Lester Flatt & Earl Scruggs Songs Of The Famous Carter Family (CD)

(Columbia) 12 tracks

Songs of the Famous Carter Family is a studio album by bluegrass artists Flatt and Scruggs with Mother Maybelle Carter and the Foggy Mountain Boys. It was released in 1961 by Columbia Records under the catalog numbers CL 1664 (mono) and CS 8464 (stereo).

The album was released before Billboard magazine began running its Top Country Albums chart in 1964. It was part of Louise Scruggs' plan to rebrand the group by incorporating older folk songs into their repertoire.

AllMusic gave the album a three-star rating. Critic Jim Smith wrote that Flatt and Scruggs “muted their famous ‘overdrive’ to present a collection of relaxed, almost dreamy adaptations of Carter tunes”.

Flatt & Scruggs 

So thisis what it took to bring bluegrass to prime time. Between 1962 and 1971, 'The Beverly Hillbillies'were just about unavoidable. In the top-rated sitcom, family patriarch Jed Clampett discovers oil on his land somewhere in the South, sells up, and moves to Beverly Hills with his ragtag clan. Series creator Paul Henning used a lot of place names from the Ozarks, because that's where he was from. He also wrote the theme song, and, after going to see Flatt & Scruggs at Ash Grove in Hollywood, decided that they'd be the guys to sing it. Music supervisor Perry Botkin approached Flatt & Scruggs' business manager, Louise Scruggs, but she was leery, thinking that it made fun of their audience (or part of their audience, anyway...

Flatt & Scruggs were starting to play campuses and spots like the Ash Grove). Botkin and Henning showed Louise a pilot and assured her that the hillbillies outsmarted the city slickers every time. Earl Scruggs was still leery, saying later, "We'd worked so hard to get away from what you might call the hillbilly image." Introducing the song later, Flatt would say, "Here's one we weren't all that crazy about when we recorded, but after it sold a hundred thousand copies, why, we just learned to love it." Before the series aired, the theme song was re-recorded with a more mainstream vocal by Jerry Scoggins, formerly of the Cass County Boys who'd backed Gene Autry on his 'Melody Ranch'shows in the 1940s. By 1962, Scoggins was working as a stockbroker and only sang on weekends.

Flatt & Scruggs backed Scoggins and played on commercials for two of the sponsors, Kellogg's and Winston cigarettes. Later on, they made a few guest shots on the show. Henning's melody was generic and probably owed more of a debt to Woody Guthrie's talking blues than to anything in the bluegrass canon. The show began airing on September 26, 1962 and Louise Scruggs pressured Don Law to release The Ballad Of Jed Clampettwhen it was clear that the show was a hit. It charted on December 8, the day that Flatt & Scruggs played Carnegie Hall, and in January 1963, it became the first bluegrass song to ever top the country charts. For all the great music they recorded, Flatt & Scruggs' two biggest hits were The Ballad Of Jed Clampett and a spinoff song, Pearl, Pearl, Pearl.

FLATT & SCRUGGS 1948-1959 (4-CD)
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FLATT & SCRUGGS 1959-1963 (5-CD)
Read more at: https://www.bear-family.de/flatt-und-scruggs-1959-1963-5-cd.html
Copyright © Bear Family Records