You have heard Jerry Douglas backing Ray Charles, Paul Simon, Phish and Dolly Parton across more than 1,600 albums, even if you have never heard his name. This episode explains what a resonator guitar is, why the dobro's metal cones were invented before amplifiers existed, how the steel bar gliding across the strings creates a weeping vocal quality, and how a kid born in 1956 in Warren, Ohio, part of the Appalachian diaspora, grew up freer to experiment than players in the traditional heartland.

The conversation follows Douglas from the Country Gentlemen and J.D. Crowe and the New South, where the instrumental Fireball won his first Grammy in 1983, through solo albums Fluxology and Fluxedo, session work with Eric Clapton, James Taylor and Garth Brooks, joining Alison Krauss and Union Station in 1998, and the O Brother, Where Art Thou? sound ...