Soggy Bottom boy

Earl Scruggs, the legendary banjo player who inspired the Coen brothers in 'O Brother, Where Art Thou?', tells Siobhán Long about his first trip to Ireland.

Anyone old enough to remember the Beverly Hillbillies theme tune will smile at the news of Earl Scruggs's visit to Ireland next weekend, when anyone with even the tiniest interest in bluegrass music will be hightailing it to Longford for the third Johnny Keenan Banjo Festival. Remember those high-pitched rolling banjo notes, buoyed by Scruggs's ability to pick out The Ballad Of Jed Clampett? Now's your chance to relive those classic moments in three dimensions.

With more than six decades in the music business - and some six million records sold - Scruggs is hardly coming to Ireland just to fill up his dance card. With his long-time playing partner, Lester Flatt, Scruggs invented a banjo style, lovingly referred to by his acolytes as Scruggs style.

Perfecting his three-finger picking technique, Scruggs dragged banjo music out of the swamps and bayous of Louisiana and his native North Carolina and into lounges and concert halls from Nashville to New York and as far west as San Francisco. He is often cited as the reason why most banjo players picked up the much-maligned instrument in the first place.

Flatt and Scruggs, both members of Bill Monroe's Blue Grass Boys from 1944 to 1948, left the band to form The Foggy Mountain Boys, who were immortalised by the Coen brothers in their film O Brother, Where Art Thou? as The Soggy Bottom Boys.

Scruggs's passport isn't weighed down with stamps: this will be his first visit to Europe for 30 years and his first ever to Ireland. Given his age - he was 80 in January - and his aversion to travelling the globe, it's unlikely to be a journey he'll repeat in the near future. "It's mighty nice for me to be visiting Ireland," he says in the softest of drawls. "I'm looking forward to meeting all the folks who can come to see us while we're there."

Scruggs's loyalty to the banjo stretches as far back as he can remember: he has memories of picking it up for the first time as a four-year-old back in Shelby, North Carolina. "In my home we had banjos, guitars and autoharps," he says, his voice hoarse but his enthusiasm for the music unstinting.

"I started out with the guitar, but my first love has always been the banjo. There's just something about it that fits me the best. Of course I'm very happy that other people like my music too. It's a nice form of flattery for people to appreciate what you've done well enough to do it themselves, and I'm real pleased to see just how much the banjo's been growing and growing since I was a boy."

Bluegrass has acquired a cachet in recent years, but at the time of Scruggs's introduction to the music it was an animal of an altogether different hide. "When I was growing up the word bluegrass had never been heard tell of," he says. "The word bluegrass only began to appear in the Sixties. We just called it country music. When I started playing there was no other banjo picker playing that style of banjo, and when I came to Nashville in 1945, and went on the Grand Ole Opry with Bill Monroe and Lester Flatt, we just played what we knew best."

Owing a significant chunk of his success to the popularity of The Beverly Hillbillies, Scruggs is sanguine about the role television and film have played in extending his reputation beyond the usual confines of country music. "First we were invited to do the theme song for the show, and later we did guest appearances there," he says. "I guess that show spread the sound of the banjo further than any other show I was ever on. And of course then the movie Bonnie And Clyde came out, and Foggy Mountain Breakdown was featured in it, so we got a lot of great exposure then too."

Scruggs's primary musical influences were close to home. "My father died when I was four years old, and of course I used to walk, eat, sleep and dream about him, and I heard my mother talk about how he played the fiddle and how he loved the banjo. He was a farmer, and most farmers used to play music mainly in the winter time, when they weren't working in the fields. That's what I was doing until I finally decided to go into the music commercially. I really didn't want to leave home. I was a home boy, and I was supporting my mother and younger sister, but finally I decided that the music was where my heart was, so I went along with it, and I used to send money every week home, to support them."

Nashville has been good to Scruggs. Ever since his first visit there, sustained in no small part by his two decades as a regular guest at the Grand Ole Opry, Scruggs's tour bus was clocking up the miles, banjo strings pumping to the addictive chord structures of Sitting On Top Of The World, Sally Goodin and, of course, Foggy Mountain Breakdown.

Like many of his contemporaries, he hasn't been slow to stretch the boundaries of the music, finding common ground with everyone from The Chieftains, guesting on last year's Down The Old Plank Road, to Billy Bob Thornton, Elton John, Sting and the late Johnny Cash on Earl Scruggs And Friends.

"When I started out there were no interstates, just two-lane highways," he says, "so we used to leave home and head south for a week at a time, covering thousands of miles. We just lived out of suitcases for years. But as long as we were playing the music it was OK. And keeping good company's always been good for the music too, I believe."

Scruggs admits to having some responsibility for the recent cult-like success of bluegrass. "Nobody else was picking the banjo the way that I was way back in 1945," he says. "Now it's happening all over the country. I enjoy hearing banjo pickers, seeing people put their own ideas into the picking, because it helps to spread it wider."

The popularity in Ireland of banjo-and-fiddle combinations makes Scruggs laugh heartily at the prospect of picking tunes with players who've let his music infuse their veins, where it's mixed with everything from Sliabh Luachra slides and polkas to Donegal slow airs.

"I don't think it's that surprising now that the world's become such a small place," he says. "The music sure does travel easy, and that's the way I like it. These days we've got more songs and more tunes and a wide exposure to good music, so I'd be crazy not to join in the fun."

Earl Scruggs plays at the Johnny Keenan Banjo Festival, Longford, on Saturday. The festival runs from Friday until Sunday. See www.johnnykeenan.com