recall paying much attention to the Revue then. County didn’t carry their albums.

Revue albums were not easy to find in Newfoundland. Working on a Flatt & Scruggs discography and, admiring Scruggs’ banjo artistry, I wanted to hear his contemporary work. I bought all the Revue albums I could find. By the fall of 1974, when I moved to New Brunswick for the sabbatical, I’d gotten seven.

Those records were in storage back in Newfoundland for the year, but I’d brought my stereo set along and by December I’d found a new Revue album, Rocking Across the Country (Columbia KC 32943). There was nice Dobro on it by Josh Graves and one great instrumental composed by Earl, “Silver Eagle” – named, presumably, for the band’s bus.

During that year I was doing field research at music events and venues – bars, jamborees, concerts, jams – and had developed a system of documenting them. I carried a 3″ by 5″ notebook (spiral binding, ruled pages) and took notes. This was with me all the time and so it just seemed like an easy thing to take notes as usual at this concert.

What follows are my notes from that February 7, 1975, concert, written up from my notebook when I returned to Pleasant Villa the following week.

Friday, February 7, 1975
Orono, Maine
Report on Earl Scruggs Revue Concert at the University of Maine, Orono.

Tickets were $3.50. I went with Sandy Ives, and we were joined at the concert by Lisa Feldman and by [Sandy’s wife] Bobby and [their daughter] Sarah Ives and [my daughter] Lisa R., who had all gone to see a Robin Hood movie. The concert was sponsored by the student union and represented a slight departure from previous concerts of this type in that instead of bringing high-powered “name” outfits on which a lot of money had been lost, they were now trying slightly less expensive acts. The concert committee was dominated by frat boys who didn’t know about music, according to Lisa [F.].

Site of the event was the basketball gym. Folding chairs were placed on the court, and wooden bleachers were placed around the side (these might have been permanent, but seemed moveable… small point). There were balcony seats on both sides and at one end, the end over the doors through which we entered. At the other end a stage was set up. Dominated by big columns and horns on either side – your typical rock concert setup. Sandy and I took seats on the left side of the bleachers (as you face the stage), about three rows up and we were about 2/3 to 3/4 of the way back from the stage toward the entry doors. Directly ahead of us in the middle of the floor was a raised platform on which the controls for the sound were set, along with a chair or two for the operator(s?). Behind this, higher and close to the back, was another platform with the lights. During the concert the colors were constantly being changed and moved about from tune to tune by a light man who must have known something about the Scruggs show in advance.

The audience consisted of college students almost exclusively. I didn’t see any old-time Martha White fans or country music types. Dress was Levi’s and hippie mufti – knit caps, ragged but interesting coats, vests, long dresses, patches, etc. There was a lot of smoking going on and some drinking. Before the show a long-haired young man who represented the powers that be got up and told the audience that there was no smoking and no drinking and that if they were caught, they would be ejected from the show by the campus police. In addition he said that, if you must smoke, then don’t get caught. But also, he said, please don’t put out your butts on the floor of the basketball court – a lot were last time, and the University is threatening to not let them have concerts if this continues. Burden of the speech: Here are the ground rules, don’t get caught, play it cool.

The campus police were cruising up and down the aisles dressed in dark blue uniforms with dark blue shirts and black ties with dark blue Stetsons. Something like Civil War Union Army officers in movies. And they were looking very serious and hawk-like.

The warm-up act was introduced, as a group from Boston, “Beckett.” The group consisted of Phil B. (missed his last name, [Buller]), who came on playing a D28 guitar and a harmonica, Steve Delaney, playing an electric bass, and Jaime Michaels, who played a D18 Martin guitar and did the emcee and lead singing in the first few numbers. Later they all switched around, with each doing some lead singing and some emceeing. I took notes in the darkened auditorium with a fancy movie critic’s pen that [then wife] Ann had given me — lights up in the dark, illuminating one’s pad. As it were.

The first song was “CLEAR BLUE SKY.” There were a few catcalls from the balcony and a rather tentative feeling from the audience. A whiff of authentic marijuana smoke drifted my way during this (and subsequent songs), and I could see people lighting up in various places. Later, the folks next to me surreptitiously passed a bottle (beer, I think) around. At the end of the first song, the Beckett emcee made a sly crack about “Maine Mounties” and from there the show built — they had the audience with them.

Next song was “SOMETHING NEW.” As all this was going on, the cops were cruising up and down the aisles, occasionally throwing people out, but generally arriving on the scene after the cigarette had been extinguished. They were on the lookout for tell-tale lights, and one time one went by us while I was jotting down a note with my fancy pen. He gave me a hard look and some of the people around me had a good giggle about that.

Next song, [“WE ARE FREE”]. These guys weren’t musically bad, but I could not really get into their music. The harmony singing was kind of Crosby/Stills/Nash and actually a bit weak; the instrumental aspect of it was bland. A note here says “harelip,” but when you wait ten days before writing up your notes you forget the jokes, I guess. Next one of the boys took up an Ovation guitar – this was Phil B., and the song was “LAST TUESDAY MORNING.” Then Jaimie mentioned that they were from Virginia and that they considered it an honor to be appearing with the Earl Scruggs Revue. Then they did “TENNESSEE.” Next, “I’LL TRY IF YOU’LL TRY.” Most of their songs were their own compositions, I guess. I didn’t recognize any of the above; the names in brackets are ones they didn’t announce that I guessed at from the words. Now Phil took up the Ovation again Steve took an electric guitar and they did a song they had written while in Pittsburgh, [“STOLE AWAY”]. Using the same instrumentation, which, incidentally, sounded better than the acoustics – that is, the electric came over with much more tone – they did “PERFECT HONEY.”

Now another instrument switch with Phil taking up an old Gibson J50 guitar and Steve going back to the bass. The song was introduced as a “folk song” for reasons which eluded me at the time. It was “SEARCHING,” but not the Coasters’ smash hit. With the same instrumentation, they then launched into a song written either by or about some friends in Boston, “COUNTY LINE.” Then, as their final tune, a song they introduced as being by Joni Mitchell and needing no introduction (?). It was well received by the audience, and they got an encore.

They came on and did a song which they introduced as a real old one by that old bluesman Eric Von Schmidt (time flies – I remember Rolf Cahn telling me in 1959 that he’d been picking with a really good kid in Boston who even did some slide guitar, a kid named Rick Von Schmidt). Song was “AIN’T NOBODY’S BUSINESS BUT YOU OWN,” and they did it well. Kids in the front of the audience got up and started waving their hands in the air, literally surrendering to the music. For the second encore, it was another Von Schmidt tune, “GRIZZLY BEAR (SOLID GONE).”

Another intermission, punctuated by further entreaties by the same fellow. By this point, the cops were less in evidence although during the second half they did eject several people sitting around me.

Enter the Earl Scruggs Revue, who plug in and pick away at once on “NASHVILLE SKYLINE RAG.” Across the front of the stage are three microphones; at my left stands Stevie Scruggs, who plays rhythm guitar (a Gallagher) most of the evening, except for one banjo tune. Next to him is Randy, who is bent over his Gallagher guitar, doing the lead work. Characteristically I guess you never see his face when he’s picking, he’s looking at the fingers and anyhow is surrounded by hair. Later, in various numbers which I didn’t note, he plays a bright red Gibson electric with twin cutouts and a thin (hollow?) body, which has a very mellow tone.

Next to him, in stage center, is Earl. Earl’s Mastertone is electrified with some sort of pickup inside, a Barkus-Berry or FRAP of some kind I guess. This surprised me, as did the fact that he was wearing the instrument much lower than when he played with Flatt. He was not bopping around as much as the boys (who, in turn, were not bopping around as much as many or most rock groups), but he was looking very relaxed, had the old smile of yore, and did move when he played more than I remember from the Martha White days. On the right and, rather standing back was poker-faced Gary, who played bass and did the lead singing. When there was any part singing done, Earl and Randy took the center mic, Steve the left-hand one, and, behind them Jody Maphis took his vocal parts on a separate mike over the drums. To my right behind and to the right of Gary, was a piano where Jack Lee the pianist sat. This is the same guy on the cover of the Rockin’ Across the Country album. [This is not correct. The guy on the cover of Rockin’ is Shane Keister, who is listed on the album cover as “keyboard instruments.”]

My first impression was one of tightness, in the sense that the band was really together and tight. And although I can’t say I like Earl’s banjo sound as well with the volts surging through it, it was sounding like a banjo and Earl did get quite a few tonal nuances from it without the visible aid of a tone control. Randy was as good as the recordings led me to expect, however, he frequently seemed to be “grandstanding” it, by playing freak-out type rock licks way up the neck which were spectacular and, effective in terms of inciting the audience, but which were as far as I was concerned not as nice musically as the well thought out stuff he did or does on record. So I was a bit disappointed in Randy.

My reaction to Earl was just the opposite. He has sounded a bit stiff and mechanical on the records I have heard (and I got ‘em all, Jack), but tonight he was nicely in the groove and seemed to have some very interesting new ideas, especially rhythmic variations, which I hadn’t heard before. He really seemed to be enjoying himself, too. After this tune, the members were introduced and they went right into “I SHALL BE RELEASED,” following which, Earl introduced the next song as an old “shouting type number,” “PAUL AND SILAS.”

Gary’s singing is o.k., it fits the music and sells the songs to the rock programmed audience. Doesn’t bother me, doesn’t excite me; seems to be better in person than on record, and better on recent record than on older records. Earl next says this is an old number he used to play at square dances back when they only had one instrument, and he says, “We’ll show you what it was like to do it alone and then we’ll show you why I was so glad when someone else came by with their instruments to help me out.” He doesn’t announce it, but it’s “SALLY GOODIN.” Intro and arrangement are as on the Kansas State album. They really get rolling (and rocking) on this one, with Earl and Randy engaging in some nice banjo-guitar call-response stuff. The audience responds here as it does again and again later on to the faster tunes, by standing up and waving their hands, shouting, etc. Following this, Earl mentions the Kansas State album by saying that the next tune is on it, an old Jimmie Rodgers tune, “T FOR TEXAS.” Next, Randy is to pick a fiddle tune on the guitar, and it turns out to be “BLACK MOUNTAIN BLUES.”

The next tune, an instrumental, was a [Blues in F] and then, coming without an announcement was “MOST LIKELY YOU GO YOUR WAY (AND I’LL GO MINE),” which has a nice arrangement with some good banjo work by Earl. The next song is introduced by Gary as one which dad wrote about the place in North Carolina where he grew up, “FLINT HILL SPECIAL.” Gary takes a harmonica break on this one.

Then, a novelty item — Randy and Jody play a tune written by Elizabeth Cotten (Earl is talking – I was gassed that he gave the tune proper credit, this really shows the kind of considerate and thoughtful person I like to think he is), on one guitar! Here Jody gets up front, from behind his drums, and he & Randy stand near the center of the stage and Randy does the right hand (the guitar, a Gallagher is hung from around his neck) and Jody does the left. Then, while Jody does the simple left hand, Randy does some fancy up the neck left hand stuff too, making it into a very interesting and rather complex piece of music. They also gag it up a bit, swinging the guitar back and forth at the end, in time to a leg-swinging rock dance step thing. Nice job, boys. “FREIGHT TRAIN” was the tune, of course.

Now one of the boys (Gary?) introduces Earl doing an old Carter Family tune on the guitar. This is “YOU ARE MY FLOWER,” which Gary sings and my impression was that the sound not as nice and delicate as on the recordings of that that Earl did a few years back. Next it’s Stevie’s turn – he does “EARL’S BREAKDOWN” on Earl’s banjo and it’s very hard to hear, giving me the impression that he hasn’t mastered the tune that well or that in any case hasn’t worked out tone production and control on the electrified instrument the way his father has. The next tune I noted only as [“FATHER TOLD ME”] and I’m at a loss to identify it from their recordings. Then, of course, the song which “Daddy wrote for a television series,” “THE BALLAD OF JED CLAMPETT” done as an instrumental. Followed by Randy’s guitar version of “ORANGE BLOSSOM SPECIAL,” which is a crowd rouser/etc.

Next comes Gary’s interesting song “EVERYBODY WANTS TO GO TO HEAVEN (NOBODY WANTS TO DIE),” which features in this performance a slide banjo sequence by Earl, in which he’s picking along, then takes his left hand off the fingerboard, reaching into his pocket (I think, what?!) and pulling out a slide and doing a couple bars of that kinda stuff. Grandstanding, but fun, and the audience can’t miss it. “STEP IT UP AND GO” is next and then “one that Dad wrote in 1949 and in 1968 they used it for the theme to a movie called Bonnie and Clyde,” “FOGGY MOUNTAIN BREAKDOWN,”
which is the final number and leaves ‘em screaming for more so they do: “CAROLINA BOOGIE,” which has some nice call-response parts and leads to a second encore in which they do “BUGLE CALL RAG,” “LITTLE MAGGIE” (bless her soul).

The audience wants more but the lights are turned on.

(Editor’s Note: Neil Rosenberg’s Bluegrass Memoirs on the Earl Scruggs Revue will be continued.)

Author’s Note: For a contrasting review see Hub Nitchie, “Pull the Plug, Earl” in Banjo Newsletter II:6 (April 1975), p. 13.

Neil V. Rosenberg is an author, scholar, historian, banjo player, Bluegrass Music Hall of Fame inductee, and co-chair of the IBMA Foundation’s Arnold Shultz Fund.

Photo of Rosenberg by Terri Thomson Rosenberg. 

Edited by Justin Hiltner.