Jerry Garcia once compared a bluegrass fiddler to Charlie Parker. That fiddler was Calvin Scott Stoneman, better known as Scotty Stoneman, one of the greatest and most complex instrumentalists in American roots music. This deep dive explores his life, his wildly innovative musical mechanics and his tragic trajectory, from a Maryland household of 23 children to the Kentucky Colonels and his death from alcohol poisoning in March 1973.

We look at how his grandfather Bill Frost passed down aggressive, double-stop-driven mountain fiddling, how the Stoneman kids evolved from Pop Stoneman and the Little Pebbles into the Bluegrass Champs in the working-class bars of Washington, D.C., and what it meant to reach the Grand Ole Opry in 1962. Then we break down exactly how a five-time national fiddle champion brought bebop chromaticism and flat fifths into traditional breakdowns.

• Why the D.C. area became a bluegrass hotbed through Appalachian migration
• Leaving the Stoneman family band in 1964 for a risky progressive startup
• The race-car-on-a-dirt-road approach to improvisation that Garcia recognized
• How mid-century touring culture became a pressure cooker for alcoholism
• Putting the fiddle away to get sober, and the newgrass players who later followed his map