Born Clarence Earl McCurry in 1895 and raised in his grandfather's boarding house in Shouns, Tennessee, Tom Ashley absorbed English ballads from his mother and aunts alongside the songs of itinerant lumberjacks, railroad workers and miners passing through. He got a banjo at eight, learned the haunting G modal sawmill tuning, and at 16 left town with a traveling medicine show, playing banjo on the back of a wagon to draw crowds for patent-medicine pitches.

This episode follows Ashley into the 1920s recording boom, when producers like Ralph Peer and Frank Walker hauled equipment into the Appalachians, and to his 1933 Vocalion session with Gwen Foster that produced the oldest known recording of House of the Rising Sun. Then the Great Depression wiped out his livelihood, sending him into West Virginia coal mines and a trucking business, until f ...