If the five-string banjo is a cool instrument today—and it undeniably is, with sales of the contraption soaring and its sparkling tones cutting through on a growing number of CDs and concerts by all manner of artists—there is, in the long run, one man to thank. So it's fitting that when the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum opens the doors to "Banjo Man: The Musical Journey of Earl Scruggs" on March 4, the exhibit will be among the most elaborate the institution has yet devoted to a single artist. And to those who think it celebrates a record of accomplishments that all lie in the distant past, or that belong to one person, the exhibit says, "Think again."

Bluegrass music celebrates its 60th anniversary this year, marking not the date that Bill Monroe put his band together, but the date that Earl Scruggs joined their ranks. As a member of the Blue Grass Boys, Scruggs belonged not only to a group who created a new genre, but to a larger cluster of musicians who were revolutionizing country music in the postwar era. And while Monroe may have the title of "Father of Bluegrass," it was what Scruggs brought to the band that gave the style its most characteristic sound.

Listen to recordings of the Blue Grass Boys' Opry appearances in 1946 and 1947, and it's unmistakable; while audiences were stirred by the group's rapid tempos, high, precise singing and Monroe's stout mandolin playing, it was Earl's banjo solos that drove them into a frenzy. In fact, Scruggs was frequently given co-billing with Monroe by the show's master of ceremonies. "Now here's Bill and Earl, with that fancy banjo," George D. Hay would intone, and the band would be off and running.

That "fancy banjo" had its roots in Cleveland County, N.C., where Scruggs was born in 1924. Though the banjo's role in most rural settings was to provide rhythm for fiddle-led string bands, around Flint Hill there was a small but vital tradition of melody-oriented, three-fingered picking. Raised with his brothers by a mother widowed when he was 4, Earl learned to play on his dad's banjo—one of the Hall of Fame exhibit's most significant pieces. By the time he was in his teens, Earl had mastered the local three-fingered tradition and was already moving beyond it, smoothing the uneven style into advanced and rhythmically powerful patterns called "rolls."

"When I came to Nashville, nobody had played the banjo before in that style," Scruggs says. "And I remember, Bill started putting some of the old tunes in the show that really picked good on the banjo. That helped me, to get to play a lot of leading parts. I was getting one or two tunes every Saturday night on the Opry back then. He had 15 minutes by himself, with just one guest, which was Uncle Dave Macon, so he'd get at least four tunes in that 15 minutes, and he'd usually put me on for a tune. So I got a lot of good exposure."

Scruggs and guitarist-lead singer Lester Flatt left Monroe's band at the end of 1947 and, within a matter of weeks, had partnered to form a new band, the Foggy Mountain Boys. Signing with Mercury Records, they recorded 28 sides for the label over the next two years, including what would become one of the most widely recognized tunes in 20th century popular music: "Foggy Mountain Breakdown," Scruggs' tour de force instrumental. Moving to Columbia Records in 1950, they followed a pattern common to many country artists of the period, using a daily radio show to sell songbooks and promote personal appearances within the listening area, then moving to another after "playing out" the territory.

By 1953, they had landed a daily Martha White-sponsored radio show that brought them back to Nashville. By 1955, they were working a weekly, 2,500-mile circuit of TV appearances and concerts that took them from Nashville to Georgia to South Carolina to West Virginia and back again, all the while making increasingly popular records. Thanks to the clout that Martha White's sponsorship gave them, they also were made members of the Grand Ole Opry.

Yet in some ways, the most important thing that happened that year was that Louise Scruggs, Earl's wife of seven years, began to book the band, a job that would grow over the years into the kind of devoted career management that few artists ever have. A Tennessee gal who was working in an accounting firm when she met Scruggs at the Opry, the former Louise Certain had always had an eye for business—indeed, one of the family mementos on display at the Museum is the toy typewriter and desk that she asked for at Christmas one year.

"The rest of the ladies in the neighborhood had little tea parties and bridge games," Louise recalls, "and I wasn't too interested in that. So I was already thinking, 'I think I can do something more. Give me something a little bit more constructive than that.' "

Her opportunity came one day when Scruggs asked her to take care of a booking. "I started out the door one day and gave her a place or two to call," Earl remembers. "Back then, you weren't paid anything to be on radio—you did that to plug your dates and sell songbooks—and of course, the Opry didn't pay too much. So concerts were where you made your money."

"He was trying to book the shows and work, too, so he just didn't have time to do it all," Louise says. "He handed me the name of a person up in Virginia, and he said, 'Here, call this number and see if you can set this concert up with this guy.' So I called him and booked it. Earl got home that night and I said, 'I got you a date booked. Any more names you want me to call?' So he started giving me contacts."

"She liked that," Scruggs says, "and she could get it done much better than me."

Not surprisingly, given the times, she ran into some resistance. "They would always want to talk to Earl, and I'd tell them, 'You're going to have to go through me anyway, so you might as well talk to me now and then we'll get this settled,' " Louise says with a smile. Over the next few years, she took on a bigger role with the group, guiding their career as Flatt & Scruggs and broadening their appeal by reaching out to the emerging folk revival audience.

"I kept up with all the trade paper magazines, and what was going on with the radio stations, and what was getting played," she says. "There wasn't a great difference between what Flatt & Scruggs were already recording and the folk music that was being recorded in that time frame; it just had a different name."

"You'd watch your audience, too," Earl adds. "We got to getting a lot of young people to come when we'd play a park or something, and that would lead you to think that there was another audience out there."

Louise helped, too, in scoring the group's biggest triumph of the early 1960s, when they recorded the theme song to Hollywood's Beverly Hillbillies television show and then re-recorded it for release as a single. The record shot to No. 1 on the Billboard country chart and reached No. 44 on the pop chart, though as the Scruggses recall, it nearly didn't happen at all.

"They called and wanted us to do the show, and we turned it down," Earl says with a laugh, "because she couldn't imagine what people in California would make you want to look like as hillbillies. So they sent their music director out here, and they assured us that, yeah, they're going to be real hillbillies, backwoodsmen, but, through common sense, old country common sense, they're going to outsmart the doctors and lawyers. So that's how she put us on the Beverly Hillbillies, and that's the way [producer] Paul Henning kept the show; they made everybody look intelligent, at least."

"There are still comments going around, I notice, that that projected a bad image for bluegrass music," Louise notes. "But, my God, it spread it all over the world."

Flatt & Scruggs might have comfortably rode the enduring popularity they'd created for themselves in the early 1960s for the remainder of a long career. For the rest of the decade, they occasionally made it onto the country charts while touring endlessly at home and overseas and making TV appearances, including on their own, long-running syndicated show. Nevertheless, Scruggs was growing restless, spurred by his sons' growing musicianship and his own creativity.

"It started from recording songs," Earl remembers. "Louise had negotiated the new contract with Columbia, and they wanted us to learn some new songs. We had done all that Lester knew how to write, and we just needed some new material—and some of that stuff, Lester's heart just wasn't in it. It kind of pulled us apart, I guess. But by that time, [our son] Gary was finishing his four years at Vanderbilt, and Randy had stayed a while at Vanderbilt, but his mind was in music, so I just started up the Revue. Randy and Gary and Steve were one of the biggest influences with me as far as changing and different tunes. They came along with their young ideas; I just went along with the ride, and playing with them was the most enjoyable thing I've ever done. I just went for it, really. I didn't know that it'd do as good as it did."

Though they're amply covered in the "Banjo Man" exhibit, the Revue are not nearly as well remembered as they ought to be these days. Not quite a pioneering country-rock act, they nevertheless served as great popularizers, fusing Earl's banjo licks and, at varying times, the bluegrass-based playing of fiddler Vassar Clements (another former Blue Grass Boy) and dobroist Josh Graves (a onetime Foggy Mountain Boy) with drums, electric bass, keyboards and electric and acoustic guitars. In the process, they turned signature Scruggs tunes like "Lonesome Reuben" and "Sally Goodin" into extended rave-ups and romped through songs from younger writers like Bob Dylan and Billy Joel.

"That Randy's always been a hot guitar picker," Earl says, "and we put a show together. We'd always open the show with 'Nashville Skyline Rag,' a tune that Bob Dylan had written, and he'd do the first break with acoustic guitar, and then lay it down and come back with electric guitar on his final break, and he was really cooking when he turned on that electric. That was kind of the first I'd heard of a real country show that had some rock in it. We weren't shooting for rock 'n' roll at all, but young guys at that time, like Randy and Gary and Steve, they were fans of it, and they could shove the show right along with that stuff."

While they didn't inspire the same fanaticism that Flatt & Scruggs had engendered among bluegrass fans during their heyday, the Revue were, from a financial point of view, more successful than the Foggy Mountain Boys had ever been. Most notably, they played college campuses and music festivals, where they shared the stage at times with the major rock acts of the day. Still, in the mid-'80s, even as Flatt & Scruggs were inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame, the Revue disbanded, as Earl began to suffer health problems and Randy pursued a growing career as a session musician and producer. Out of the public eye for the first time in nearly 40 years, by the early '90s Earl Scruggs was beginning to be more of a revered memory than an active participant in the musical scene.

Ironically, it was a health crisis that eventually paved the way for his reemergence. Entering the hospital in 1996 for surgery on a hip replacement he'd had in the 1950s after an auto accident, Scruggs suffered a post-operative heart attack; yet his recovery was such that he wound up feeling better than he had in years. Renewing his interest in picking, he began to take the stage at the Opry again, abetted not only by Randy and Gary, but by a new generation of musicians he'd profoundly influenced, like Vince Gill, Ricky Skaggs and Alison Krauss. He started to make guest appearances on recordings, too, recapping his brilliant guitar picking on "I'm Working on a Road (to Gloryland)" with award-winning bluegrassers IIIrd Tyme Out and contributing to the Grammy-winning "Same Old Train" that closed 1998's star-laden Tribute to Tradition compilation.

Freed from the commitment to a full-time band, Scruggs has been giving free reign to his interests, including finding young musicians with whom to play, both onstage with his Family and Friends outfit and at "pickin's" held at the Scruggs home. "He likes to pick with young people," Louise says. "They're always coming up with some innovative idea or lick. It turns him on, too, so he'll go and play something crazy that they haven't heard, and they'll come offstage saying, 'Did you hear what Earl played? I never heard him do that before!' "

At the same time, he's been collaborating with a variety of heavyweights from other genres, as he did on 2001's Earl Scruggs and Friends, which features guest turns by country stars like Gill, Johnny Cash and Marty Stuart, as well as from pop and rock figures like Sting and Melissa Etheridge.

Though the album's star-studded remake of "Foggy Mountain Breakdown" earned Scruggs a Grammy the following year, the disc itself got a mixed reaction. For those prizing rootsiness as a musical ideology, the presence of pop stars like Elton John and Don Henley was, it seems, hard to swallow. For Earl, though—presumably inured to such criticism since his break with Flatt in 1969—making the album was a thoroughly satisfying experience. His enthusiasm, the ultimate key to his stature, is evident throughout the album, suggesting that his journey isn't yet over.

"Boy, that was a joyful thing to do," he says. "I guess the first one we did was with Elton, at a studio down there in north Georgia. When he came in and hit that piano, golly, it was just like the whole room was full of piano.

"What little jump in show business I've done is because of getting to play with different people like that. I just always felt that if I didn't play something besides the eight or 10 bluegrass tunes that we'd been doing—if I didn't play something else, I was just depriving myself of enjoyment in life. And I just knew that my style of playing the banjo could fit in with what other people were doing. So I just went for it. I just felt like I owed it to myself to do something with those guys."