Lester Raymond Flatt was born in 1914 in Overton County, Tennessee, to Nannie Mae Haney and Isaac Columbus Flatt, and raised in the tiny community of Duncan’s Chapel. His professional breakthrough came in 1943 playing mandolin and singing tenor with Charlie Monroe’s Kentucky Partners, but in 1945 he joined Charlie’s younger brother Bill Monroe’s Blue Grass Boys on guitar, where his warm lead voice and thumb-and-index rhythm style became the transmission that put Monroe’s high-revving mandolin onto the pavement.

This episode explains the mechanics of that guitar style and the Lester Flatt G run, then follows the controversial 1948 split when Flatt and banjo player Earl Scruggs left Monroe to form the Foggy Mountain Boys, a 20-year partnership that sent The Ballad of Jed Clampett into millions of living rooms as the theme of The Beverly Hillbillies in 1962. When Scruggs pushed toward folk rock and Bob Dylan covers, the duo dissolved in 1969, and Flatt renamed the backing band the Nashville Grass, recorded with Mac Wiseman, and reunited on stage with Bill Monroe in 1974 before dying of heart failure in Nashville in 1979 at age 64.

• How Flatt’s thumb handled the kick drum and his index finger the snare on a six-string guitar
• Why a G run worked as a musical traffic signal keeping the band synchronized at blistering tempos
• The bitter decades-long rift with Bill Monroe that followed the 1948 departure
• Flatt’s refusal to add strings, synthesizers, or electric guitars during the 1970s Nashville sound era
• Country Music Hall of Fame induction in 1985, inaugural IBMA Hall of Honor membership in 1991, and Sparta, Tennessee’s Lester Flatt Memorial Bluegrass Day