Clarence White's hands were too small for a standard acoustic guitar as a child, so he started on a ukulele. Before his 30th birthday he had reinvented how the guitar is played in two genres and co-invented a hidden mechanical device that gave him a third hand on stage. This episode follows the French-Canadian prodigy born in Lewiston, Maine in 1944 from the family's move to Burbank, California in 1954, through the Three Little Country Boys and the Kentucky Colonels, an Andy Griffith Show appearance in 1961, and the night at the Ash Grove in Los Angeles when he saw Doc Watson and realized the acoustic guitar could lead.

The conversation breaks down the flatpicking style he built with open strings and syncopation on the landmark 1964 album Appalachian Swing, the missed chance to record an electric Mr. Tambourine Man before The Byrds did, and ...