After recording roughly 100 songs for RCA between 1937 and 1941, brothers Bill and Earl Bolick were asked by the label to add an electric guitar to their sound. They refused, stopped recording, and by 1951 had left the industry entirely, Bill taking a job as a postal clerk in North Carolina and Earl working at the Lockheed aircraft plant in Atlanta. This episode traces the Blue Sky Boys from their childhood in West Hickory, North Carolina, where their parents in the First Church of God taught them hymns, through the neighbor who taught them their instruments and their decision to swap so that Bill took the mandolin and Earl the guitar.

We explore the strange sponsorship system of 1930s radio that had them performing as the Crazy Hickory Nuts, the Good Coffee Boys, and the Crazy Blue Ridge Hillbillies before an RCA audition with Eli Oberstei ...