James Gideon Tanner was a chicken farmer from Thomas Bridge, near Monroe, Georgia, who picked up a fiddle at 14 and built a repertoire of more than 2,000 songs in an era with no radio and no records. This episode follows his rivalry with Fiddlin' John Carson on the Georgia fiddle convention circuit, where reputations were won and lost in front of live crowds, and explains why a walking human jukebox was exactly what rural communities needed.

In March 1924 Tanner and Riley Puckett traveled to New York to record for Columbia, becoming the first Southern rural artists the label ever cut, singing into an acoustic horn with no electricity. Two years later he formed the Skillet Lickers in Atlanta, a city that rivaled Nashville as a recording hub, and the band recorded more than 100 songs in eight years, including the million-selling Down Yonder a ...