In 1934, a ten-year-old boy on a North Carolina farm stormed off after a fight with his brother, picked up a banjo, and noticed his fingers falling into a three-finger pattern instead of the two-finger style everyone around him used. This episode traces Earl Scruggs from Flint Hill, where his father died when he was four and he crawled around a banjo laid flat on the floor because he was too small to hold it, through a 40-cents-an-hour textile mill job during World War II, to his 1945 audition at the Tulane Hotel that landed him a $50-a-week spot in Bill Monroe's Blue Grass Boys.

The hosts explain how Scruggs style differs from clawhammer, why the mid-1940s lineup with Monroe, Lester Flatt, Chubby Wise, and Cedric Rainwater is the prototype for bluegrass, and how the brutal touring schedule in a 1941 Chevy led to his 1948 resignation, Flatt ...