George Riley Puckett was blinded as an infant in 1890s Georgia when a doctor treated a minor eye condition with lead acetate. This episode follows how he learned guitar and banjo by touch at the Georgia School for the Blind, developed the driving bass run that became standard in country guitar, and earned the nickname the Bald Mountain Caruso at Atlanta’s fiddlers’ conventions.

We trace his 1922 debut on Atlanta’s WSB radio, the 1924 trip to New York with Gid Tanner to become Columbia’s first country artists, the first recorded country yodel on Rock All Our Babies to Sleep, his status as Columbia’s second-best-selling artist by 1925, his years with Gid Tanner and His Skillet Lickers, a discography of more than 200 records, and his death from an untreated infection in 1946.

• Why lead acetate was used in 19th-century medicine
• What a bass run does mechanically in a song
• How acoustic horn recording worked before electric microphones
• Why Puckett’s yodel predates Jimmie Rodgers by three years
• Why it took until 1986 for the Georgia Music Hall of Fame to induct him