Lester Flatt and Earl Scruggs get all the credit for “The Ballad of Jed Clampett” because of their pluckin’ and pickin’, but it was Jerry Scoggins who sang that insanely hummable, Paul Henning-penned Beverly Hillbillies theme. Perhaps you’ve heard it: “Come and listen to a story about a man named Jed / a poor mountaineer who barely kept his family fed.” Scoggins, 93, died of natural causes on Tuesday in Westlake Village. Scoggins had his own band, the Cass County Boys, in the ’30s, sang backup for Gene Autry and Bing Crosby in the ’40s and ’50s and was working as a stockbroker and part time singer in 1962 when asked to sing the theme for the Buddy Ebsen pilot. The song became a huge hit along with the show, which drew 60 million viewers at its peak. Scoggins reckons he’d sung the song 1,000 times by 1993 when he was hired by director Penelope Spheeris to sing it one more time for the big-screen version of the Hillbillies. “I wanted to keep as much familiarity in the movie as I could find,” she said. “And that was a key part – people’s familiarity with his voice.” (Star Tribune)

(Photo: Cass County Boys)