Keith Whitley's headstone in Spring Hill, Tennessee carries the wrong birth year, and he remains the only person in Grand Ole Opry history recognized posthumously as a former member without having been inducted while alive. Born in Ashland, Kentucky in 1954 and raised in Sandy Hook in Elliott County, he survived two horrific car crashes as a teenager, including driving off a 120-foot cliff into a frozen river, and by 15 was playing contests with his banjo-playing brother Dwight and friend Ricky Skaggs.

This episode retells the night Ralph Stanley, delayed by a flat tire, mistook two 16-year-olds in a Fort Gay, West Virginia club for a jukebox playing his old records and hired them into the Clinch Mountain Boys. It then follows Whitley through J.D. Crowe and the New South, the 1983 move to Nashville, the poorly received 1984 EP A Hard Act to ...