The commercial country music industry did not begin in a boardroom. It began with a 50-something cotton mill foreman playing an Irish family fiddle on the streets of Atlanta after a 1914 labor strike at the Fulton Bag and Cotton Mill left him without a paycheck. Fiddlin' John Carson, born in 1868 in Fannin County, Georgia, turned busking into a business by writing musical tabloids about local scandals and selling printed lyric sheets for a nickel.

This warts-and-all episode follows Carson's seven Georgia fiddling championships, his campaign work for Tom Watson and the Talmadges alongside his daughter Moonshine Kate, his 1922 WSB radio debut, and the chain of chance that led furniture dealer Polk Brockman to see him in a Times Square newsreel and convince Ralph Peer to record him in June 1923. It also confronts the inflammatory ballads about ...