20th Century Masters - The Millennium Collection: The Best of Flat & Scruggs

Fresh off their pioneering stint with Bill Monroe, guitarist-vocalist Lester Flatt and banjo master Earl Scruggs waxed 28 seminal cuts for Mercury between 1948 and 1950. All 28 appeared on the Complete Mercury Sessions, which has been replaced by this far-less-generous 12-song collection. Still, the duo and their Foggy Mountain Boys attack this music with an urgency that even Monroe's Blue Grass Boys were hard-pressed to equal.

Scruggs's three-fingered banjo technique is as important to bluegrass as any other innovation, possessing a rolling quality that keeps the songs moving. "Foggy Mountain Breakdown" and "Farewell Blues" are banjo tour de forces that will never be matched. Original gospel numbers find Scruggs applying his fingerpicking technique to guitar, à la Merle Travis, and feature sharp group harmonies.

Most of the original secular songs have become bluegrass standards, even though the pair refused to call their refined mountain music bluegrass. --Marc Greilsamer