mick laBriola

Earl Eugene Scruggs (January 6, 1924 – March 28, 2012) was an American musician noted for popularizing a three-finger banjo picking style, now called “Scruggs style“, which is a defining characteristic of bluegrass music. His three-finger style of playing was radically different from the traditional way the five-string banjo had previously been played. This new style of playing became popular and elevated the banjo from its previous role as a background rhythm instrument to featured solo status. He popularized the instrument across several genres of music.

Scruggs’ career began at age 21 when he was hired to play in Bill Monroe‘s band, the Blue Grass Boys. “Bluegrass” eventually became the name for an entire genre of country music. Despite considerable success with Monroe, performing on the Grand Ole Opry and recording classic hits such as “Blue Moon of Kentucky“, Scruggs resigned from the group in 1948 because of their exhausting touring schedule. Fellow band member Lester Flatt resigned as well, and he and Scruggs later paired up in the duo Flatt and Scruggs. Scruggs’ banjo instrumental “Foggy Mountain Breakdown” was recorded in December 1949 and released in March 1950. The song became an enduring hit. The song experienced a rebirth of popularity to a younger generation when it was featured in the 1967 film Bonnie and Clyde. The song won two Grammy Awardsand, in 2005, was selected for the Library of Congress’ National Recording Registry of works of unusual merit.

Flatt and Scruggs brought bluegrass music into mainstream popularity in the early 1960s with their country hit “The Ballad of Jed Clampett“, the theme music for the television sitcom The Beverly Hillbillies—the first Scruggs recording to reach number one on the Billboard charts. Over their 20-year association, Flatt and Scruggs recorded over 50 albums and 75 singles. The duo broke up in 1969, chiefly because, while Scruggs wanted to switch styles to fit a more modern sound, Flatt was a traditionalist who opposed the change and believed doing so would alienate a fan base of bluegrass purists. Although each of them formed a new band to match their visions, neither of them ever regained the success they had achieved as a team.

Scruggs received four Grammy awards, a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award and a National Medal of Arts. He became a member of the International Bluegrass Music Hall of Fame and was given a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. In 1985, Flatt and Scruggs were inducted together into the Country Music Hall of Fame and named, as a duo, number 24 on CMT‘s “40 Greatest Men of Country Music”. Scruggs was awarded a National Heritage Fellowship by the National Endowment for the Arts, the highest honor in the folk and traditional arts in the United States. Four works by Scruggs have been placed in the Grammy Hall of Fame. After Scruggs’ death in 2012 at age 88, the Earl Scruggs Center was founded in Shelby, North Carolina, near his birthplace with the aid of a federal grant and corporate donors. The center is a $5.5 million facility that features the musical contributions of Scruggs and serves as an educational center providing classes and field trips for students.

Live church service on Sunday 1-5-25 with music director Van Nixon accompanied by Kathy Nixon, Onesmo Kibira and mick laBriola

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Stephan’s Quintet is a visual grouping of five galaxies of which four form the first compact galaxy group ever discovered. The group, visible in the constellation Pegasus, was discovered by Édouard Stephan in 1877 at the Marseille Observatory.The group is the most studied of all the compact galaxy groups. The brightest member of the visual grouping (and the only non-member of the true group) is NGC 7320, which has extensive H II regions, identified as red blobs, where active star formation is occurring.

Four of the five galaxies in Stephan’s Quintet form a physical association, a true galaxy group, Hickson Compact Group 92, and will likely merge with each other. Radio observations in the early 1970s revealed a filament of emission between the galaxies in the group. This same region is also detected in the faint glow of ionized atoms seen in the visible part of the spectrum as a green arc. NGC 7320/19/18/18A/17. 290mly

Earth’s orbit around the Sun is not a circle, it’s an ellipse. The point along its elliptical orbit where our fair planet is closest to the Sun is called perihelion. This year perihelion is today, January 4, at 13:28 UTC, with the Earth about 147 million kilometers from the Sun. For comparison, at aphelion on last July 3 Earth was at its farthest distance from the Sun, some 152 million kilometers away. But distance from the Sun doesn’t determine Earth’s seasons. It’s only by coincidence that the beginning of southern summer (northern winter) on the December solstice – when this H-alpha picture of the active Sun was taken – is within 14 days of Earth’s perihelion date. And it’s only by coincidence that Earth’s perihelion date is within 11 days of the historic perihelion of NASA’s Parker Solar Probe. Launched in 2018, the Parker Solar Probe flew within 6.2 million kilometers of the Sun’s surface on 2024 December 24, breaking its own record for closest perihelion for a spacecraft from planet Earth.