Bill Keith turned down the Dueling Banjos session for Deliverance because he was in Europe and wanted to visit a girl in Ireland, suggesting they call Eric Weissberg instead. That anecdote captures a musician driven by curiosity rather than fame. Born in Boston in 1939 and an Amherst College graduate in French literature and mathematics, Keith was an outsider who looked at bluegrass banjo as a puzzle waiting to be solved differently.

This episode explains how his nine months with Bill Monroe's Blue Grass Boys in 1963 introduced the Keith style, also called melodic or chromatic banjo, which alternates picking fingers across strings and mixes open strings with high fretted notes so a banjo can play fiddle tunes note for note. It then follows Keith into hardware, where he designed an elegant internal tuning peg that made Earl Scruggs' bolted-o ...