Bascom Lamar Lunsford was born in 1882 in Mars Hill, North Carolina, deep in Madison County, where his mother sang traditional ballads and his schoolteacher father gave him his first fiddle. He played banjo at square dances as a boy, then diverged from the usual path: he qualified as a teacher at Rutherford College, taught in Madison County schools, and earned a law degree in 1913 from Trinity College, the institution now known as Duke University. That combination made him a bilingual translator, fluent in mountain culture and in the language of the institutional elite.

This episode explores his decades of trekking to isolated farms to document old songs, his 1922 wax cylinder recordings with Frank C. Brown, his 1928 Brunswick sides including Dry Bones and I Wish I Was a Mole in the Ground, and the calculated decision to perform in a starched white shirt and bow tie while cutting bawdy verses. It follows how he turned Asheville’s 1927 Rhododendron Festival into the Mountain Dance and Folk Festival by 1928, the first event ever called a folk festival, his work managing Zebulon Weaver’s congressional campaign, his 1939 White House performance for King George VI, the Harry Smith Anthology of American Folk Music that carried his recordings to a young Bob Dylan, and his death on September 4, 1973, at age 91.

• Why he signed away the rights to his Mountain Dew song for nothing more than a train ticket home
• How the hillbilly stereotype enabled timber and coal interests to exploit Appalachian labor and land, and why formal wear was his armor against it
• The upward brushing banjo stroke and mandolin-banjo hybrid he used to cut through a crowded barn dance
• His claim to have spent nights in more Appalachian homes than anyone except God
• Manly Wade Wellman’s Silver John character, David Hoffman’s 1964 documentary, and the 1996 Smithsonian Folkways compilation