​Earl Scruggs, the North Carolina-born banjo legend who was a regular at San Francisco's Hardly Strictly Bluegrass music festival, died at a Nashville hospital this morning, according to news reports. He was 88.

Known as part of a seminal duo with guitarist and mandolin player Lester Flatt (who died in 1979), Earl Scruggs helped popularize bluegrass music in the United States. His influence was so great that the three-fingered banjo style is now known as the "Scruggs style."

Scruggs was also a favorite of Hardly Strictly Bluegrass founder and fellow banjo player Warren Hellman, who passed away last December. Scruggs played at every Hardly Strictly since 2005. And four years ago, according to festival booker Dawn Holliday, Scruggs asked Hellman to join him onstage for "Solder's Joy."

"It made Warren's life," Holliday says. "At that point Warren had only been playing a couple of years, and he was scared to death."

The performance went off without a hitch -- if anything, Holliday says, Hellman's obsessive practice helped him play faster than Scruggs. Afterward, Scruggs gave Hellman a red bolo tie that Hellman wore every subsequent time his band the Wronglers played Hardly Strictly.

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Jay Blakesberg

Warren Hellman at Hardly Strictly Bluegrass

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Hardly Strictly Bluegrass founder Warren Hellman passed away at the end of last year, but the sprawling free music festival he started will continue. And on Feb. 19, Hellman's family and the festival's organizers will hold a sort of mini-Hardly Strictly as a tribute to Hellman. The bill -- which we're announcing first right here -- reads like a list of Hardly Strictly regulars, featuring big names like Emmylou Harris, Steve Earle, Gillian Welch, Buddy Miller, and more. (See the full lineup after the jump.)

The location for the festival hasn't been decided yet, but Dawn Holliday, Hardly Strictly's booker, tells All Shook Down that organizers are choosing between Hellman Hollow (formerly known as Speedway Meadow) and the parking lots at Ocean Beach. (Concerns over rain make her wary of holding the tribute concert in the festival's usual Hellman Hollow location.)

Also undetermined as yet are the precise hours of the concert. But as they did with Hellman's funeral, organizers are planning to stream the event live. The artists will perform back-to-back on two stages, so everyone in attendance will be able to see every set.

"It's just about the music," Holliday says of the concert. "It's about the joy Warren loved, and every one of these artists was hand-picked because he loved them."

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Christopher Victorio

Gomez at Hardly Strictly

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Gomez
Justin Townes Earle
Zakir Hussein, Bela Fleck, and Edgar Meyer
Devil Makes Three
The Swanson Family Band
October 2, 2010
Hardly Strictly Bluegrass

Better than: Smuggling vodka into Outside Lands.

"This is so much better than Outside Lands!" a girl squealed Sunday after exiting a line of porta potties. And indeed, the enthusiasm for free music, shorter bathroom lines, brown-bagged bottles of booze, and an all-around bare-footed freedom lasted throughout the weekend this year at Hardly Strictly. With a vibe that often felt more like a street fair, throngs of people found their way to Golden Gate Park one more time on another unusually sunny day in the avenues.

Nor-Cal favorites the Devil Makes Three, one of the highlights of the day, belted out time-honored tunes like "Beneath the Piano," as well as songs from their latest album, Do Wrong Right. A large crowd of women in feather headbands and shirtless men with glistening chests hopped around to the danceable folk tunes. The same rollicking enthusiasm found at any of the group's frequent Bay Area shows was also obvious at this performance, and fans jumped over sunbathers and beer bottles for a front-and-center view of the stage.

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Christopher Victorio

Merle Haggard and Kris Kristofferson at Hardly Strictly Bluegrass

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Merle Haggard & Kris Kristofferson
A.A. Bondy
Robyn Hitchcock
Hugh Laurie
October 1, 2011
Hardly Strictly Bluegrass

Better than: Seeing Neil Young after he released Greendale, that's for sure.

A man dressed in an official Hardly Strictly shirt walks out to say that the biggest set of the day will start in about eight minutes. All right, he doesn't call it that. But at this festival, with Merle Haggard and Kris Kristofferson about to share the stage...

He takes a beat to let the initial applause from the mere mention of their names slow down. This man is about to offer an additional piece of information he hopes will keep the buzz going. "Merle's got a new album coming out..."

Shit. This sentiment is typically concert death.

There are certain truths to keep in mind when seeing a living legend. The set will sound great because the backing band will be killer. Young, talented musicians don't say no when approached by Haggard, or Dylan, or Neil Young, or whoever. Lead vocals will be rough around the edges but recognizable, enough so you can lose yourself in the aura of said legend. (When Kristofferson opened the set with a solo tune, "Shipwrecked In The 80s," I couldn't help but think it sounded a bit like a South Park parody. Holy Torrr-edo).

But the insertion of a new album into a set usually threatens to ruin everyone's experience.

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The Mekons

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The Mekons are not like any other band. Almost an art collective as much as a regular rock band, the British outfit was born out of the same late-'70s Leeds punk rock scene that birthed such legends as the Gang of Four. But where Gang of Four favored spare, scathing post-punk, the Mekons went off in what was then an unusual direction: American roots music. Credited by many as having invented alt-country in the mid-'80s, the Mekons applied their punk-rock ethos -- leftist critiques of capitalism and DIY spirit among them -- to sounds inspired by Hank Williams and Johnny Cash. The results were stunning early albums such as Fear and Whiskey and The Mekons Rock 'n' Roll, both of which brim with a surly vitality and creative energy that advanced the stale formulas of so-called punk rock while retaining the worldview that made it important.

But unlike most other bands, the Mekons never came and went -- they came and stayed. Having never worried about making a living from their music, most of the band's original members are still in the group, and still touring and recording, despite the fact that they all live on three different continents. They're still making interesting music, too. Ahead of the band's special performances today -- first, at 2:10 p.m. at Hardly Strictly Bluegrass, and later tonight at the Swedish American Music Hall -- we had a brief conversation with member Sally Timms about what keeps this stalwart band going.

So you're at work in a law office right now? You have a dayjob?
I've always had real jobs. I've worked the whole time. For one thing, we've never made enough money to live on, but I've liked having something to do in my time.
I work in law office, but I don't usually discuss it with anyone becuase it's boring.

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​This is the first of a two-part series of explorations of the long, bewildering discographies of Joe Ely, Jimmie Dale Gilmore, and Butch Hancock, who will be preforming together as The Flatlanders this Saturday at the Hardly Strictly Bluegrass Festival.

The Flatlanders are the only must-see band whose records are not as good as those of its individual members. Less a working band than old friends who knock some songs out together once in a while, the iconoclastic west Texas singer-songwriters have only recorded together officially, as a working unit, at the very beginning of their respective careers and again, now, in their elegiac kinda/sorta legend period.

That first record, now known as More a Legend Than a Band, is a ghostly collection hallmarked by Jimmie Dale Gilmore's high-lonesome, singing saw of a voice, which isn't to be confused with the actual singing saw layered into many of the tracks. Recorded in 1972, the tracks haven't dated because they seem to come from no particular time: They're hazy, natural, and strange, sounding something like if one of those shimmery panhandle highway mirages somehow booked itself some studio time.

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Nathan Gallagher

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This Saturday, Robyn Hitchcock plays a solo acoustic set at Hardly Strictly Bluegrass. (Look for him at 12:25 p.m. on the Rooster Stage.)

Since 1976, Hitchcock has been writing and performing top-flight psychedelic pop, first with the Soft Boys and then as a solo artist often augmented by sturdy bands like The Egyptians or the Venus 3. Playful yet passionate, soaring yet intimate, lovestruck yet often preoccupied with the squishiest bits of biology, his music, as he puts it, mines the sound of 1967 -- but with many more lyrics about vegetable matter.

Those lyrics, often surrealistic or sensual in the spirit of Andrew Marvell's slow-swelling "vegetable love," have expanded the purview of pop. His guitar playing, meanwhile, is spidery and distinct, often so delicate it seems to be silking out of a spinneret. We spoke with Hitchcock ahead of this weekend's Hardly Strictly Bluegrass festival, where he will perform Saturday at 12:25 p.m.

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Chris Thile, mandolinist and mixologist

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Mandolin virtuoso Chris Thile needs a drink. Since January, he has toured all over the country with his band, the Punch Brothers, recorded an album with guitarist Michael Daves (touring solo when Daves returned home for personal reasons), and collaborated on Yo-Yo Ma's latest project, the Goat Rodeo Sessions (Sony Masterworks). Due out in October, the Goat Rodeo Sessions combines a group of insanely talented musicians -- cellist Ma, double bassist Edgar Meyer, fiddler Stuart Duncan, and Thile -- to create a fantastic concoction of genre-bending arrangements. To ease any potential chaos in the studio, Thile, also a budding mixologist, whipped up some timeless cocktails for the group of master performers. Speaking over the phone before a show in Cork, Ireland, the unassuming musician talked about his upcoming set with the Punch Brothers at this weekend's
Hardly Strictly Bluegrass festival, and explained how to make a drink for Yo-Yo Ma.

What's a goat rodeo?
A goat rodeo is a situation -- a fiercely chaotic situation -- where basically everything has to go right or it will end in disaster. So we actually felt like it was a good name for our project because it was such an unlikely group of guys. The arrangements are like -- what's that game? Jenga? If one little thing doesn't go right, it sort of creates a domino effect of things going wrong. I think certainly at the beginning it seemed very goat rodeo-ish. And the fun thing is I actually feel at the end of the project now, everything did go right, and we ended up with something really neat.

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Broken Social Scene is one of more than 90 acts playing Hardly Strictly Bluegrass this year.

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The lineup for this year's Hardly Strictly Bluegrass Festival is out, and good luck figuring out whom to call the "headliner." For the festival's 11th year, organizers have put together another insanely huge lineup (90-plus acts) that spans all sorts of genres, stepping out even further from the traditional Americana focus of the festival. Names that stand out to us include Robert Plant and the Band of Joy, Sonic Youth's Thurston Moore, Mekons, Broken Social Scene, Bright Eyes, Kurt Vile, Kris Kristofferson and Merle Haggard, Cass McCombs, Bob Mould, and Elbow.

Of course, the lineup includes regulars such as Emmylou Harris and Earl Scruggs, too. Check out the full bill after the jump.

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Jim Herd

It ain't last year's model...

​Maybe you saw the rather wild, sequined jacket that the free-music-festival-wearing Warren Hellman was wearing at Hardly Strictly Bluegrass this weekend.

Maybe you thought it looked cool, and wondered what exactly the Hebrew writing on the back meant.

Maybe you'd like to head over to SF Weekly's news blog, The Snitch, and find out.

Follow us on Twitter @SFAllShookDown