David ‘Stringbean’ Akeman was born in 1915 in Annville, Kentucky, into a musical but severely impoverished family, and traded a pair of bantam chickens for his first banjo at age 12. This episode follows his Depression-era path through the Civilian Conservation Corps, a talent contest judged by Asa Martin, the on-stage slip that gave him his name, and the night a missing performer pushed him into singing and comedy.

The hosts explain how semi-pro baseball led to Bill Monroe and a 1943 to 1945 stint as Monroe’s banjo player, why being replaced by Earl Scruggs became a catalyst rather than a career end, and how the long shirt and knee-belted jeans built his stage persona at the Grand Ole Opry and on Hee Haw from 1969. They then confront the darker reality: a Depression-born distrust of banks, rumors of cash hidden in his cabin near Ridgetop, Tennessee, and the November 10, 1973 murders of Stringbean and his wife Estelle by cousins John and Marvin Brown.

• Clawhammer versus Scruggs three-finger picking and why the newer style drowned out the old rhythmic sound
• Friendship with neighbor Grandpa Jones and the banjo passed down by Uncle Dave Macon near the end of his life
• How the killers used the live Opry radio broadcast to time their break-in and what they actually took
• The $20,000 found behind a chimney brick in 1996, shredded by mice after 23 years
• Grandpa Jones’s trial testimony, the sentences, the scarecrow left standing on the Hee Haw set, and Sam Bush’s 2009 ballad