Birthplace of Lester Raymond Flatt

Flatt left Overton County as a boy; his family moved to Sparta when he was nine. His career began in 1941 as a singer on station WBBB in North Carolina, and he then played country, folk and gospel with Charlie Monroe and the KY Pardners. With Earl Scruggs he joined Charlie's brother Bill Monroe and the Bluegrass Boys, considered by many the first true bluegrass band; Monroe found Flatt's vocals and Scruggs's three-finger banjo ideal for setting his sound apart. The genre rests largely on their recordings from the late 1940s and 1950s.

What the plaque says

Birthplace of Lester Raymond Flatt Born June 19, 1914, in the Duncan's Chapel area of Overton County, Lester Raymond Flatt helped define traditional bluegrass music. He became an original member of Bill Monroe's Blue Grass Boys in 1945. From 1948 to 1969 he achieved fame as the lead singer and guitarist for Flatt & Scruggs and the Foggy Mountain Boys. Flatt became a member of the Grand Ole Opry in 1964, was inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame in 1985, and was an original inductee into the International Bluegrass Music Hall of Fame in 1991.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Standing Stone State Park — 7.9 mi
  A New Deal park on Mill Creek named for a vanished stone that Native peoples revered and railroad builders blasted, with a lake, 1930s cabins and a marbles championship.
• Cordell Hull Birthplace and Museum State Park — 16 mi
  A replica of the log cabin where the secretary of state and Nobel laureate was born in 1871, with a museum of his belongings, in Pickett County's hills.
• Cummins Falls State Park — 16 mi
  A 75-foot waterfall and swimming hole on the Blackburn Fork, saved from a housing development in 2011 and opened as Tennessee's 54th state park.
• Muddy Pond Mennonite Community — 17 mi
  A Mennonite farming community in Overton County near Monterey, known for sorghum syrup pressed and boiled each fall and for the farm stores along its roads.

More markers nearby

• Livingston Academy — 0.3 mi
• Gov. Albert H. Roberts 35th Governor of Tennessee - 1919-2921 — 0.3 mi
• Alpine School — 5.8 mi
• Albert Houston Roberts — 6.0 mi