Vassar Clements recorded with the Grateful Dead, played the Beverly Hillbillies theme, jammed with Paul McCartney and ended up on a Monkees track by hanging around a studio, yet he never learned to read a note of music. This episode follows the self-taught Florida kid who chose the fretless fiddle over the guitar because it was harder, learned melodies note by note from the Grand Ole Opry on the radio, and in 1949 rode a bus with no money to audition for Bill Monroe, who paid for his hotel room and hired him the next day.

After seven years with the Blue Grass Boys and stints with Jim and Jesse and Flatt and Scruggs, alcohol pushed him out of music into jobs as a plumber at the Kennedy Space Center, a paper mill worker, a railroad switchman and a potato chip franchise operator. Sober by 1967, he returned to Nashville, helped launch newgrass  ...