In 1949 Curly Seckler and his wife Juanita wrote Traveling This Lonesome Road at home and never filed the copyright. Bill Monroe and Mac Wiseman recorded it without credit. This episode follows the man born John Ray Seckler on Christmas Day 1919 in China Grove, North Carolina, from long shifts in a cotton mill and banjo lessons with Happy Trexler, through the Yodeling Rangers and a daily 1935 radio spot in Salisbury, to a $20-a-week touring job with Charlie Monroe at nineteen.

The hosts explain what made him indispensable when he joined Lester Flatt and Earl Scruggs in the Foggy Mountain Boys in 1949: the offbeat mandolin chop that acts as the band’s snare drum and the high tenor harmony that cuts through a noisy room. They trace the chaotic musical chairs of 1951, including short stints with the Sauceman Brothers and the Stanley Brothers and a Kentucky Barn Dance gig that evaporated when the venue changed hands, then his stable run with Flatt and Scruggs through 1962 and more than 130 recordings. After a decade away, Lester Flatt called him back in 1973 for the Nashville Grass, and when Flatt died in 1979 Seckler led the band until retiring in 1994.

• How a laborer’s discipline from the mill translated into mastering the five-string banjo
• Why mid-century roots musicians treated songs as communal property rather than protected work
• What leaving the Stanley Brothers over Carter Stanley’s drinking says about his priorities
• Why decades of harmony singing prepared him to step from the engine room to the steering wheel
• Hall of Fame inductions in 2004 and 2010, the 2005 project 60 Years of Bluegrass with My Friends, and his death at 98 in December 2017