Moran Lee Dock Boggs was born in 1898 in West Norton, Virginia, the youngest of ten, as railroads and coal turned quiet farm valleys into boom towns. This episode traces how he blended his family’s frailing banjo style with blues picking he learned by following a guitarist called Go Lightning and watching Black string bands in the Dorchester labor camps, creating his own up-picking style in a modal tuning.

We follow the 1927 Brunswick audition with a borrowed banjo and a couple of shots of whiskey, the eight sides he cut in New York, the $300-a-week boom years, brawls and the song Wise County Jail, the Depression, a failed radio audition, pawning his banjo, three decades in the mines, Harry Smith’s 1952 Anthology of American Folk Music, and Mike Seeger’s 1963 knock on the door that started a second act at Newport.

• How industrial coal camps mixed musical traditions along the rail lines
• What modal tuning does to the mood of a song
• The tension between holiness religion at home and secular music for pay
• Why a fearless bar performer froze in a silent radio studio
• The annual festival in Norton, Virginia, that still honors him