The University of Illinois Press' monumental Music in American Life series rolls on with Thomas Goldsmith's Earl Scruggs & Foggy Mountain Breakdown. As the title suggests, it's as much about a key bluegrass instrumental (first recorded by Flatt & Scruggs on Mercury Records in December 1949) as about the musician who may or may not have written it. Both Bill Monroe and Earl Scruggs claimed authorship, and neither would back down. Outside experts have landed on either side of the dispute.

In any event, music journalist Goldsmith holds that the tune had a "major role in making Scruggs famous and in preserving the country string music and the banjo he picked so well." For the bulk of the book, Scruggs the human being is all but a secondary presence while the music commands the front of the stage. However large his gift and however influential a banjo picker, Scruggs seems to have been an ordinary man in his private life. Goldsmith twice characterizes him as "taciturn" in manner, also as a family man who usually got along with people. He generously mentored aspiring bluegrass-banjo players. He could hold grudges, though, practically an occupational requirement of first-generation bluegrassers.

Born Jan. 6, 1924, in the Flint Hill community of Cleveland County, North Carolina, Scruggs was a self-taught musician. The family lived in an isolated area, so young Earl had little exposure to the other banjo players who are sometimes said to have influenced his three-finger roll, most prominently Charlie Poole and Snuffy Jenkins. Scruggs invented it himself, specifically on a day when he was practicing on the traditional "Reuben" and he found that without realizing it he had moved from two- to three-finger picking. His brother Horace, who was there, confirms Earl's account. Even then, Earl understood he had created something important.

Scruggs joined Bill Monroe's Bluegrass Boys in late 1945. There he met singer-guitarist Lester Flatt. Bluegrass traces its origins to that classic band, which broke up in 1948 because Earl and Lester found, as many had and would, that life under Monroe's oversized thumb was hard to endure. A few months later, Flatt & Scruggs formed their own band, the Foggy Mountain Boys, the most commercially successful bluegrass outfit ever. It even scored charting hits, one of them "Foggy Mountain Breakdown," which played a prominent role on the Bonnie & Clyde soundtrack in Arthur Penn's celebrated 1967 film. An entire chapter, among the lengthier ones, is devoted to the matter. For a while Scruggs more or less fades out of the narrative.

Over time "Foggy Mountain" won two Grammys and other acclaim. In March 1969 Flatt & Scruggs broke up, the principal cause personal and artistic differences. Scruggs wanted newer, more fashionable material and had no objection to electric instruments; Flatt didn't agree. Flatt went on to tour and record with a traditional bluegrass band, and Earl formed the country-rock Earl Scruggs Revue with his sons. I always found the latter a bland, neither-fish-nor-fowl enterprise, but mine was a minority assessment; the Revue did well, and Earl drew a new audience. He also surprised many fans by coming out against the Vietnam War, a daring position to take among the conservative performers who worked the Grand Ole Opry in those days. Scruggs died on March 28, 2012.

The previous two volumes of the Music in American Life series focused on two major figures in tradition-inflected Southern music, Bill Monroe and Uncle Dave Macon (I reviewed them here on 22 December 2018 and 2 March 2019 respectively), each with a strong, distinctive personality of the sort to whom legends and anecdotes are attached.

Earl Scruggs is not one of those, which should not mean he doesn't merit a biography. It is hardly Goldsmith's fault that notwithstanding his undeniable contribution to American vernacular music, Scruggs was a normal guy with a quiet, mature personality that kept him out of turmoil and trouble. If you're looking for drama, you won't find it here. Not too many pages into it, I began to grasp that its target audience is bluegrass players, less so more casual mainstream readers seeking a lively account of the artist behind the art.