Ola Belle Reed was born Ola Wave Campbell on August 18, 1916, in Grassy Creek, North Carolina, the fourth of 13 children in a family where music functioned as domestic infrastructure. Her grandfather and father played fiddle, her uncle Dockery Campbell taught her clawhammer banjo, her mother and grandmother passed down traditional ballads, and her uncle Herb Osborne taught her mining songs. This episode traces how that oral inheritance survived the Great Depression migration north to the Maryland-Pennsylvania border, where a teenage Ola Belle joined the North Carolina Ridge Runners and refused to let mountain music dilute.

The conversation follows her rarely discussed entrepreneurial side: opening the New River Ranch music park in Rising Sun, Maryland, with her brother Alex, losing the venue to destruction in 1958, and pivoting to Sunset Pa ...