ABSTRACT
It was a late spring morning on June 16, 1936, in Charlotte, North Carolina. Two teenage boys sat reading a newspaper in a waiting room in the old Southern Radio Building on South Tryon Street. Inside, engineers from the Victor recording company had draped the walls with heavy curtains to create a temporary recording studio. A big moon-faced man named Eli Oberstein was in charge, and he was making records for Victor’s new Bluebird label-a cut-rate record subsidiary that featured blues and country music, and sold in those Depression-era times for 35 cents apiece. He had recently discovered that Charlotte was a good location to find both kinds of talent-he had already recorded hit acts like Mainer’s Mountaineers and the Monroe Brothers there-and now he was racing through another marathon session, cutting as many as twenty or twenty-five masters in a day, and hoping that lightning would strike again.
