Barrett also remembers "the first time that I had to deny my grandparents and deny my culture. It was kind of like in the Bible—"

"When the cock crows three times," Barrett; his wife, Carla Gover; and the interviewer — all products of Bible Belt forebears — finished in unison.

Barrett continued: "Having to deny your own culture, it was such a horrible place to be."

As the country rides the crest of the O Brother, Where Art Thou? wave, and it's cool to play banjo or use the Southern second-person plural in the most rarefied of settings, Barrett and Gover agree that "It's still not cool in the mountains." And while Barrett and Gover loved the lore they learned from their grandparents and at the occasional school assembly, it took a while for them to figure out how to bring entertainment and education together to lift up their own people.

Barrett, from just outside Berea, Kentucky, sang with his family from early childhood. "Every family gathering, there was music. My grandpa on my dad's side played banjo, and my granny played guitar on my mom's side, and Pa sang a lot." He also sang mountain gospel with his mother: "It kinda freaked me out — I was just a kid, and we'd be singing at funerals of people I wasn't kin to or anything."

By his late teens, he had joined the duo Mandala and was touring the country, playing contemporary and traditional Appalachian-influenced music. "After 12 years of playing clubs, I decided that I was burnt out. I came home and decided I was just gonna do woodworking. A schoolteacher friend asked me if I would come in and sing for a class, and I did. And I told some stories — my grandfather was a tale-spinner. She asked me to come in, and I did it for her class, and ended up doing that and realizing there was a way I could still play music and not have to go out and, for want of a better word, prostitute myself in bars. 'Cause I really had got so jaded I put my guitar away.

"The first time I really started to identify what I was doing was when a schoolteacher from Los Angeles was in Berea. He'd come to Berea for this fair, and I was telling stories and singing. And he heard me, and said he had this idea of bringing three different artists from different cultures into inner-city L.A. And he asked if I'd be interested. I said, 'Sure.' Two years later he calls me, and I went out there and did that. It was Carlos Nakai and myself and a Welsh chairmaker. I discovered my own culture from having to talk about it in Los Angeles."