Frank Noah Proffitt was born in 1913 in Laurel Bloomery, Tennessee, and grew up from age nine in the Beaver Dam community of Watauga County, North Carolina, where music was an inheritance rather than a career. He learned ballads from his parents, aunts and uncles, and learned to build mountain banjos and Appalachian dulcimers from his father Wiley, a Civil War veteran and luthier, later using his father's old space as a workshop while farming tobacco and doing carpentry to support his wife Bessie Hicks and six children.

This episode follows how folklorists reached him: Duke University's Frank C. Brown in 1937, then Anne and Frank Warner in 1938, who collected more than a hundred of his songs across a thirty-year friendship and passed them to Alan Lomax. Lomax printed Tom Dooley in Folk Song USA, the Kingston Trio recorded a polished version ...