On October 21, 1966, Carter Stanley began hemorrhaging on stage in a packed school auditorium in Hazel Green, Kentucky, and died six weeks later of cirrhosis of the liver at 41. This episode works backward from that night to explain how a boy born August 27, 1925, at Big Spraddle Creek in Dickenson County, Virginia, took unaccompanied ballads, church hymns and old-time string band music and helped engineer a tightly structured new genre with his brother Ralph in the Clinch Mountain Boys in 1946.

The hosts examine the division of labor between Carter's rhythm guitar and warm lead vocal and Ralph's driving banjo and piercing tenor, Carter's plain-spoken songwriting on White Dove and The Fields Have Turned Brown, his definitive arrangement of Man of Constant Sorrow, and the pseudonym Ruby Rakes he used to navigate restrictive publishing contra ...