This episode approaches Bill Monroe's life through a single theme: friction. The youngest of eight children born in 1911 near Rosine, Kentucky, he was handed a mandolin nobody else wanted, told to strip half its strings off, and orphaned by 16. His uncle Pendleton Vandiver hardwired Scottish and Irish fiddle rhythms into his brain, while the traveling Black musician Arnold Shultz introduced him to the swing, bent notes, and syncopation of the blues. We examine how Monroe forced those two traditions together with an aggressive attack on the mandolin, and how the deafening misery of an Indiana oil refinery during the Depression pushed him and his brother Charlie to hustle as the Monroe Brothers.

The conversation follows the 1938 breakup of the duo at the height of its success, the Blue Grass Boys' 1939 Opry debut, the experimental early 1940s ...