Larry Sparks was born in September 1947 in Lebanon, Ohio, to a family with roots in Jackson County, Kentucky, part of the mid-century Appalachian migration that carried mountain music into the industrial North. He grew up on Grand Ole Opry broadcasts and WCKY radio, absorbing the Stanley Brothers, Wayne Raney, and broadcaster Paul Moon Mullins, but spent his teenage years playing electric guitar in country and rock bands in loud high school gymnasiums, building the aggressive right-hand rhythm that would later drive an acoustic band.

This episode traces the fast networking chain of 1964, when banjo player Wilbur Hall told Mullins about the teenager and Mullins called the Stanley Brothers, and the earthquake of December 1966, when Carter Stanley died and Ralph Stanley tapped the 19-year-old to sing lead in the Clinch Mountain Boys. Rather th ...