Lester Flatt

Essential Albums

  • Foggy Mountain Banjo (Remastered 2014)
    Foggy Mountain Banjo (Remastered 2014)

    By the time Flatt & Scruggs released Foggy Mountain Banjo in 1961, the band had already been at it for over a decade, shepherding hillbilly music—or bluegrass, as it had come to be called—into something like the mainstream, guesting regularly on nationally syndicated media and joining folk festivals aimed at audiences looking to recover something “real”. Decades later, the music here retains an intensity more germane to punk than anything else, driven by thumping bass, searing fiddle and the breathless picking of banjo player Earl Scruggs, who seems to have been given more fingers than most. Down-home as they were, there are times—“Cumberland Gap”, “Lonesome Road Blues”, “Bugle Call Rag”—when the band appears to wheel up and leave the ground.

Singles & EPs

Appears On

About Lester Flatt

After Lester Flatt and Earl Scruggs parted ways in 1969, Flatt reassembled many of the Foggy Mountain Boys, renamed the group Nashville Grass, and toured very successfully until his death in 1979. Unlike Scruggs, who with his sons moved on to music that was only marginally country, Flatt and the Grass stuck to traditional bluegrass material. Even without Scruggs, the band shone, and Flatt's vocals, musical direction, and taste received the credit they had so long deserved. ~ David Vinopal

HOMETOWN
Overton County, TN, United States
BORN
19 de junho de 1914
GENRE
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