Malcolm Bell Wiseman was born in May 1925 in Crimora, Virginia, in the Shenandoah Valley, and contracted polio at six months old. The disability kept him out of farm labor, so he spent his childhood indoors with records, radio, and his mother's composition notebooks, in which she transcribed the songs she heard on air. That forced stillness gave him an encyclopedic knowledge of mountain music that he then layered with formal training at the Shenandoah Conservatory in Dayton, Virginia, after graduating high school in New Hope in 1943.

This episode follows Wiseman from DJ work at WSVA in Harrisonburg and bass duties in Molly O'Day's Cumberland Mountain Folks to a rare feat: serving as guitarist and featured vocalist in Lester Flatt and Earl Scruggs' Foggy Mountain Boys and later playing with Bill Monroe's Blue Grass Boys. His warm lower-regis ...