Bascom Lamar Lunsford was born in 1882 in Mars Hill, North Carolina, deep in Madison County, where his mother sang traditional ballads and his schoolteacher father gave him his first fiddle. He played banjo at square dances as a boy, then diverged from the usual path: he qualified as a teacher at Rutherford College, taught in Madison County schools, and earned a law degree in 1913 from Trinity College, the institution now known as Duke University. That combination made him a bilingual translator, fluent in mountain culture and in the language of the institutional elite.

This episode explores his decades of trekking to isolated farms to document old songs, his 1922 wax cylinder recordings with Frank C. Brown, his 1928 Brunswick sides including Dry Bones and I Wish I Was a Mole in the Ground, and the calculated decision to perform in a starch ...