At the peak of his career, after surviving a drive-by shooting outside the Red Fox Inn in Bethesda, Maryland in February 1972, banjo master Bill Emerson left the music industry and enlisted in the United States Navy for twenty years. This episode follows William Hundley Emerson Jr., born in January 1938, from the 1957 car accident that sidelined bandleader Buzz Busby and forced Emerson and guitarist Charlie Waller to form an emergency band to honor bookings, a band that became the Country Gentlemen and helped launch progressive bluegrass.

The hosts explore why he quit his own band in 1958 to work as a sideman for Jimmy Martin and Red Allen, how his duo with Cliff Waldron on Rebel Records arranged rock, soul, and country songs for banjo and guitar by mimicking a drummer's backbeat, and his 1970 return to the Country Gentlemen. They then cove ...