Clarence White’s hands were too small for a standard acoustic guitar as a child, so he started on a ukulele. Before his 30th birthday he had reinvented how the guitar is played in two genres and co-invented a hidden mechanical device that gave him a third hand on stage. This episode follows the French-Canadian prodigy born in Lewiston, Maine in 1944 from the family’s move to Burbank, California in 1954, through the Three Little Country Boys and the Kentucky Colonels, an Andy Griffith Show appearance in 1961, and the night at the Ash Grove in Los Angeles when he saw Doc Watson and realized the acoustic guitar could lead.

The conversation breaks down the flatpicking style he built with open strings and syncopation on the landmark 1964 album Appalachian Swing, the missed chance to record an electric Mr. Tambourine Man before The Byrds did, and his reinvention on a Fender Telecaster as a Los Angeles session player. It then covers the 1967 B-Bender built with drummer and machinist Gene Parsons, his years as the second-longest-serving member of The Byrds, Muleskinner and the New Kentucky Colonels, and his death at 29 in July 1973 after a drunk driver struck him outside a Palmdale venue.

• Why bluegrass orthodoxy kept the guitar as a rhythm instrument until players like Doc Watson pushed it forward
• How ringing open strings buy a flatpicker time to move across the neck and sound like two guitars at once
• The strap-button lever system inside a routed Telecaster that bends the B string a full tone
• His stoic, motionless stage presence next to Roger McGuinn while driving the country rock sound
• Where his instruments went next: the 1935 Martin D-28 to Tony Rice and the B-Bender Telecaster to Marty Stuart