In October 2008, Eddie Adcock lay fully awake in an operating room at Vanderbilt University Medical Center playing a five-string banjo while surgeons placed deep brain stimulation electrodes to treat his essential tremor. This episode explores the life of the tinkerer behind that scene, born June 1938 in Scottsville, Virginia, who raised and sold a calf to buy his first banjo, played professionally with Smokey Graves and His Blue Star Boys by 1953, boxed as an amateur, and drove a drag racer named Mr. Banjo to 34 consecutive wins and two track records in Manassas.

The hosts trace his brief 1958 stint with Bill Monroe, the economic squeeze of the Elvis era that sent him back to auto mechanics and sheet metal work, and the Washington D.C. car accident that led Bill Emerson to assemble the lineup that became the Country Gentlemen. They break d ...