Around 1934, in rural North Carolina, a 10-year-old boy sat alone in his bedroom, picking a five-string banjo, and almost unconsciously began using three fingers on his right hand instead of the thumb and forefinger that every other banjo player used.

More than 65 years later, Earl Scruggs has received Grammy Awards and membership in the Country Music Hall of Fame, and he's scheduled for a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame next February. He has been joined on records by some of the world's most influential performers, ranging from bluegrass greats Bill Monroe and Lester Flatt to pop superstars Elton John and Sting to actor/musicians Billy Bob Thornton and Steve Martin.

The most profound measure of Earl Scruggs' influence is the simple fact that the five-string banjo is the only instrument on which the overwhelming majority of players copy the style of just one man. "Scruggs style" - the driving, three-fingered roll that Scruggs perfected in the 1930s - defines the five-string banjo.

Scruggs has done everything a man could ever hope to do with a musical instrument, but he's not about to hang it on the wall and rest on his accomplishments. In an interview at Gibson's Original Acoustic Instruments division, where Gibson makes all the Earl Scruggs banjo models, the master revealed that his driving force today is the same as it was in 1934:

"Picking," he said. "I don't think you'll ever get enough picking.

"You might get a little tired of the road or something, but I don't know, I can pick every week if I have somewhere to pick. I don't like to travel as much as I have in the past, but it's good for my soul to get to pick, especially with these good musicians and these guys that play so well."

Scruggs has been surrounded lately by guys that play really well. His most recent album, Earl Scruggs and Friends, features an all-star guest lineup including Elton John, Sting, John Fogerty, Steve Martin, Paul Schaffer and Melissa Etheridge. (See the full guest list at the bottom of this page.) It won a Grammy last year - the first and only Grammy for Martin and Shaffer.

Earl's son Randy produced the album and organized all the sessions, which required him to be as much travel agent as band booker. The first session was with Elton John in Atlanta, where John lives. A session with Don Henley was recorded in Dallas. Others were in Los Angeles and Nashville.

Back problems, hip surgery and heart surgery had kept Scruggs out of the recording studio for 17 years before the new album, but he hardly noticed the break. "I didn't realize it had been that long since I'd been in the studio," he said.

Feeling comfortable in the studio, Scruggs turned his attention to some of the new tunes on the sessions. "Some of them I'd never heard before," he said, "but I enjoy doing new tunes. It gives me a little bit to perk up, to pay a little bit more attention."

Doing new music was once a controversial move for Earl Scruggs. When he split with his longtime bluegrass partner Lester Flatt, he formed the Earl Scruggs Revue with sons Randy, Gary and later Steve, and took the banjo into rock and pop music. To the rest of the world, it seemed like a radical move, but not to Scruggs. It was actually the same music he'd been playing around the house, thanks to Randy and Gary. "I like other types of music," he explained. "I don't know if 'restricted, I'd been restricted' would be the way to phrase it. Of course, with Lester, that was a good run with him, but the boys growing up, they used to bring their friends out to our house. We lived out here in Madison, and they would go in there and they'd have jam sessions with the younger artists. I got to sit in with them, so the farther I went, the more inspired I was to go farther."

It came as no surprise to Scruggs that his banjo style worked in a variety of musical styles. "Well I knew that before I came to Nashville really," he said. "I worked with a guy, I can't think of his name, him and his wife, and one of them had a saxophone and the other played drums. It wasn't a regular job but I did a few gigs around home with them. He used to have a tent show, a little tent show, and I thought I was going to get a job working one year on the tent show, but he closed it down and I never got to go out there, but anyway, he had a sax and played drums. I like drums, really, if they're under control."

Scruggs-style banjo, based on a three-fingered roll that allows the player to provide a driving rhythm and deliver a melody at the same time, just came to him when he was growing up in Cleveland County, near Shelby, North Carolina. "When I first started at 4 or 5 years old I played thumb and finger, two-fingered, we called it," he said. "And when I was about 10 years old I was sitting one day and picking 'Ruben,' this tune I still play, in a room by myself, just sitting. And I was in a mode where I was not asleep but not thinking about what I was doing, just sitting there and doodling around with the banjo, and all of a sudden I realized I was picking with the third finger, the roll, and I never tried the two-fingered style again.

"I played that same tune the rest of the week," he continued. "My oldest brother Junie would usually come over on Saturday, and I couldn't wait to see what he thought about it. He was coming up the road - he walked - coming up this dirt road, and I was sitting on the edge of the porch picking 'Ruben.' I'd see him turn his head in the wind, he was getting a whiff of it coming up the road. I kept picking and he came on up, came up on the steps, and started on into the house and said, 'Is that all you can pick?' And it frightened me. Because I hadn't retuned. The banjo was tuned down in D to play Ruben. And I'd been playing the same tune. Anyway I ran it up to G and C and it worked just fine."

Scruggs got his first decent banjo when he traveled with his mother to a pawn shop in Spartanburg, S.C., and paid $90 for a Gibson RB-11 (which was actually one of Gibson's less expensive models, despite its fancy looking pearloid overlays). Scruggs' wife Louise, who was with him for this interview, picked up the story from there: "His mother on the way home said, 'You've got to think of some way to make some money and pay for that banjo and get your money back out of it.' She gave him a license to go pick, actually, and didn't even know it."

"That's what made me fly out of the coop, when she told me that," Scruggs added.

Scruggs' goal was to get in a good, sober band and to get a job playing on radio. A succession of radio jobs eventually brought him to Nashville, where in late 1945, armed now with a Gibson RB-75, he auditioned for Bill Monroe's Blue Grass Boys. He not only got the job, he immediately established Scruggs-style banjo as the signature instrumental sound of bluegrass music. After leaving Monroe and teaming up with Lester Flatt, Scruggs went into the studio in 1949 - now using a Gibson Granada - and recorded "Foggy Mountain Breakdown." Then, as now, it set the standard for the instrument.

Through Scruggs' years with Flatt, bluegrass banjo players copied his playing note for note, and he began to reach wider audiences when he was invited to appear at the Newport Folk Festival in 1959. In 1962 mainstream TV audiences heard Scruggs-style banjo on the "The Beverly Hillbillies," and Flatt and Scruggs' version of "The Ballad of Jed Clampett" was a No. 1 country single. In 1967 Warren Beatty chose "Foggy Mountain Breakdown" to be the music for the chase scenes in his hit film Bonnie and Clyde, and the recording went on to win a Grammy.

By 1969, Scruggs was ready for another musical challenge and created it for himself with the Earl Scruggs Revue, a far-reaching country-rock ensemble that included sons Gary on bass, Randy on guitar and Steve on keyboards. For the next 11 years, the Revue took Scruggs-style banjo picking to rock festivals, college concerts and such venues as Carnegie Hall and Central Park in New York.

In 1984, Gibson finally made its longstanding relationship with Scruggs official with the first Earl Scruggs model. Four more Scruggs models followed, and then in 2002, Gibson's OAI division designed the ultimate banjo, trimmed in silver and gold and abalone pearl, with a hand-painted portrait of Scruggs on the resonator. "The Earl," as it was called, was shown to Scruggs for his approval. "They brought it to me, and I approved it because I didn't see anything to improve it," he said. "You know you can get gaudy with something, and they didn't do that. To me, I think it's very tasteful, well done, with the silver and gold and the engraving. I think it's very tasteful." The first The Earl was presented to Scruggs by Gibson chairman and CEO Henry Juszkiewicz at the summer NAMM show in July 2002.

Although honors and awards for Earl Scruggs continue to come in, he finds his satisfaction as he always has, simply in picking the banjo. As he explains, "I'm playing just enough to suit my inner feelings."