Earl Scruggs - The Earl Scruggs Banjo Songbook: Selected Banjo Tab Accurately Transcribed for Over 80 Tunes with Foreword by Jim Mills: Selected Banjo Tab Accurately Transcribed for Over 80 Tunes!

First of all, I'd like to say being asked to write this Foreword is an honor in itself, as few people on earth, if any, have more respect for Mr. Earl Scruggs and the 5-string banjo style that he developed, than me.

Earl Scruggs wasand still ismy all-time hero on this planet, Earth. I was in my 20s and already making a living picking the banjo when I first met Earl in person. He was just as nice as I had ever imagined him to be, even more so. He was friendly and, to my surprise and delight, very complimentarya true gentleman. We became friends, and I feel fortunate to say that some of the biggest highlights in my life were getting to share the stage with Earl from time to time.

I was born in 1966 and began trying to learn to play the banjo seriously at around 10 or 11 years old after hearing my older brother's vinyl copy of the 1949 Flatt & Scruggs recording of Earl's Foggy Mountain Breakdown." By that early age, I had figured out that Earl Scruggs and his style of banjo playing was all I wanted to do.

Unfortunately, there were very few books on the subject and there were even fewer mediums of musical recordings to listen to or learn from. We had vinyl-playing record players (a/k/a turntables") and 331/3 rpm long-play record albums, 45 rpm single" records and then of course a little later, we had the newest analog mediums of musical recordingsthe ( gasp ) eight-track tape and cassette tape formatsthere were no CDs, no DVDs, no digital streaming video or audio, and no YouTube. This must all sound absolutely archaic to most young people today, but that was it

That said, us aspiring banjo players had few options with those vinyl recordings. Most of us would put them on the turntable, and then slow down the speed of the record player to try and listen as closely as we could to figure out just what Earl was doing. But before we could figure it out man! that banjo solo had gone by so fast , even with the speed slowed down! And then we'd have to raise the record player's stylus arm back up again and then set the needle back down on the vinyl record as close to the spot where we knew the banjo solo was patiently waiting to be played again and again and again.

My goodness, this sounds almost cavemanesque today! But that's the way it was, and that's what we had to doover and over and overto try and glean anything we could from Earl Scruggs' fabulous playing on those recordings.

A few years later after I was already playing pretty well, I went into a local music store to purchase some strings or picks or something, and saw a book titled, Earl Scruggs and the 5-String Banjo and of course I had to buy it.

I didn't realize it had been in print for a good while before my finding it there. Thumbing through it, I noticed some pages of music notation and I realized I already knew many of the songs pretty well. There were also right-hand roll patterns written there with a T," I" and M," signifying the Thumb, Index, and Middle" fingers of the right handand markers where the left-hand fingers would go between the fretsthey called it Tablature , a way to learn music note for note." There were several songs I didn't have down completely at the time, so I figured out how to read this tablature and quickly learned the proper way to play the parts I was having a problem with simple as that .

That little story brings us up to the present day and the tablature-filled book we are introducing here, The Earl Scruggs Banjo Songbook . This new and insightful book is a wonderful opportunity for countless folks trying to learn to play Scruggs Style Banjo" today, only in a much easier and informative way to learn than I and many others endured way back when. And it's also a more reliable way of learning, with accurate tablature to many songs never before featured anywhere else to my knowledge.

This book includes tablature to many Flatt & Scruggs songs that were not available on any of their regular commercial recordings, but only accessible through hearing them performing live.

Many of us today were not fortunate enough to get to see and hear this monumental band, Lester Flatt & Earl Scruggs and the Foggy Mountain Boys," playing live. Fortunately for us, we have the Best of the Flatt & Scruggs TV Shows on DVD now, featuring so many great songs and instrumentals that they never recorded commerciallyinstrumentals like Shortnin' Bread," Flop Eared Mule," and other awesome singing songs like Love and Wealth," Nobody's Business," and many more.

This new book, The Earl Scruggs Banjo Songbook , features 13 songs with tablature from those live DVDs, which to my knowledge, have never before been tabbed out in print. Having this book along with the DVDs will give banjo players who want to read the tablature to these rare performances not only a chance to merely hear those performances, but to actually get to see Earl and this remarkable band in their prime playing those songs as well! It's almost magical to see how relaxed and interactive they were with one anotherwith hot studio lights shining and TV cameras rollingall while knowing they were coming into so many households across America through their popular television show.