And you are standing in a packed auditorium with maybe 3 ,000 other people. The Appalachian Mountains are just buried under this massive, blinding snowstorm. The kind of bitter, bone -chilling whiteout that completely grounds flights and paralyzes highways.

But as the touring ramps up, the physical toll on his body escalates. Driving for hours over unpaved Alabama roads in the 1930s, standing on stage for four hours a night, this is catastrophic for a spine suffering from spina bifida occulta. The friction between his ambition and his biology starts to generate sparks here. And because he has no access to modern orthopedic medicine, he turns to the cheapest most accessible painkiller available in a southern honky -tonk, which is alcohol.

• To understand the weight of that Canton, Ohio audience laughing at his death, we first nee ...