“Foggy Mountain Breakdown” by Flatt & Scruggs

"Foggy Mountain Breakdown" is Earl Scruggs' tune, a bluegrass instrumental cut to the common breakdown form, and he and Lester Flatt first put it on tape with the Foggy Mountain Boys in December 1949, Scruggs driving it on five-string banjo. It turns up on the 1959 album Lester Flatt & Earl Scruggs with the Foggy Mountain Boys, and it has long since become a bluegrass standard, the kind of number guitar and mandolin pickers learn by copying the banjo's breaks. Its opening double hammer-on is shared with Bill Monroe's "Bluegrass Breakdown", which Scruggs helped write, before it swings off to E minor.

Bonnie and Clyde ran it under the car chases in 1967, country chase scenes on screen have borrowed it ever since, and it won Flatt & Scruggs a Grammy in 1969. In 2004 the Library of Congress added it to the National Recording Registry.

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