After recording roughly 100 songs for RCA between 1937 and 1941, brothers Bill and Earl Bolick were asked by the label to add an electric guitar to their sound. They refused, stopped recording, and by 1951 had left the industry entirely, Bill taking a job as a postal clerk in North Carolina and Earl working at the Lockheed aircraft plant in Atlanta. This episode traces the Blue Sky Boys from their childhood in West Hickory, North Carolina, where their parents in the First Church of God taught them hymns, through the neighbor who taught them their instruments and their decision to swap so that Bill took the mandolin and Earl the guitar.

We explore the strange sponsorship system of 1930s radio that had them performing as the Crazy Hickory Nuts, the Good Coffee Boys, and the Crazy Blue Ridge Hillbillies before an RCA audition with Eli Oberstein, who initially assumed they were Monroe Brothers imitators, led to a contract and a new name honoring the land of the blue sky. The conversation covers their first 1936 Charlotte recordings, military service from 1941 to 1946, their dislike of honky-tonk, the postwar fiddle additions, and the reunions sparked by a 1962 Starday LP, including new albums Together Again and Precious Moments, a Capitol session during the UCLA Folk Festival, and a 1975 Rounder record.

• Why swapping instruments early on reveals the lack of ego that held the duo together
• How live radio in the 1930s turned musicians into walking advertisements for coffee and mineral crystals
• Why the brothers saw the electric guitar as a spiritual corruption rather than a musical preference
• How the 1960s folk revival turned their refusal to change into a mark of authenticity
• The 1990s Copper Creek releases of 1940s radio transcriptions that preserved their peak sound