At age 15, Scruggs played in a group called The Morris Brothers for a few months, but quit to work in a factory making sewing thread in the Lily Textile Mill near his home in North Carolina. He worked there about two years, earning 40 cents an hour, until the draft restriction for World War II was lifted in 1945, at which time he returned to music, performing with "Lost John Miller and his Allied Kentuckians" on WNOX in Knoxville. About this time an opening to play with Bill Monroe became available.