On a Saturday night in December 1927, after an hour of classical programming, a four-foot-ten Black harmonica player stepped to the WSM microphone in Nashville and filled living rooms with the sound of a roaring freight train. The announcer contrasted it with the grand opera that preceded it and coined the phrase "Grand Ole Opry" on the spot. This episode tells the story of that man, DeFord Bailey, the first African American country music star.

We trace his birth in 1899 in Smith County, Tennessee to a musical family one generation removed from slavery, the polio that confined him to bed for a year at age three and turned his ear toward trains, hens, and hounds, and the tongue-blocking technique that made a background instrument into a one-man band. We follow him through the first records ever made in Nashville, tours with Uncle Dave Macon, ...