Lester Raymond Flatt was born in 1914 in Overton County, Tennessee, to Nannie Mae Haney and Isaac Columbus Flatt, and raised in the tiny community of Duncan's Chapel. His professional breakthrough came in 1943 playing mandolin and singing tenor with Charlie Monroe's Kentucky Partners, but in 1945 he joined Charlie's younger brother Bill Monroe's Blue Grass Boys on guitar, where his warm lead voice and thumb-and-index rhythm style became the transmission that put Monroe's high-revving mandolin onto the pavement.

This episode explains the mechanics of that guitar style and the Lester Flatt G run, then follows the controversial 1948 split when Flatt and banjo player Earl Scruggs left Monroe to form the Foggy Mountain Boys, a 20-year partnership that sent The Ballad of Jed Clampett into millions of living rooms as the theme of The Beverly Hillb ...