On a Saturday night in December 1927, after an hour of classical programming, a four-foot-ten Black harmonica player stepped to the WSM microphone in Nashville and filled living rooms with the sound of a roaring freight train. The announcer contrasted it with the grand opera that preceded it and coined the phrase “Grand Ole Opry” on the spot. This episode tells the story of that man, DeFord Bailey, the first African American country music star.

We trace his birth in 1899 in Smith County, Tennessee to a musical family one generation removed from slavery, the polio that confined him to bed for a year at age three and turned his ear toward trains, hens, and hounds, and the tongue-blocking technique that made a background instrument into a one-man band. We follow him through the first records ever made in Nashville, tours with Uncle Dave Macon, Bill Monroe, and Roy Acuff, the flat five-dollar fee he was paid while drawing the crowds, and the 1941 ASCAP-BMI licensing war that WSM used as an excuse to fire him, sending him to a shoeshine stand for forty years.

• Why RCA Victor released his “John Henry” in both its race and hillbilly series
• What black hillbilly music sounded like before record labels segregated genres
• How tour mates smuggled him into hotels and carried food to the car under Jim Crow
• His son’s band that once featured a young Jimi Hendrix, and his 1974 return to the Opry stage
• The 2005 Country Music Hall of Fame induction, the Opry’s 2022 apology, DeFord Bailey Avenue, and grandson Carlos DeFord Bailey on the Opry stage today