David Harrison Macon ran a mule-drawn freight company between Tennessee towns for 20 years until motorized trucks put him out of business around 1920, when he was 50. Born in 1870, he had learned banjo as a teenager from circus comedian Joel Davidson at his family’s Broadway Hotel in Nashville, a magnet for vaudeville performers, before his father’s murder in 1886 sent the family to a stagecoach inn in Readyville, where he built a homemade stage to entertain travelers.

This episode follows his first paid gig in 1921, the 1923 Shriners show where theater magnate Marcus Loew offered him $15 to play Alabama, a rapid rise to several hundred dollars a week on the vaudeville circuit, 1924 recordings in New York, and the December 26, 1925 WSM broadcast that evolved into the Grand Ole Opry. The hosts cover the Dixie Dewdrop persona, the Fruit Jar Drinkers renamed the Dixie Sacred Singers for hymns, the 19 picking styles musicologists identified, the open-backed Gibson banjo, the havoc he wreaked on carbon microphones, his disdain for bluegrass while touring with Roy Acuff and Bill Monroe, his 1952 death at 81, and his 1966 Country Music Hall of Fame induction.

• Why learning banjo from a comedian shaped everything about his stage act
• How 20 years of entertaining freight customers became a rigorous field test
• What authenticity meant to homesick urban audiences in the 1920s
• Why an open-backed banjo forced him to play with violent force
• Why the grandfather of country music rejected Earl Scruggs and bluegrass