This year has been good to Tony Trischka, but not without major effort on his part. With his own place solidly secured in the world of bluegrass banjo, Trischka has taken on a labor of love honoring one of his banjo heroes Earl Scruggs. With the release of Earl Jam, which promises to be Volume 1 of an ambitious project, Trischka has been awarded the International Bluegrass Music Association’s award for Collaborative Recording of the Year for “Brown’s Ferry Blues” off the album. Recorded with Billy Strings and produced by Béla Fleck, the song is the opening track on the album. Now the album is nominated for a Best Bluegrass Album Grammy.
The album project ensued when Trischka was given a thumb drive with more than 200 songs with Earl Scruggs and John Hartford jamming. At the time, Hartford had the foresight to make tape recordings, preserving Scruggs playing tunes no one had heard him play before. In a time when everyone has the capability of recording, people tend to forget how rare recordings of these first-generation bluegrass musicians are.
Trischka said, “I remember in the late sixties getting a live recording of Bill Monroe from Bean Blossom and how precious it was. I would listen to it ten thousand times and transcribe the banjo solos. Now we have this avalanche of information.” As for the recordings of Scruggs playing with Hartford, Trischka says, “I don’t think they’ll ever see the light of day, at least not by my hands.” Bob Carl, said Hartford, with whom he played clawhammer banjo, told him that Earl never wanted these recordings to get out there. While people have asked for copies, Trischka said, “It’s not for me to give. I’ll never let it out there because Earl didn’t want it out there, even though his playing is amazing.”
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What he could do—and did—was to study them carefully, transcribing Scruggs’ playing note for note for the Earl Jam project. In addition to Billy Strings, Trischka handpicked a roster of talented musicians, such as Molly Tuttle, Sam Bush, Sierra Ferrell, and Vince Gill, to play and sing on the album.
This album features such traditional songs as “Cripple Creek” and “Amazing Grace,” as well as Scruggs’ take on “Lady Madonna.” The second album, expected on in the summer of 2025, has a rendition of “Here Comes the Bride.”
In support of the album, Trischka has made a number of appearances, both solo and backed by Michael Daves, Jared Engel, and Casey Driessen, where he not only shares the songs from the project but also details about Scruggs’ life.
Trischka sometimes opens with a quote from Mark Twain:
When you want genuine music–music that will come right home to you like a bad quarter, suffuse your system like strychnine whisky, go right through you like Brandreth’s pills, ramify your whole constitution like the measles, and break out on your hide like the pin-feather pimples on a picked goose,–when you want all this, just smash your piano, and invoke the glory-beaming banjo!
Trischka also likes to quote Scruggs, who said, “You can’t encore the past. If I see something bright shining out there, I move toward it.” What Trischka has learned that he shares with audiences is the forward-thinking nature of Scruggs. Trischka notes that while Earl created the Scruggs style of banjo-playing, that style continued to evolve over the course of his life. He noted that Scruggs was moving forward, whether playing with his sons after playing traditional bluegrass with Lester, and then with the Earl Scruggs Revue with drums, electric bass, and sometimes steel guitar or electric guitar, playing Beatles and Bob Dylan tunes. “Even in these recordings,” says Trischka, “he’s constantly coming up with fresh ideas.”
Over the past year, as Trischka has shared stories from Scruggs’ life and career, he draws from his own encounters with the banjo icon. He recalls playing an Irish banjo festival where Scruggs was a special guest. He says, “I remember having my ear right next to this giant speaker, with his banjo blasting through it and hearing all of this new stuff coming out of him constantly. He was constantly recreating Scruggs style. It wasn’t like he was going out of his style, but he had infinite way to change it around and move it forward.
“This is why I did the Earl Jam project. We thought we knew Scruggs style, but he did all these different things, be it tunes or techniques.” Trischka hopes to be able to work through the legal aspects to get permission to create a tablature book of a lot of this music. “Even if the recordings are not available, at least that would be available,” said Trischka.
In addition to his own interactions with Scruggs, Trischka also discovered a treasure trove from the Scruggs family. After the death of Gary Scruggs, the last surviving member of the family, all of Earl’s mementoes, ephemera, and songbooks went to the Earl Scruggs enter in Shelby, NC. Mary Beth Martin, the executive director of the center, found a Mickey Mouse notebook with sixty pages in his handwriting, of his thoughts about his childhood, playing with Bill Monroe, and performing on stage. She shared it with Trischka, who said that in his interviews with Scruggs, none of this had ever come up. Trischka shares some of those memories with audiences, giving them new life.
The stories also tie directly to the songs discovered on those jam tapes. With his own technical banjo skills and his keen ear, Trischka reproduces note-for-note what Scruggs played. In response to questions from other banjo players, he also played variations of the same tunes as played by some of Scruggs contemporaries.
According to Trischka, in one of the recordings from the jam sessions, Scruggs plays the old-time standard “Little Maggie,” but before he plays it, he says, “This is what Ralph Stanley did on it” and plays this little short lick Ralph did. Trischka also located a recording of Earl Scruggs and Don Reno playing double banjos in the 50s, noting, “They were obviously tuned into what each other was doing.”
As Trischka weaves together the songs and stories of Scruggs rich life, he includes how Earl developed his unique style, while playing “Reuben.” According to Trischka, Scruggs realized he had a three-finger roll going that fit the tune perfectly. He practiced all week, looking forward to showing it to Junie, his oldest brother. All Junie had to say was, “Is that all you can pick?”
Trischka also shared Flatt and Scruggs’ entrée into popular culture, first when the pair was chosen to play the Beverly Hillbillies theme song “The Ballad of Jed Clampett” and later, when their rendition of “Foggy Mountain Breakdown” was used in the soundtrack of Bonnie and Clyde.
Through the Earl Jam project and the presentations he makes in connection with it, Trischka continues to breathe life into the legendary performer after the centennial of his birth. He is uniquely qualified to do so, certainly as a highly acclaimed banjo player himself, but also with his storytelling style, incorporating music into the narrative.
With the second volume of Earl Jam due next year, music fans and banjo nerds have access to this sonic avenue into the legendary musician, produced as a true labor of love.
