Malcolm Bell Wiseman was born in May 1925 in Crimora, Virginia, in the Shenandoah Valley, and contracted polio at six months old. The disability kept him out of farm labor, so he spent his childhood indoors with records, radio, and his mother’s composition notebooks, in which she transcribed the songs she heard on air. That forced stillness gave him an encyclopedic knowledge of mountain music that he then layered with formal training at the Shenandoah Conservatory in Dayton, Virginia, after graduating high school in New Hope in 1943.

This episode follows Wiseman from DJ work at WSVA in Harrisonburg and bass duties in Molly O’Day’s Cumberland Mountain Folks to a rare feat: serving as guitarist and featured vocalist in Lester Flatt and Earl Scruggs’ Foggy Mountain Boys and later playing with Bill Monroe’s Blue Grass Boys. His warm lower-register singing earned him the nickname The Voice with a Heart, and Dot Records hits like The Ballad of Davy Crockett in 1955 and Jimmy Brown the Newsboy in 1959 made him a star. Then, facing the rock and roll threat, he co-founded the Country Music Association in 1958 as its first secretary, ran Dot’s country division, directed the WWVA Jamboree from 1966 to 1970, and co-founded the IBMA in 1986. He died in Nashville in 2019 at age 93.

• Why his mother’s handwritten notebooks became the blueprint for his entire approach to songs
• How he served as a musical translator between the rival Monroe and Flatt and Scruggs camps
• The CMA’s early work pushing all-country radio formats and proving to Madison Avenue that country fans bought cars and soap
• Collaborations with Duane Eddy and a 1979 hit with big band leader Woody Herman on My Blue Heaven
• Songs From My Mother’s Hand, recorded at age 89 in 2014, and honors including the IBMA Hall of Honor, an NEA National Heritage Fellowship, and the Country Music Hall of Fame