Musician Tony Trischka was just a kid who fell in love with the banjo, Earl Scruggs' playing style

This weekend in Flagstaff, bluegrass fans will unite for the city’s annual Pickin’ in the Pines Bluegrass Festival. And Tony Trischka will hit the stage to rock out on the banjo there.

Trischka is an award-winning banjo player who has dedicated much of his career to documenting and preserving the work of American banjo legend Earl Scruggs. It resulted in a multi-album release dubbed "Earl Jams," which features some of the biggest bluegrass musicians today.

Trischka told The Show he’s been performing for most of his life when he was just a kid who fell in love with the sound of the banjo.

Full conversation

TONY TRISCHKA: I was involved in the folk boom of the early ’60s, late ’50s. I mean, it was all happening at that point. And I was playing some folk guitar, and then I heard a group called the Kingston Trio, which people of a certain age will remember, and they had a song called “M.T.A.,” which had a banjo solo in it by their banjoist, Dave Guard.

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I heard these notes that he was playing, 16 notes in particular, and it blew me away. And at that moment, I realized I’ve got to play the banjo. And I hounded my parents till they bought me a banjo for that Christmas, which would have been ’63.

LAUREN GILGER: Wow. So you were just a kid.

TONY TRISCHKA: I was just a kid. I was a little tyke. Yeah. And I just fell in love with the banjo and have been ever since.

LAUREN GILGER: What did you love about it? I mean, it’s a particular kind of sound. It’s very Americana, and it’s kind of plugged into that folk, kind of bluegrass world, right?

TONY TRISCHKA: Yeah, I didn’t know anything about bluegrass at that point. It was really just the sound of it. It was just a fast solo. It was very exciting to me. And I’ve interviewed many people myself, lots of banjo players, and I would ask them, “What got you into it?” It’s the sound. It just has that, you know, it’s almost like a magpie being attracted to bright, shiny objects. It was that sort of a thing.

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LAUREN GILGER: And it is, I’m guessing, fun to play, especially in those very fast solos like you’re mentioning.

TONY TRISCHKA: Yeah, it was more fun when I was younger. I mean, I can still play fast, but, you know, once in a while I’ll have — this one instance, a 12-year-old kid came up to me after a workshop I was giving. “Mr. Trischka, can we play ‘Shuckin’ the Corn’?” which is this really fast tune. And I said, “Sure, son.” We started playing. He’s playing it so fast I’m struggling to keep up, you know. This was a bunch of years ago, because, you know, kids can roll out of bed and just play really fast.

LAUREN GILGER: All right. So let’s talk about “Earl Jam” and Earl Scruggs, right, the father of bluegrass banjo, for lack of a better phrase. I mean, first, for those in our audience who aren’t keyed in to bluegrass, tell us about Earl Scruggs.

TONY TRISCHKA: He just came up with a style of banjo playing, three-finger style of banjo playing, that other people had been playing before, even as early as the 1870s, but he had this other thing, this excitement to his playing. Then he came up with a whole raft of new licks and ideas that no one had come up with before. And he told me one time that he thought what he brought to the banjo was syncopation, which is when you accent notes landing where you don’t expect them to land.

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LAUREN GILGER: He changed the game in that way for this instrument in particular. Yeah. I mean, so it sounds like you knew him. What was that relationship like?

TONY TRISCHKA: We were friendly in his later years. I guess one indication of our relationship was a friend of mine, who’s a wonderful photographer, wanted to take a picture of Earl when he came to New Jersey. He did this after the show, and then my friend said, “Well, let’s get a shot with you and Earl together.”

So I’m standing next to Earl. Now, I wasn’t going to put my arm around his waist or anything, but I’m standing there. He put his arm around my waist, and, “Oh, this is big. This is big.” So, no, we were definitely friendly and had a chance to hang out on various occasions.

LAUREN GILGER: So it sounds like you have been inspired by him for a long time, but you did also get to know him. And then, you know, he passed away in what, 2012, right? So, I mean, this is years later. We’re in the lockdown of the pandemic, and something kind of crazy happens, right? Like someone sends you a thumb drive. Did you know what was on it?

TONY TRISCHKA: I didn’t at the time. I’d been working on this Earl Scruggs book, making corrections to an Earl Scruggs book, when this guy Bob Piekiel — and he would send one or two tunes here and there, you know, through the internet, of this jam session with Earl and John Hartford. And I’m going, “What are these?”

And it turns out he was at some of these jam sessions. And so finally my friend Bob just put all of these tunes that he had, over 200 tunes, on a thumb drive and sent them to me.

LAUREN GILGER: Wow. So you plugged it in, and what did you think?

TONY TRISCHKA: I was blown away, because what is all this material? It’s just stuff that no one had ever heard before. And it was tunes that we’d never heard Earl play before, like “Here Comes the Bride” was on there, a duet with John Hartford, fiddle and banjo, just playing “Here Comes the Bride.” And a tune called “Chinese Breakdown,” and just a whole host of other tunes.

And then there were other tunes that we knew him, you know, playing before really well, like “Cripple Creek” and things like that, and — but he would take that in a totally new direction, playing bluesy solos on a fiddle tune, which you’re not supposed to do, but he did it. And rather than only being able to play one solo on a tune, he would play two or three or four, and sometimes three or four in a row, just taking it out and going deeper down the rabbit hole. It was amazing stuff.

LAUREN GILGER: OK. So you take those recordings, and it’s more than 200 of them that no one’s ever heard, and you’ve turned them into this project, right, that’s been going on for a long time called “Earl Jam,” which you got to love. You’re bringing in all of these very well-known bluegrass musicians and playing with them and and kind of re-releasing this music, right?

TONY TRISCHKA: That’s basically what I did, because before I had the idea to do the album, I just started transcribing his solos at slow — slowed down to half speed, so I could learn what he was playing. And then I started thinking, well, I’ve got all this material now, I should — and no one will ever be able to hear these, probably, which I found out later Earl never wanted these recordings to be released.

So I will never give them out to anybody because of that. But I figured if I on these recordings that I ended up doing with “Earl Jam” and “Earl Jam 2,” if I just play note-for-note what Earl played in these recordings, then at least through me people will hear what Earl was doing.

LAUREN GILGER: So what was that like? Like as somebody who, you know, is a protégé in a way of of this great banjo player, what did you learn transcribing those those songs and and recording them on your own?

TONY TRISCHKA: I learned a lot of things, some of which are too geeky to get into for a normal person to have to listen to ...

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.. but just a lot of the syncopations that he did. I was doing some of that, but I got deeper into it because there was so much syncopation in his playing.

And then just the way he moved around the neck, I discovered things that I’d never heard him do before. And I thought I knew his style, because I trans — I had already transcribed for years many of his solos. And then here’s all this new stuff.

He just had — he was so much deeper than I even realized. And so a lot of that is just sort of osmosed into my own playing when I’m just playing whatever I would happen to play. “Oh, that’s an Earl thing there. Oh, that’s an Earl thing there,” that I never used to play. So he’s had a very big impact on my own playing.

LAUREN GILGER: But you’re carrying it forward in that that way, kind of keeping the tradition going.

TONY TRISCHKA: Yeah, well, I sometimes say I wouldn’t exist without Earl Scruggs. You know, he’s had such a profound impact on my life, because he was just this shy shy kid from, you know, whose father died when he was 4 years old from North Carolina, and he changed the world.

LAUREN GILGER: Yeah. Pretty cool. All right. We’ll leave it there. Tony Trischka, he will be playing at Flagstaff’s Pickin’ in the Pines Bluegrass Festival coming up here. Tony, thank you so much for coming on The Show. Thanks for talking to us about this. I really appreciate it.

TONY TRISCHKA: Thank you, Lauren. It’s really been a pleasure to talk to you. Thank you.