Frank Noah Proffitt was born in 1913 in Laurel Bloomery, Tennessee, and grew up from age nine in the Beaver Dam community of Watauga County, North Carolina, where music was an inheritance rather than a career. He learned ballads from his parents, aunts and uncles, and learned to build mountain banjos and Appalachian dulcimers from his father Wiley, a Civil War veteran and luthier, later using his father’s old space as a workshop while farming tobacco and doing carpentry to support his wife Bessie Hicks and six children.

This episode follows how folklorists reached him: Duke University’s Frank C. Brown in 1937, then Anne and Frank Warner in 1938, who collected more than a hundred of his songs across a thirty-year friendship and passed them to Alan Lomax. Lomax printed Tom Dooley in Folk Song USA, the Kingston Trio recorded a polished version in 1958 that became a multimillion-selling hit, and the folk revival’s later hunger for the source brought Proffitt to Folkways in 1961, the Newport Folk Festival in 1963, and the 1964 New York World’s Fair before his death in 1965 at 52.

• What an Appalachian dulcimer is, how it is played across the lap, and why its drone resembles a bagpipe
• How 1930s field collectors hauled disc-cutting machines powered by car batteries into the mountains
• The real story behind Tom Dooley: Confederate veteran Tom Dula, the 1866 murder of Laura Foster, and a hanging
• The family-recipe analogy for how the Kingston Trio sanitized a murder ballad for suburban teenagers
• The 1962 Folk-Legacy album with Proffitt’s own rendition, the 1969 memorial album, and the 2000 tribute Nothing Seems Better to Me