{"id":915,"date":"2012-03-29T23:36:48","date_gmt":"2012-03-30T05:36:48","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/bendreth.com\/?p=915"},"modified":"2012-03-29T23:39:01","modified_gmt":"2012-03-30T05:39:01","slug":"earl-scruggs-rip","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bendreth.com\/?p=915","title":{"rendered":"Earl Scruggs, RIP"},"content":{"rendered":"

Earl Scruggs died yesterday<\/a>. I’m sorry to hear that. There are a lot of people who play in the style that he pioneered, but he always seemed to have a little something extra in his playing, at least, to my ear.<\/p>\n

I bought my first banjo in 1979, and laboriously learned to play three or four tunes badly using the books and tapes I bought, including Earl’s book<\/a> with it’s little floppy record. I never learned to play the instrument beyond reproducing “fret this string here, then pick it” sequences until after I’d attended Pete Wernick’s banjo camp<\/a> – about two weeks after camp, something just “clicked” and I suddenly knew what I was doing. I still can’t play well, partly because I’ve largely moved from banjo to ukulele, but there’s a qualitative difference in what I do now compared to what I did before.<\/p>\n

I’ve been to Pete’s banjo camp twice, and I remember that he would have all of the attendees sign a birthday card for Earl, since the banjo camps took place around his birthday.<\/p>\n

I only got to see Earl live one time, which was the last time he performed in Denver. Several people got him to sign their banjos after the concert. I didn’t bring mine, but I did get his signature on my copy of Masters of the Five-String Banjo<\/a><\/em>.<\/p>\n

I’ve got several Earl Scruggs LPs and CDs. I need to move them back up to the top of the playlist; maybe it’s time to get inspired to pick up the banjo again.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Earl Scruggs died yesterday. I’m sorry to hear that. There are a lot of people who play in the style that he pioneered, but he always seemed to have a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7,15],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-915","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-in-the-news","category-music"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bendreth.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/915","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bendreth.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bendreth.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bendreth.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bendreth.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=915"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bendreth.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/915\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bendreth.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=915"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bendreth.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=915"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bendreth.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=915"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}