Roy Acuff was on the verge of a professional baseball career when a severe case of sunstroke during a 1929 tryout with the Knoxville Smokies ended his athletic dreams and left him unable to tolerate daylight. Confined to dark rooms, he picked up a fiddle and his father's record collection, then learned to project his booming voice over the crowds of Dr. Howard's traveling medicine show. That voice cut through the static of Knoxville radio, earned him a record deal on the strength of The Great Speckled Bird, and carried him and the Smoky Mountain Boys onto the Grand Ole Opry in 1938.

This episode traces how Acuff re-engineered the chaotic string band format into a singer-centered show, co-founded Acuff-Rose Music with Fred Rose in 1942 to keep country music publishing in Nashville, and ran for governor of Tennessee in 1948 after a sitting go ...