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Peter Cooper On Music: Earl Scruggs’ legacy helps rejuvenate his hometown

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Randy Scruggs, son of bluegrass legend Earl Scruggs, stands near a statue of his father at the Earl Scruggs Center in honor of his father during a tour that took place after the Earl Scruggs Center dedication ceremony at Central United Methodist Church on Saturday, Jan. 11, 2014 in Shelby, N.C. (photo: Associated Press / The Star, Ben Earp)

Randy Scruggs, son of bluegrass legend Earl Scruggs, stands near a statue of his father at the Earl Scruggs Center in honor of his father during a tour that took place after the Earl Scruggs Center dedication ceremony at Central United Methodist Church on Saturday, Jan. 11, 2014 in Shelby, N.C. (photo: Associated Press / The Star, Ben Earp)

In his 88 years, Earl Scruggs found a new way to play the banjo, an instrument that was clattering toward antiquity until he gave it a new and eloquent voice.

In so doing, Scruggs helped create a new form of country music now recognized as “bluegrass,” he inspired thousands of players and millions of songs and he altered the course of American popular music.

Now, a year and 10 months after his death, Scruggs and his singular legacy are helping to rejuvenate the once-decaying uptown square in Shelby, N.C., the town where he worked making sewing thread in the Lily Mill, and where he left in 1945 to head west — first to Knoxville, then to Nashville — to fulfill his destiny.

Click here to see a photo gallery of Earl Scruggs through the years. Here, he waits in his dressing room at the Ford Theatre at the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum before going on stage (Photo: John Partipilo/The Tennessean).

Click here to see a photo gallery of Earl Scruggs through the years. Here, he waits in his dressing room at the Ford Theatre at the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum before going on stage (Photo: John Partipilo/The Tennessean).

On Saturday, January 11, thousands gathered on Shelby’s Courthouse Square, to celebrate the opening of the Earl Scruggs Center, a $6.2 million museum and interactive learning center devoted to Scruggs and to preserving the music and stories of the American South.

More than 100 musicians, including Nashville mandolin wizard Sam Bush and award-winning bluegrass combo Steep Canyon Rangers, organized what amounted to a bluegrass flash mob at the Central United Methodist Church, where North Carolina Governor Pat McCrory talked of blasting the Flatt & Scruggs classic “The Ballad of Jed Clampett” in his car on the drive from Raleigh.

As Scruggs’ sons, musicians Randy and Gary Scruggs, looked on, the governor said, “This is all about the music and culture of North Carolina, which is going to help out the economy.”

And on Saturday night, Shelby High School’s Malcolm Brown Auditorium filled to capacity for a sold-out and remarkable “Remembering Earl: Music & Stories” event, featuring Randy and Gary Scruggs alongside Bush, Vince Gill, Travis Tritt, Dobro player Rob Ickes, drummer John Gardner and banjo great Jim Mills, who has internalized Scruggs’ bluesy, rhythmically precise style like few others.

Until recently, few Southern cities did much to accentuate the importance of native sons and daughters who left their homes, traveled to Nashville, Memphis or Chicago, New York or Los Angeles, and made significant musical contributions. There is no Tom T. Hall Center in Olive Hill, Ky., no Aretha Franklin Museum in Memphis, no George Jones Learning Campus in Saratoga, Texas, and no James Brown Library in Augusta, Ga.

Sometimes, successful musicians are ill-considered in their hometowns for having the audacity to leave in the first place.

But numerous municipalities are now exploring the financial and quality-of-life benefits found in embracing the importance and popularity of musicians, and in securing those musicians’ legacies.

Nashville’s downtown, of course, has been enriched by a renovated Ryman Auditorium, by the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum, by the Schermerhorn Symphony Center, by the Musicians Hall of Fame and by the gargantuan convention campus whose name pays tribute to a city of song: Music City Center.

In tiny Indianola, Miss., the B.B. King Museum and Delta Interpretive Center is going great guns, and music trails across Mississippi enlighten visitors. In Spartanburg, S.C., the Spartanburg Music Trail shines a light on the Marshall Tucker Band, Marshall Chapman, Pink Anderson, Walter Hyatt and others. Gov. McCrory’s current home of Raleigh now hosts the International Bluegrass Music Association conference and awards show.

They’re prepping a Johnny Cash Boyhood Home museum in Dyess, Ark., and an Americana Music Triangle with points in Nashville, Memphis and New Orleans.

And now Shelby’s citizens excitedly talk about former residents Scruggs, Country Music Hall of Famer Don Gibson (the lovely, 400-seat Don Gibson Theatre opened in 2009) and country hit-maker Patty Loveless (she used to work at a barbecue restaurant in Shelby, and sang in local beer joints).

On Saturday, downtown square shop windows featured Scruggs-inspired displays, and fans, family and dignitaries got their first glimpses at a historic courthouse that has been transformed into a showcase for Scruggs artifacts and regional history. The courthouse has been the town’s visual centerpiece since it was built in 1907.

“I’ve heard Dad say when he was young, he thought it was the most beautiful building he’d ever seen,” says Gary Scruggs.

The county court moved from the location in 1974, replaced by a historical museum that languished and failed. It was locked up in 2004, and the most beautiful building young Earl Scruggs had ever seen became something less than beautiful. A consultant came from NC State University, supposedly to talk about how to care for the closed museum’s artifacts.

“He said, ‘We can’t talk about that, we need to talk about your town: This place is dying,’” said Brownie Plaster, chairwoman of Destination Cleveland County, a group whose name drew snickers from locals who thought Cleveland County would never become a destination for travelers.

Plaster’s group, though, envisioned an uptown Shelby that embraced and marketed its history. In 2006, they contacted the Scruggs family.

“We brought Gary and Earl here in ‘06,” Plaster said. “We hadn’t taken care of our own stuff, but we were wanting the family to entrust Earl Scruggs’ legacy to us. We had to build trust.”

They built it. Earl Scruggs came in 2007, 2009 and 2010 for successful concerts. William Ferris, associate director of the Center for the Study of the American South at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill, lent expertise and joined a national advisory board. Nashville’s Craig Havighurst developed a film about the Scruggs family to play at the center.

After viewing the renovated building, Gary Scruggs said on Saturday, “It’s above and beyond what I hoped it could be.”

The center includes a display devoted to Earl’s wife, Louise Scruggs, the Nashville music industry’s first female manager and the person who helped bring Scruggs and musical partner Lester Flatt into the folk boom of the 1960s and into living rooms across the country via “The Beverly Hillbillies” and “Petticoat Junction” television shows.

There’s also plenty of material pertaining to the Earl Scruggs Revue, the multi-generational, cross-genre, country-bluegrass-rock band that featured Scruggs, sons Steve, Gary and Randy, drummer Jody Maphis, Dobro player Josh Graves and others. Scruggs artifacts abound, which should be enough to draw curious visitors, and exhibits pertaining to local history reveal Cleveland County as a place of cultural significance, where the agrarian South became the industrial South.

Outside the center, restaurants and businesses have sprung up or relocated to the block around a courthouse building that was once in decline but is now a place to visit and learn.

Earl Scruggs grew up in the Flint Hill community, roughly 10 miles away from the building that now bears his name. Scruggs was 4 years old when his father died, and the boy often passed time by playing his dad’s old banjo.

At 10 years old, in Flint Hill, he was playing a tune called “Lonesome Reuben” when he noticed that he was augmenting his traditional approach of playing with thumb and index finger. The addition of a third finger afforded melodic and rhythmic possibilities that transformed his instrument and ultimately — once he’d mastered the new style and stood on the “Grand Ole Opry” stage in December of 1945 to show the world — transformed American popular music.

Now, that extra digit is transforming his old hometown.

Earl Scruggs gave us his middle finger. And that has made all the difference.

Reach Peter Cooper at (615) 259-8220, or pcooper@tennessean.com.

READ MORE: "Earl Scruggs, Country Music Hall of Famer and bluegrass innovator, dies at age 88" (March 28, 2012)


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