Earl Scruggs: Four things to know about the celebrated bluegrass banjo player

Earl Scruggs, the celebrated American bluegrass banjo player, is being remembered this Friday with a Google Doodle, during the month of what would have been his 95th birthday.

Scruggs, who developed his own style of playing the five-string banjo – usually referred to as a three-finger picking style, though Scruggs himself said that labelling was misleading – was born on 6 January, 1924 and died on 28 March, 2012, having left a durable mark on bluegrass music.

He rose to fame as a member of Bill Monroe’s Blue Grass Boys, the group largely credited with inventing the bluegrass genre.

Here are four things you need to know about Scruggs and his legacy:

1. He invented his own way of playing the banjo

Scruggs is best known for coming up with his own technique to play the five-string banjo, now referred to as the “Scruggs style”.

He described it as such in a 2003 interview with NPR: ”It’s a little misleading to say three fingers. It’s actually two fingers, middle and index finger, and your thumb, and it’s kind of — some of the rolls will go, if you number your thumb one, the index two and your middle finger three, it’s like a one-two-three roll, over and over.”

2. He was a Nashville fixture

Scruggs, who started playing the banjo aged four using his father’s instrument, started playing on local radio stations aged 15, according to the Encyclopaedia Britannica.

He developed his “Scruggs style” technique in his teens and in December 1945, aged 21, joined Monroe’s Blue Grass Boys.

The band frequently performed frequently at the Grand Ole Opry in Nashville, meaning they had to keep up with a packed travel schedule in order to be back to perform on the famed Tennessee stage regularly.

In 1948, Scruggs, and his band mate Lester Flatt left Monroe’s group and formed their own band, the Foggy Mountain Boys.

Flatt and Scruggs were inducted at the same time into Nashville’s Country Music Hall of Fame in 1985.

3. His career peaked thanks to his wife

Anne Louise Certain married Scruggs in April 1948.

She is credited with enabling her husband’s career to flourish by becoming his and Flatt’s manager and agent in 1955.

Ms Scruggs remained her husband’s manager until her death in 2006, per Scrugg’s own website. She is believed to have been the first female manager and agent of a major country music act.

4. He hated life on the road

By his own admission, Scruggs didn’t enjoy his hectic touring schedule – and it wasn’t helped by the infrastructure of his time.

“Back then there was only two-lane highways, and [Bill Monroe] travelled in a ‘41 Chevrolet car and we’d leave after the Opry on Saturday night and maybe work down south,” he told NPR in 2003.

He recounted travelling just as far as Georgia for a Sunday show, then playing around Miami on a Monday or on a Tuesday, and working more until Thursday when it was time to head back to Nashville.

“ So it was just — you’d only be in Nashville long enough to do the Grand Ole Opry and to get a change of clothes and pack your suitcase and head out again," he added.