Earl Scruggs

Citation needed.

Um, but, but essentially like, um, the ovals are older, uh, and what, you know, and I think critically what our heroes were playing, right? This is, this is what, as far as I know, um, you know, what some of the first early Earl Scruggs recordings, and I presume most of, I'm sure Earl messed with finger picks like anyone else, but, um, maybe he didn't.

Correct me in the comments if I'm wrong on that.

That'd be hilarious.

Whatever it is, most of the instruments he played were made before he played the banjo.

They were not made for him to do what he did the way he did it.

He didn't play the custom Earl Scruggs model during all those Mercury recording sessions or whatever.

He found...

Is there

any Earl Scruggs bands in the

audience? Yeah.

Make it look convincing.

I had one of those things.

You need a little piece of special equipment on the head of a banjo to do that.

Maybe if you're like Earl Scruggs, you can do it, however.

But there's usually little...

No, but Flatt and Scruggs.

Okay, so Chris Scruggs is Earl Scruggs' grandson, very good friend of mine, and his son, Ben, who's incredible, biggest Curious George fan ever.

He's 12 now, so he's like too cool for it, but it...

He's still a huge Curious George fan.

No. Um, do you know, historically like string gauge wise, you were just joking about him having four teens, but actually I'm curious, like, it's such a, um, it's such a thing that changes over time with any instrument.

Like what is the preferred setup? And here's how Earl set up his banjo, but that doesn't really apply because now we use plastic heads instead of hide heads.

So like things change.

Do you know, string gauge wise, what people were using like Lester or, or, or Jimmy Martin or whatever? Like,

With the banjo, it's the same.

I mean, and things change cause it's like the way things are recorded, uh, you get different levels of fidelity and therefore you don't need it to be so loud or, you know, whatever, you can get away with different things.

Um, you know, and then different players have different, I mean, Sonny Osborne had super heavy strings and Earl didn't and blah, blah, blah.

Everyone's always kind of saying, you know, well, this is exactly how so-and-so did it.

Wow.

Okay, so I know that you guys will be at the Earl Scruggs Music Festival.

Yes, we're playing on Sunday from 6 to 7, Sunday evening.

That sounds like it's going to be fun.

We also played with Chris Jones and the Night Drivers.

We're looking forward to that.

This will be our third time at Earl Scruggs Fest.

Well, I'll be down there this year.

I just heard about them recently.

And these recordings of John Hartford playing with Earl Scruggs, it was sort of Earl Scruggs Unchained, because in a normal recording situation, we'd maybe take one or two solos on a tune.

And in these jam sessions, he would play three or four or five and just get into some incredible material.

And one of the tunes they did in the jams, which is on Earl Jam 2, is Here Comes the Bride.

Here's a piece of trivia.

The first song Tony learned to play on the banjo was Ode to Joy from Beethoven's Ninth Symphony.

His latest album is Earl Jam 2, a tribute to Earl Scruggs.

That was Tony Trischka and Earl Jam featuring Michael Daves.