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French Kirkpatrick just wanted to play music.

“I kind of wanted to be a singer, but I couldn’t sing worth a hoot,” the 75-year-old chuckled. “I wanted to be a regular picker, a banjo player, I even tried to play the fiddle one time, played the harmonica — I was a multiple-testing type of person.”

Liner notes for the new album released by the Great Smoky Mountains Association — “Carroll Best and The White Oak String Band: Old-time Bluegrass from the Great Smoky Mountains, 1956 & 1959.”

French Kirkpatrick can sum up Carroll Best.

“What he did with the banjo was above and beyond,” Kirkpatrick said. “He was the most, probably without a doubt, the most creative banjo player I was ever in a room with.”

Recently at his home in Ironduff, a mountain community a few miles outside of downtown Waynesville, Kirkpatrick, an acclaimed musician in his own right, relaxed further back into his couch and reminisced with a smile about his late friend.

Marc Pruett has won a Grammy and played the Grand Ole Opry stage, but his biggest concern on this day is sinkholes.

“Where is it? Canton?,” he asked a coworker. 

Director of erosion control for Haywood County, Pruett sits at his desk, which is covered in paper, maps and books. After a heavy midday rain, two sinkholes have emerged in downtown Canton. Pruett puts a plan into motion, workers head for the door. 

He was a toddler with tenacity and talent.

At three years old, Seth Taylor picked up his first guitar. Seeing musicians on television and hearing them on the radio sparked something inside of the Bryson City native. Once that instrument was in his hands, it was like two magnets connecting, where it would take all your might to pull them apart.

Summer McMahan remembers the exact moment her life changed.

“Mountain Heritage Day [at Western Carolina University], 14 years ago,” she said. “I watched the Fiddlin’ Dill Sisters and decided that’s what I wanted to do.”

Darkness enveloped the vehicle as soon as it exited Interstate 40.

Cruising around sharp S-curves in the mountain community of Fines Creek in the remote northern reaches of Haywood County, headlights peered across vast fields and by quiet farmhouses where inhabitants were winding down after another bountiful day. A heavy fog rolled into Western North Carolina as distant homes sparkled like far away stars in the sky. Barreling further into the country, and away from any semblance of town, it seemed you could drive off the edge of the earth if you kept pushing any longer.

It’s the greatest show in town, but the location is a secret.

With the tall smokestacks of the Canton paper mill falling into the rearview mirror, the pickup truck meandered up into the surrounding hills. The road snaked deeper into the woods. Pulling into a muddy entrance, a few sporadic vehicles lined the driveway. Tires squish through puddles in search of a place to park.

He went east to discover the final frontier.

In 1937, Californian Joseph S. Hall was a 30-year-old graduate student. Hired by the National Park Service for a summer job, Hall was commissioned to seek out and capture the essence of the unique people, places and things amid the high peaks and hollers of the Southern Appalachian Smokies.

With notepad in-hand, he jumped into a pickup truck and headed into the isolated landscape, coming out with innumerable pages of stories told in a unique dialect — one that evolved partly out of the Scotch-Irish and German ancestory of mountain settlers, and partly, it seemed, from the mountains themselves.

Raymond Fairchild is a man of few words.

But, it only takes those few words to truly grasp a man that ultimately lives up to myth and legend.