Jeff Scroggins

Jeff Scroggins is a great banjo player who has won numerous state, regional and local banjo contests and awards, including the prestigious National Bluegrass Banjo Championship at the Winfield, Kansas, Walnut Valley Festival, in 1989 (he also placed second in 2006). He has performed and recorded with many of the top names in bluegrass, including Steve Kaufman, Peter Rowan, Sam Bush, Stuart Duncan, Mark Schatz, David Grier, Jerry Douglas, and Kenny Smith and The Dixie Chicks, and was inducted into the Texas Tornadoes, an elite music society whose membership include many Texas music legends (including Stevie Ray Vaughn, Johnny Winter and Billy Gibbons of ZZ Top) in 1996. Jeff has played in the Andy Owens Project, and in Big Twang, among others, and he has also taught at bluegrass camps in the US and abroad.

Jeff grew up in rural Oklahoma, listening to his grandfather, J.M. Cary, perform old time country music, and hearing the fiddling of his great uncle, Oklahoma  fiddle legend Ace Sewell. At the age of twelve Jeff’s grandfather gave him his first guitar. Through his teens he played electric guitar in garage bands, and then at nineteen Jeff bought a banjo at a garage sale. Soon he was obsessed with the banjo, and traded in his Les Paul for a better one.

Jeff spent the 1980s learning how to play. He was fortunate to have the opportunity to learn from banjo legend and fellow Oklahoman Alan Munde, and then later, after relocating to Dallas, from James McKinney.