Jimmy Martin was born in 1927 in Sneedville, Tennessee, and raised in a grueling farming community where his mother and stepfather sang gospel in church. In the winter of 1949, hearing that Mac Wiseman had left Bill Monroe’s Blue Grass Boys, he rode a bus to Nashville, slipped backstage at the Grand Ole Opry, and started playing in the hallway until banjo player Rudy Lyle marched him over to Monroe, who hired him after two songs. Martin’s piercing lead voice pushed Monroe into higher keys and helped forge the high lonesome sound on tracks like Sitting Alone in the Moonlight and I’m Blue, I’m Lonesome.

This episode follows Martin from his clashes with Monroe to forming the Sunny Mountain Boys in 1955 with J.D. Crowe and Paul Williams, branding his crowd-pleasing style Good ‘n’ Country, bringing a snare drum on stage, and landing hits like Hit Parade of Love, Widow Maker, and the instrumental Theme Time. It also examines the mood swings and alcohol abuse that got him permanently blacklisted as an Opry member, his unexpected role on the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band’s 1971 album Will the Circle Be Unbroken and its 1989 and 2002 sequels, his 1995 induction into the International Bluegrass Music Hall of Honor, and his death from bladder cancer in Nashville on May 14, 2005.

• How Martin talked his way into Bill Monroe’s band with a two-song hallway audition at the Opry in 1949
• Why singing at the top of the vocal register creates the strain that makes the high lonesome sound feel so desperate
• The G run Martin claimed to invent, and the archival recordings showing Lester Flatt playing it before him
• Gloria Belle, the high baritone fourth harmony, and the 1975 Japan tour that made her a trailblazer despite Martin’s demeaning stage jokes
• Raccoon hounds on his album covers, a Tom Russell song about his feud with Nashville, and what the Opry’s rejection says about gatekeepers