Tommy Jarrell was born March 1, 1901, in the Mount Airy region of Surry County, North Carolina. He married Nina Lowe in 1923, raised three children, and spent roughly four decades operating a motor grader for the North Carolina Highway Department until retiring in 1966. Music was never his career; it was how his community socialized after work, and that insulation from the commercial industry preserved a remarkably pure regional style.

This episode breaks down the mechanics of the Round Peak sound, from sliding microtonal ornamentation and heavy syncopation to the downward-striking clawhammer banjo technique, and explains how singing over it demands polyrhythmic coordination the hosts compare to operating heavy machinery. It then follows the folk revival documentarians who found him in Toast, North Carolina, after his wife's death in 1967,  ...