Pickin1 Scruggs

In Nashville, Tenn., one of the local mills advertises a self-rising ingredient for flour and meal known as Hot Rize. For the past nine years, the fortunes of Hot Rize have been rising with a couple of hillbillies--Banjo Player Earl Scruggs and Guitarist Lester Flatt--whose musical style on Grand Ole Opry is uncannily like the gassy product they represent on the show. Scruggs and Flatt are the country's leading practitioners of a particularly corny style of country music known as "bluegrass." And, thanks in large measure to the efforts of the twanging pair, bluegrass is enjoying such a boom that it has now moved cheek by jowl with cool jazz into big city supper clubs.

What distinguishes bluegrass is 1) the fact that all instruments are unamplified (folk fanciers have long deplored the siren-wailing electric guitars of less authentic country singers), and 2) the employment of a five-string banjo technique known affectionately as "pickin' scruggs." This technique, which moved one astigmatic observer to compare Scruggs's achievement on the banjo to Paganini's on the violin, involves a clawlike motion with thumb and two fingers that serves to transform the banjo player from a plunk-plunking accompanist into a virtuoso soloist. Nobody has heard anything to equal it, says one folk expert, since the glorious days of Fisher Hendley and his Aristocratic Pigs, famed hillbillies of the early 1930's.

Last week in Nashville, Scruggs, Flatt and their Foggy Mountain Boys (fiddle, mandolin, bass violin, steel guitar) were busy taping enough bluegrass tunes to enable them to leave their daily radio show for one of their frequent concert tours. On the road, dressed in black jackets, red string ties and white Stetson hats, they scramble frantically through Foggy Mountain Special, Randy Lynn Rag, Polka on the Banjo, Shuckin' The Corn, giving each piece the knuckle-cracking momentum and the curiously high-pitched, pinging tone that is the mark of bluegrass style. For a dramatic finisher, Flatt may lift his nasal, sowbelly voice in an enduring country hit named Give Me Flowers While I'm Living:

In this world today while we're living

Some folks say the worst of us they can.

But when we're dead and in our caskets,

They always slip some lilies in our hand.

Won't you give me my flowers while

I'm living . . .

Both Southern hill boys who have been playing and singing as long as they can remember, Scruggs, 37, and Flatt, 47, met in Nashville, the country-music capital, decided in 1948 to form their own band, were soon the most popular dispensers of bluegrass in the business. They now make nearly $100,000 a year apiece. Their fees are among the highest on the country circuit, but thanks to their sponsor, fans can sometimes get in to hear them at half price: they need only present an opened sack of the sponsor's corn.

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