Photo by Jim McGuire
Lester Flatt was born 108 years ago today.
Flatt was a bluegrass musician and guitarist and mandolinist, best known for his membership in the Bluegrass group, The Foggy Mountain Boys, and in the duo, Flatt and Scruggs, with banjo picker Earl Scruggs.
Flatt's career spanned multiple decades. Besides his work with Scruggs, he released multiple solo and collaboration works. Flatt also served as a member of Bill Monroe's band during the 1940s.
Born in Duncan's Chapel, Overton County, Tennessee, Flatt was a singer and guitarist. He first came to prominence as a member of Bill Monroe's Blue Grass Boys in 1945. In 1948, he started a band with fellow Monroe alumnus, Earl Scruggs, and for the next twenty years Flatt and Scruggs and the Foggy Mountain Boys were one of the most successful bands in bluegrass.
When they parted ways in 1969, Flatt formed a new group, the Nashville Grass, hiring most of the Foggy Mountain Boys. His role as lead singer and rhythm guitar player in each of these seminal ensembles helped define the sound of traditional bluegrass music.
He created a role in the Bluegrass Boys later filled by the likes of Jimmy Martin, Mac Wiseman, Peter Rowan and Del McCoury. His rich lead voice is unmistakable in hundreds of bluegrass standards. He is also remembered for his library of compositions. The Flatt songbook looms titanic for any student of American acoustic music.
Flatt continued to record and perform with that group until his death in 1979 of heart failure, after a prolonged period of ill health. He was posthumously inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame in 1985 with Scruggs. He was also posthumously made an inaugural inductee into the International Bluegrass Music Hall of Honor in 1991.
Flatt and Scruggs performed "The Ballad of Jed Clampett," which was used as the theme for the television show, The Beverly Hillbillies.
Here, Flatt and Scruggs perform “Salty Dog Blues”
Flatt and Scruggs at a court hearing during the breakup
On March 11, 1969 — after 23 years playing together and 21 as a duo — Lester Flatt and Earl Scruggs broke up.
With numerous Top 10 singles and a Grand Ole Opry membership under their belts, the two raised the bluegrass genre to a level of popularity it had not previously enjoyed.
But times had changed. In the late 1960s, the duo began experimenting with more popular forms of music. Their 1968 album, Changin' Times, featured five Bob Dylan songs, 1969's Nashville Airplane featured four and the post-breakup release Final Fling, had seven Dylan tunes. They were even planning to collaborate with notable Dylan producer, Bob Johnston.
Scruggs, a decade Flatt's junior, was growing sick of playing bluegrass every night in its original form, while Flatt had come to resent their more modern direction. It all came to a head in 1969. Flatt formed a traditional bluegrass band, the Nashville Grass, while Scruggs assembled a progressive group, the Earl Scruggs Review.
To see these changes immortalized, one needs only listen to the musical directions each artist undertook after the breakup. The cover art of Scruggs and Flatt's last album says it all, with Lester Flatt scowling bitterly at a smiling Earl Scruggs (see below). Note Scruggs next album, with his long-haired family members.
Final album as a duo
Scruggs family album after the breakup
When I was growing up in the late 1950s and early 1960s in South Carolina, I always watched the Flatt and Scruggs television show in the early morning before going to school.
My mother hated it, perplexed at why her young son was attracted to what she called that “white trash” music. She preferred Lawrence Welk and tried to push him on me without success.
Before I knew what bluegrass music really was, I liked it. I was also aware — I don’t know how — that Bill Monroe and Flatt & Scruggs were the best bluegrass performers. To my parents, they were just local musicians lucky enough to be on television.
As I grew up, I went to hear them all perform. When I worked at the local radio station while in high school, I actually recorded Bill Monroe’s Blue Grass Boys in the station’s studio, though I didn’t know who they were at the time.
On this birthday of Lester Flatt, I can look back and say honestly that I was right and my mother was wrong on this one.
Bluegrass still rules!
Below, a still from the TV show I used to watch as a kid.