William August Marburg was born in 1931 into a Maryland tobacco fortune, raised on a farm in Riderwood, and educated at elite private schools. He discovered country music on the radio, was singing and playing guitar by 12, and at the University of Virginia in 1949 formed the Dixie Mountain Boys with Paul Clayton and Dave Sadler. Because his family considered hillbilly music a scandal, he adopted the name Bill Clifton and lived a double life on central Virginia radio.

This episode follows Clifton onto the WWVA Wheeling Jamboree, through his 1955 songbook 150 Old Time Folk and Gospel Songs that gave the genre a shared playbook, and into a self-funded 1956 RCA session with Ralph Stanley that forced Starday to give him a real contract. On July 4, 1961, at Oak Leaf Park in Luray, Virginia, he organized one of the first major bluegrass festivals with Bill Monroe, Mac Wiseman, the Country Gentlemen, Jim and Jesse, and the Stanley Brothers. Then he took the music global: England in 1963, the Peace Corps in the Philippines in 1967, New Zealand, and finally home to Virginia and the IBMA Hall of Fame in 2008.

• Why historians call Clifton one of the first citybillies: smooth urban vocals over hard-driving instrumentation
• Field work with Woody Guthrie, A.P. Carter, and the Stanley Brothers behind the 1955 songbook
• The Mercury and Starday deal that fell apart and the studio session he paid for himself
• The 1961 Luray festival lineup and why it created the modern bluegrass festival
• Exporting bluegrass abroad, the First Generation Band, and launching Elf Records in 1980