He found Flatt increasingly difficult, however. He eventually quit around 1973 and, remarkably, was hired by the Earl Scruggs Revue, despite the rancor between the two band bosses.
“I hadn’t spoke to Earl, and he hadn’t spoke to me, since that [the breakup] happened,” he remembers. “I was settin’ here, me and one of my boys, pickin’, and Randy [one of Scruggs’ three sons] come over and was listenin’. He said, ‘That’s not too bad for an old man.’ I said, ‘An old man out of a job.’ He said, ‘You’re not with Lester?’ I said, ‘Naw.’ He said, ‘Why don’t you call Daddy?'”
Graves replied that he doubted Scruggs would want him but that if Randy thought otherwise, he could invite his father to telephone. He says Scruggs called and hired him the same day.
“And he treated me good. I made $1,100 the first week with him, recording with different people. Bought a new color TV. The next week I made a thousand and had a [new] roof put on.”
Some of the people with whom he has recorded over the years include such varied figures as Kris Kristofferson, Opry performers Del Reeves, Ferlin Husky and Cowboy Copas, and saxman Boots Randolph.
His Flatt & Scruggs years, including those with each separately, stretched from the mid-’50s to the mid-’70s and made his name. Since then, it seems to have been mostly a matter of keeping up with demand for appearances on his own or with a frequent partner, former Bill Monroe fiddler Kenny Baker.
In that fashion, Graves has played the Smithsonian and festivals across North America, and been chosen to endorse a line of Gibson slide guitars. Since losing his left leg in 2000, he has taken stages to more standing ovations than ever, as fans cheer the determination of a master who’s not only not ready to quit his work, but still does it well.
He notes that his old teacher, Scruggs, currently plays “better than I’ve heard him pick in 20 years.” He says Scruggs has come to see him twice since his most recent hospitalization and that he again feels their early closeness, before 1969 banished the Foggies into memory.
Other things remain the same. His stage guitars still include one he has used since the mid-1950s. It once belonged to Cliff Carlisle, and he continues to probe its mysteries.
He recalls that in the old Flatt & Scruggs days, when “we’d come in at three o’clock in the morning and they’d let me off here at the house, I’d set here at this [kitchen] table and work on things” on the dobro.
He still does that.
“Since I’ve been in the hospital,” he says, “I try to take 30 minutes out of the day to sit and try to play.”
He pauses, then permits himself another little pat on the back.
“If anybody worked hard at trying to perfect that thing,” he says, “it was me.”
Jack Hurst, whose byline has long appeared in the Chicago Tribune, has also worked on the staffs of the Philadelphia Inquirer and The Tennessean in Nashville.
