Alton and Rabon Delmore, sons of Alabama tenant farmers, won their first talent contest by tiebreaker over a comedy act and took home a sack of flour and a pair of socks. This episode follows how their mother's gospel harmonies and Rabon's four-string tenor guitar produced a syncopated sound that made them the most popular act on the Grand Ole Opry by 1936.

We cover their work with Fiddlin' Arthur Smith, the 1937 session Alton recorded with a severe cold that permanently damaged his voice, the 1938 split from the Opry, the nomadic King Records years under pseudonyms like Jim Scott, Wayne Raney's amplified harmonica, Freight Train Boogie (1946) and Blues Stay Away from Me (1949), Rabon's death at 36, and the losses that led Alton to write his autobiography Truth Is Stronger Than Publicity.

• Why a vaudeville tenor guitar gave countr ...