““He never had a craving in him that he couldn’t slick away on his guitar. You have to be native to the red-clay hills of Kentucky to understand that. There the guitar players don’t bother with any fingering; they do it by running a knife blade up and down the stops. Most of the good slickers down where he was born would say that a thin blade made the most music. But he liked the heft of a good, heavy hog sticker. It took a born player to handle one of those. And maybe that’s why his mother changed his name to Melody when he got old enough for a name to mean something beside “Come get tit.””