Earl Scruggs

If I hadn't been 21 years old and full of energy, I just came off on a farm and a thread mill where I thought to do an hour show on the road.

was a pushover compared to eight hours in the mill or from sunup to sundown on the farm.

And music was my love, so to get into a group that had good singing and playing, and Bill had that, especially good singing and had a good fiddle player.

So I went in, and it just seemed to make a full band, especially for that style of music.

That was long before anybody had tagged it as bluegrass.

It was just country music.

Why did I hate it?

It was because we did it 24 hours a day, practically.

Back then, there was only two-lane highways, and he traveled in a 41 Chevrolet car.

And we'd leave after the opera on Saturday night.

and maybe work down in South Georgia, about as far as you could get for a Sunday afternoon show, and on down to Miami someplace for Monday or Tuesday, and work till about Thursday and start working back to Nashville.

So it was just, you'd only be in Nashville long enough to do the Grand Ole Opry and to get a change of clothes and pack your suitcase and head out again.

I was single at the time, so I was living in a hotel and I had one suitcase.

And so I had to really work on it to keep clean clothes for every night doing a show on the road.

Well, I liked his singing, and his playing fit in good with that style of music, and I

We piled around together, roomed together.

And so we did that for two and a half, three years.

And that's when really we never had talked about starting to show ourselves.

But I had made up my mind that I was going to just get off on the road.

So I worked two weeks notice.