The great blue­grass ban­jo play­er Earl Scrug­gs died Wednes­day at the age of 88. Short­ly after­ward, Steve Mar­tin sent out a tweet call­ing Scrug­gs the most impor­tant ban­jo play­er who ever lived. “Few play­ers have changed the way we hear an instru­ment the way Earl has,” wrote Mar­tin ear­li­er this year in The New York­er, “putting him in a cat­e­go­ry with Miles Davis, Louis Arm­strong, Chet Atkins, and Jimi Hen­drix.”

Mar­tin writes of Scrug­gs:

Some nights he had the stars of North Car­oli­na shoot­ing from his fin­ger­tips. Before him, no one had ever played the ban­jo like he did. After him, every­one played the ban­jo like he did, or at least tried. In 1945, when he first stood on the stage at the Ryman Audi­to­ri­um in Nashville and played ban­jo the way no one had heard before, the audi­ence respond­ed with shouts, whoops, and ova­tions. He per­formed tunes he wrote as well as songs they knew, with clar­i­ty and speed like no one could imag­ine, except him. When the singer came to the end of a phrase, he filled the the­atre with sparkling runs of notes that became a sig­na­ture for all blue­grass music since. He wore a suit and a Stet­son hat, and when he played he smiled at the audi­ence like what he was doing was effort­less. There aren’t many earth­quakes in Ten­nessee, but that night there was.

You can con­tin­ue read­ing the essay at The New York­er Web­site.

In Novem­ber of 2001 Mar­tin had the oppor­tu­ni­ty to play the ban­jo along­side his hero on the David Let­ter­man show. (See above.) They played Scrug­gs’s clas­sic, “Fog­gy Moun­tain Break­down,” with Scrug­gs’s sons Randy on acoustic gui­tar and Gary on Har­mon­i­ca, and a stel­lar group that includ­ed Vince Gill and Albert lee on elec­tric gui­tar, Mar­ty Stew­art on man­dolin, Glen Dun­can on fid­dle, Jer­ry Dou­glas on Dobro, Glenn Wolf on bass, Har­ry Stin­son on drums, Leon Rus­sell on organ and Paul Shaf­fer on piano.

Depend­ing on which cir­cles you run in, you might have first spot­ted singer-song­writer-actor Glen Hansard as the leader of the rock band The Frames, as an actor in Alan Park­er’s film The Com­mit­ments, or, more recent­ly, as one half of the folk-rock duo The Swell Sea­son. But if the suc­cess of John Car­ney’s movie Once is any­thing to go by, you may well have become aware of Glen Hansard while watch­ing it. Car­ney, The Frames’ for­mer bassist, knew that Hansard had accu­mu­lat­ed just the kind sto­ries in his youth spent busk­ing around Dublin to shape his film’s down-and-out musi­cian pro­tag­o­nist. By shoot­ing time, Hansard had tak­en on the role him­self, ensur­ing that a whole new, large audi­ence would soon learn of a sec­ond inim­itable Irish voice to put on their playlists.

The first, of course, would have to be Van Mor­ri­son, whose artis­tic cap­ti­va­tion of gen­er­a­tions of lis­ten­ers extends to Hansard him­self. Invit­ed to Mor­rison’s birth­day par­ty by a Guin­ness heiress whom he befriend­ed while busk­ing, Hansard seized the chance to get near his favorite singer. Like some brave fans, he found a way to approach the reput­ed­ly brusque and tem­pera­men­tal Mor­ri­son. Unlike most of those fans, Hansard’s expe­ri­ence turned into a unique­ly close and per­son­al one. Watch the clip from Kevin Pol­lak’s Chat Show below and hear him tell the sto­ry of how he inad­ver­tent­ly par­layed a brushed-off song request (“You don’t know me!” was Mor­rison’s dev­as­tat­ing dis­missal) into an entire night spent exchang­ing songs alone with his musi­cal idol.

Hansard likens this mem­o­ry to one of “jam­ming with a Bea­t­le,” before cor­rect­ing him­self: “No, bet­ter than a Bea­t­le — it’s Van Mor­ri­son!” Though Hansard hails from Dublin and Mor­ri­son from Belfast — the root of such innate dif­fer­ence, Hansard explains, that he can’t even imi­tate Mor­rison’s accent — it seems only to make good sense that the two artists could engage in such a brief yet intense con­nec­tion. Despite com­ing from sep­a­rate gen­er­a­tions and sub­cul­tures, these two imme­di­ate­ly rec­og­niz­able Irish musi­cians sound pos­sessed of, or pos­sessed by, some­thing unusu­al. In both cas­es, their pecu­liar­ly expres­sive vocal and rhyth­mic ener­gies defy easy descrip­tion. In his book When That Rough God Goes Rid­ing: Lis­ten­ing to Van Mor­ri­son, crit­ic Greil Mar­cus describes this qual­i­ty in Mor­ri­son as “the yarragh.” Lis­ten to the cov­er of Mor­rison’s “Astral Weeks” above and won­der: what to call it in Hansard? H/T Metafil­ter

Col­in Mar­shall hosts and pro­duces Note­book on Cities and Cul­ture. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.