'Beverly Hillbillies' Singer Dies at 93Excerpt:Bluegrass stars Lester Flatt and Earl Scruggs played guitar and banjo on "The Ballad of Jed Clampett" while Scoggins sang the lyrics.
The song and series were instant hits, and the ballad made the national hit parade in 1963.
The series, which ran on CBS from 1962 to 1971, was ranked as TV's No. 1 program in its first two seasons and drew up to 60 million viewers at its peak.
[Jerry] Scoggins was retired when he read in 1993 that 20th Century Fox was planning a movie version of the series. He called the studio and was put through to music supervisor Steve Smith, who told him, "Criminy I didn't know you were still around."
The studio had wanted Johnny Cash or Willie Nelson to sing the theme for the movie, but director Penelope Spheeris held out for Scoggins.
"I wanted to keep as much familiarity in the movie as I could find, and that was a key part: people's familiarity with his voice," she told the Los Angeles Times in 1993.
Scoggins estimated that by the movie he had sung "The Ballad of Jed Clampett" more than 1,000 times since first recording it.
Scoggins was born in Mount Pleasant, Texas, and began singing and playing guitar on Dallas radio in the early 1930s. In 1936 he formed the Cass County Kids with John "Bert" Dodson and Fred Martin.
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