Randy Scruggs – Pick your friends
RS: And then, in the summertime, I would travel on some dates with them. More so when I started playing guitar, because…I started guitar when I was 11, but by 13 I started playing my first recording sessions. And then soon started playing on the Flatt & Scruggs records.
JD: I’ve always wondered if Doc Watson had any great influence on you when he came into the picture.
RS: He had tremendous influence. I wasn’t a flatpicker until I met Doc. He did the album with Flatt & Scruggs, Strictly Instrumental [Columbia, 1967], and during the course of that recording stayed at our house quite a lot. It changed [me] from the moment I first saw him sit down on the couch at home and play.
JD: Yeah, I knew he had to have something to do with it.
RS: Oh, yeah, and Southbound [Vanguard, 1966], all that album was just incredible. What he and Merle were doing together…just a complete influence on how to flatpick. That is a milestone record in a lot of people’s lives, I think; it was the first time that Doc Watson was exposed to a huge audience, right out of Deep Gap, North Carolina.
JD: Was starting the Earl Scruggs Revue a difficult time for Earl? Just going from where he’d been in this band with this guy for twenty years, to all the sudden…
RS: At that point I think it was probably one of the least difficult times for him. And I say that because here for the first time, at that point in his career, he was with his family.
JD: Right. I knew that was a big reason why he did what he did.
RS: There was that, and it was, to a certain extent, a different audience. But it was an audience that was just throwing their arms around him.
JD: They were very respectful of who he was.
RS: And so I think the only flack or negative feedback was really at that point from the people that just didn’t want to see change.
JD: Uh-huh. They’re always there. It had to have made him pretty happy to be playing with his sons.
RS: Yeah. Because he was following his heart. We had been playing a lot at our house, and…
JD: You were on the records, too, at that point.
RS: Right. Exactly.
JD: So it was a pretty even transfer of energy for him.
RS: Yeah. And eventually even some of the festivals and locations that first turned their back on what we were doing at that point asked us back (laughs).
JD: Yeah, it’s funny how that cycle goes around, isn’t it? You guys were plugging in, so the traditional bluegrass audience that had been listening to Earl play all those years were going like, well…
RS: It was the same as, I think, any new band would experience, in the sense of new work and new band.
JD: But you guys had this guy with you that had set the mold.
RS: Oh, absolutely.
JD: I saw you guys…I think it was when Ricky Skaggs and I had Boone Creek, and we ran into you guys at Shady Gap, Pennsylvania, we were all playing at what ended up as a biker festival. (laughs)
RS: (laughing) It was a long day.
JD: It was a long day because the bikers were the security, and back then a festival was supposed to be modeled after Woodstock, or Altamont, you know. It was a big happening…
RS: And for some reason there could not be a festival site without a lake.
JD: Festivals, it’s funny how all those things have sort of changed and calmed down. All those bikers are now lawyers and doctors, and everybody’s able to have more fun without life risks.
RS: When they started having trouble with Altamont and all those, they tried to figure out a way of still having a rock festival yet not calling it a rock festival. So we ended up doing a lot of bluegrass festivals that had B.B. King and the Doobie Brothers (laughs). There was any type of act, and hundreds of thousands of people.