Most people in the bluegrass world know the name Earl Scruggs. Not nearly enough of them know the name Haze Hall. That is a shame, because without Haze Hall, one of the most important transactions in the history of American music never happens.
Hall spent the better part of his life within a few miles of Bassett, Virginia, working at Bassett Furniture for close to fifty years and picking banjo wherever anyone would have him — square dances, radio programs, television appearances, county fairs. He was not famous. He did not chase fame. He had a wife and two kids to look after and no money to chase anything anyway. But he could play, and the people who knew music knew it.
Sometime around the summer of 1946, Bill Monroe and the Blue Grass Boys came through the area for a show. Earl Scruggs was playing banjo with Monroe at the time, still early in what would become one of the most celebrated careers in the history of American music. Haze had already been playing all day at the show in Rocky Mount and was worn out by the time Monroe’s outfit arrived that evening. He had mentioned to some of the other musicians that he owned a Gibson Mastertone banjo. Word got back to Scruggs. That night around 10:30, Scruggs showed up at Hall’s door to buy it.
Haze’s wife begged him not to sell. He sold it anyway.
Scruggs did not hold onto it long. He eventually traded it to Don Reno along with a gold-plated Mastertone and a new Martin guitar, getting back an old gold-plated banjo that, by Haze’s telling, looked rough but sounded fine. That was the banjo Scruggs made his name with. Reno, for his part, kept the banjo he got from Scruggs and later told people he would not take ten thousand dollars for it. When Hall heard that, sitting on his front porch in 1979 with a Vega Earl Scruggs model across his lap, he just shrugged. To him it was a keepsake banjo, no better or worse than what he was holding right then. He had owned and played them both.
Hall was known well beyond Henry County in the circles that mattered. Don Reno was a friend. The Osborne Brothers came to Bassett to visit him and bought a banjo, and while they were there played two shows at the Bassett Community Center. He judged at the Galax Fiddlers Convention. He played live radio at the Martinsville station on Monday nights, staying until midnight to tape programs for the rest of the week, and never got a dime for it. He eventually got fed up with publicity that put nothing on the table and quit.
In a 1979 interview recorded on his front porch by a family member, Hall reflected on all of it with the same plainspoken practicality that seems to have defined his whole life. When asked why he never went off and played professionally like Scruggs and the others, his answer was short. He had a family to feed. Music came easy and the money went easy, and he reckoned he had made maybe ten thousand dollars from music over his entire life. He did not seem to lose sleep over it.
Henry County has produced its share of quietly remarkable people. Haze Hall is one of them — a man who spent his life at a furniture factory, played banjo for the love of it, and once sold Earl Scruggs the instrument that helped change American music.
Jarred Marlowe is a local resident and historian. He is a member of the Col. George Waller Chapter of the Sons of the American Revolution, the Blue & Gray Education Society, and the committee chair for the Martinsville-Henry County 250 Committee. He may be reached at [email protected].
