Lester Raymond Flatt (June 19, 1914 – May 11, 1979) was an American bluegrass guitarist and mandolinist, best known for his collaboration with banjo picker Earl Scruggs in The Foggy Mountain Boys (popularly known as "Flatt and Scruggs").
Flatt's career spanned multiple decades, breaking out as a member of Bill Monroe's band during the 1940s and including multiple solo and collaboration works exclusive of Scruggs. He first reached a mainstream audience through his performance on "The Ballad of Jed Clampett", the theme for the network television series The Beverly Hillbillies, in the early 1960s.
Lester Flatt was born in Duncan's Chapel, Overton County, Tennessee to Nannie Mae Haney and Isaac Columbus Flatt and learned to play banjo from his father at an early age. He didn't particularly like the banjo, so quit that to pick up guitar before he was seven. By ten years old, Flatt was playing guitar and singing in local schools and churches.
As a teenager, he moved to North Carolina to work in a silk mill. While there, he married his wife, Gladys, with whom he began performing as a duo. When the mill shut down, the Flatts returned to Tennessee for a short time before moving to Virginia. As the result of a bout with rheumatoid arthritis, Flatt quit the mill permanently to focus on a career in music and played with a handful of groups, before being invited by Charlie Monroe to join the Kentucky Pardners in North Carolina. Charlie had Flatt playing mandolin and singing tenor, neither of which pleased Flatt too much.
Upon finally leaving the Kentucky Pardners, Charlie's brother Bill Monroe immediately invited Flatt to join his Blue Grass Boys as a guitar player and lead singer. His first gig with the band was in 1945 at the Grand Ole Opry, with no prior rehearsal. Soon after, banjo player Earl Scruggs joined the Boys, as well, and the group surged to popularity, holding down a rigorous tour schedule for nearly three years. Tired of the road, Scruggs left the band in 1948, followed soon after by Flatt and Cedric Rainwater. Together, the three formed Flatt & Scruggs' Foggy Mountain Boys, and for the next twenty years Flatt and Scruggs and the Foggy Mountain Boys were one of the most successful bands in bluegrass.
The duo broke up in 1969, and although the reasons for the split were never made known, the most logical assumption is that Mr. Flatt resisted Mr. Scruggs's increasingly overt interest in pursuing a country‐rock fusion. Flatt formed a new group, the Nashville Grass, hiring most of the Foggy Mountain Boys to record and perform live shows, including the Grand Ole Opry.
He performed at more than 50 colleges a year until illness forced him to cut back his schedule. Flatt had been hospitalized three times since 1975, when he had open‐heart surgery, and suffered a brain haemorrhage during November 1978. Yet he managed return in March 1979 to the stage of the Grand Old Opry, where he had been a fixture for 35 years. He entered Baptist Hospital on April 23 for treatment and evaluation of his heart condition where he died on 11 May 1979. He was 64 years old.
Some of the songs Flatt wrote through the years were “My Cabin in Caroline,” “Come Back Darling,” “I’ll Never Shed Another Tear,” “Down the Road,” “Head Over Heels in Love with You,” “Why Did You Wander,” “We’ll Meet Again, Sweetheart,” “I’m Gonna Sleep with One Eye Open,” “Bouquet in Heaven,” “God Loves His Children, “Get in Line, Brother,” “I’m Going to Make Heaven My Home,” “I’m Working on a Road to Gloryland,” “Be Ready for Tomorrow May Never Come,” “Little Girl [of Mine] in Tennessee,” “Don’t Get Above Your Raisin’,” “Cabin on the Hill” and “The Old Home Town.”
His role as lead singer and rhythm guitar player helped define the sound of traditional bluegrass music. He created a role in the Bluegrass Boys later filled by the likes of Jimmy Martin, Mac Wiseman, Peter Rowan and Del McCoury. His rich lead voice is unmistakable in hundreds of bluegrass standards. He is also remembered for his library of compositions. The Flatt songbook looms titanic for any student of American acoustic music. "Flatt and Scruggs" will always be remembered as one of the greatest duos in Bluegrass music and were inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame in 1985.
He was posthumously made an inaugural inductee into the International Bluegrass Music Hall of Honour in 1991. His hometown of Sparta, Tennessee held a bluegrass festival in his honour for a number of years, before being discontinued a few years prior to the death of the traditional host, resident Everette Paul England; Lester Flatt Memorial Bluegrass Day is part of the annual Liberty Square Celebration held in Sparta.
(Edited from mainly Wikipedia & also New York Times)