Louis Marshall Jones was born in 1913 in Niagara, Kentucky, the youngest of ten children in a sharecropping family where his father played old-time fiddle and his mother sang ballads and played concertina. He was performing in public by age 11, absorbed the WLS Barn Dance and Jimmie Rodgers records, and in 1937 learned the clawhammer banjo style that defined his sound from a woman named Cousin Emmy. That rough, percussive technique became the engine of the Grandpa persona he adopted while still a young man.

This episode traces his 1942 move to WLW in Cincinnati alongside Merle Travis, his early King Records sessions, the World War II interruption, his pioneering work in late-1940s television, and his 1968 arrival as a charter cast member of Hee Haw, where the ankle bells and the What's for supper? routine became national institutions. It al ...