In 1945, Arthur Smith struck steel strings with a stiff piece of tortoiseshell and recorded Guitar Boogie, accidentally laying groundwork for rock and roll. This episode tracks the evolution of flatpicking, the technique of playing melody on a flat-top acoustic guitar with a single plectrum, from its origins as a rhythm workaround in 1920s Appalachian string bands to today’s arena stages. It explains the physics of energy transfer, why fingertips dampen strings while a pick delivers a sharp transient attack, and how slides, hammer-ons, pull-offs and cross-picking let a guitar cut through fiddles and banjos.

The conversation follows Riley Puckett’s bass runs, Roy Harvey, the Delmore Brothers and Bill Monroe’s Mule Skinner Blues, then Don Reno translating fiddle tunes to six strings, Hank Garland and Joe Maphis carrying the mechanics into electric rockabilly, and the 1960s golden age of Clarence White and Doc Watson. It closes with Tony Rice’s jazz-inflected Dorian mode solos, the Winfield championships, and modern players like Molly Tuttle, Billy Strings, David Rawlings and Bryan Sutton.

• Why boom-chuck rhythm was all a guitar could manage before PA systems
• The distinction between tenor banjo plectrum jazz and what musicologists call flatpicking
• How post-war honky-tonks and the boogie craze forced guitarists to get louder and faster
• George Shuffler’s cross-picking and the harp-like wall of sound
• How playing an F major scale anchored on G created Tony Rice’s bluesy tension over happy chords