John Duffey was born in Washington, D.C., in 1934, graduated from Bethesda-Chevy Chase High School in Maryland, and grew up with a father who sang at the Metropolitan Opera, about as far from a Kentucky porch as a bluegrass pioneer could start. He did not pick up a guitar until he was 17, nudged by a neighbor, yet that late start left him without the ideological baggage of players raised inside the tradition. Classical vocal mechanics, breath control, and a stratospheric falsetto let him weaponize the high lonesome sound over a loud five-piece string band.

This episode traces Duffey's 1957 job as a fill-in musician at WFMD radio in Frederick, Maryland, his pairing with baritone Charlie Waller, and the birth of the Country Gentlemen, a band that refused to stick to songs about log cabins and train wrecks. Duffey mined Protestant hymnals and  ...