Georgia musician Eddie Hoyle has strung together a life where bluegrass melodies and financial savvy play in perfect harmony.
Story by Alan Clemons, Photos by Brit Huckabay
Eddie Hoyle has lived two remarkably successful lives in Georgia: one in the steady, exacting world of banking, the other in the quicksilver circles of bluegrass, banjo in hand. One was an avocation; the other, a lifelong passion. For more than 50 years, Eddie has heard about “the video.” Even now, he remains gracious, almost bemused, when recounting how a tow-headed 14-year-old once found himself onstage with some of the world's finest pickers.
The iconic footage lives on YouTube under the title “Bluegrass Country Soul.” Running five minutes and thirty-six seconds, it was filmed at Camp Springs, North Carolina, over Labor Day weekend in 1971. At its center is the legendary Earl Scruggs, leading more than a dozen musicians in what amounts to a roll call of bluegrass royalty. Scruggs, whose accolades include playing with Bill Monroe and the Blue Grass Boys, recording “Foggy Mountain Breakdown” with Lester Flatt in 1949, and earning four Grammy Awards along with a host of other honors, anchors the moment — and the memory.
In the video, you see a gaggle of men on stage, almost all with banjos, and Scruggs smiles during a one-minute ovation from the crowd. He quietly thanks everyone and says, “I’m pickin with some guys that play a tremendous amount of banjo ... don’t underestimate anybody up here. Man, they’re great. Let’s pick a tune.” and starts “Foggy Mountain Breakdown” with a few bars before the next picker steps up to the microphone. Then, another, and another until Eddie appears after Japanese picker Saburo Watanabe Inoue. It's a shock when he does. Eddie’s sandy blond hair with a shag cut is out of place with the men’s sideburns, big collars, and goatees. But he is not intimidated. Eddie plucks for about 15 seconds before stepping aside for Jimmy Arnold.
“That probably was the sixth or seventh year of the Camp Springs festival, which was really good,” Eddie says from his home in northeast Georgia. “I wasn’t up to the speed of the other guys there, but I guess I wasn’t too bad. We obviously didn’t have YouTube and other things like that, and so I had been learning with some lessons and reel-to-reel tapes. But those would change the key. So, you’d have to slow it down a little or use your imagination to pick out the notes. There weren’t as many people taking lessons back then, either. You had to learn as you went.”
