“Foggy Mountain Breakdown” is one of my absolute favorite instrumentals and this is just an incredible performance of it.  There are so many great performances here, not the least of which is Earl Scruggs who keeps getting better with age.  He’s not just an inspiration to me as a banjo player and a musician but as a human being.

“This is a banjo.  It’s the only instrument invented in America and you are about to witness why this is the only country that had enough nerve.”

- Roy Clark, from Roy Clark Live!

So I was listening to some Flatt and Scruggs stuff online when I came upon this album.  I don’t know why but I figured it was the television theme plus some background music and some numbers from when they guest-starred on the show.

That would have been nice.

Instead what I got was the television theme plus a whole mess of songs sung by the cast - in character.   Oh they all get their turn.  Jed, Granny, Ellie Mae, Jethro….even a duet between Mr. Drysdale and Miss Hathaway about the love of money.

At first listen it sounds like some kind of horrible novelty record.  After subsequent listens….it’s still bad.

For instance, everyone wants to know what’s in Granny’s pot in “Vittles:”

We got owl soup
jowl soup
and a little fowl soup
fried bits
dried bits
skinny and wide bits
hog belly
frog belly
cooked a nice possum jelly
that’s what’s a-cookin’ in my pot

So that’s pretty much how the whole thing goes.  Outside of the main theme the music itself isn’t that interesting and I feel strangely violated after listening to this. To whoever marked this as a Flatt and Scruggs recording, I hope you’re happy.

Oddly enough, you can but the whole thing on MP3 on Amazon.  Even more odd, someone gave it five stars.

“No one likes every style of music, but everyone loves the sound of the five string banjo.” - Larry McCabe  in the Roy Clark Complete Bluegrass Banjo Bible

“In the Southern Appalachians, no decent woman would let her husband associate with a banjo player, and certainly no father would see that fate befall his innocent daughter.  The habitat of the banjo was the moonshine still.

[...]

[my father was] told by a mountain minister that ‘you might as well give your son a ticket to hell as give him a five-string banjo!’” - Nat Winston in Earl Scruggs and the 5-String Banjo

“I don’t want to be the sort of person who lives in a house with two banjos.” - my wife after discovering I had bought a second banjo