Earl Scruggs, the Grammy award-wining banjo player, has died aged 88.
Scruggs popularised a syncopated three-finger style of playing the banjo, first with Bill Monroe's Blue Grass Boys in the mid 1940s and then with guitarist Lester Flatt as the Foggy Mountain Boys and later as Flatt and Scruggs.
The Ballad of Jed Clampett, the duo's theme music for the TV show The Beverly Hillbillies, became a huge country hit.
Scruggs wrote the bluegrass classic, Foggy Mountain Breakdown, which won him two Grammy Awards - in 1969 and in 2002 with a later recording of the song.
Earl Scruggs died in a hospital in Nashville on 28 March 2012.
Scruggs popularised a syncopated three-finger style of playing the banjo, first with Bill Monroe's Blue Grass Boys in the mid 1940s and then with guitarist Lester Flatt as the Foggy Mountain Boys and later as Flatt and Scruggs.
The Ballad of Jed Clampett, the duo's theme music for the TV show The Beverly Hillbillies, became a huge country hit.
Scruggs wrote the bluegrass classic, Foggy Mountain Breakdown, which won him two Grammy Awards - in 1969 and in 2002 with a later recording of the song.
Earl Scruggs died in a hospital in Nashville on 28 March 2012.
