Album review

Earl Scruggs - Classic Bluegrass Live

Alongside Bill Monroe, for whom he began serving apprenticeship as a Bluegrass Boy in 1944, Scruggs' pioneering three-finger banjo style, and subsequent career with Lester Flatt, guaranteed him immortality within the genre. Dylan, Baez and The Byrds all borrowed a snifter of DNA, ensuring him cult status with Newport disciples. These recordings—partly with Hylo Brown's Timber-liners, partly reunited with Flatt—make for classic hee-haw hootenanny, not least hoary old Beverly Hillbillies theme, "The Ballad Of Jed Clampett".

Rating: 3 / 10


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‘Even worse than Lou Reed. . .’


Lou Reed was back in the news last week and for reasons other than his recent life-saving liver transplant. It turned out that some boorish actor, a self-styled hell-raiser, Rhys Ifans, by name, had thrown a bit of a strop during a newspaper interview and so one of the Saturday broadsheets,...