A master of the drop-thumb banjo style (and not too shabby at two-finger picking, either), Lee Sexton has lived his whole life near his birthplace in Letcher County, KY. Born in 1927, he acquired his first banjo, a homemade wooden fretless model with a groundhog skin head, for a dollar when he was eight years old (he worked to clear a field for a week to earn that dollar), and with instruction from his father and uncles (one of whom was the unique and sublime banjo player Morgan Sexton), Sexton soon mastered the instrument, and the fiddle, as well. As a young man he would work...