Earl Scruggs (born January 6, 1924, Flint Hill, North Carolina) earned a place in the history of Bluegrass and Country Music as the developer of a unique instrumental style that helped to popularize the five-string banjo. During his early teens Scruggs experimented with and eventually perfected a picking technique involving the thumb and first two fingers of the right hand—a technique that came to be called the “Scruggs style.” In December 1945, he joined Bill Monroe’s Blue Grass Boys. In 1948 S