“By his own account, the model for the Grand Ole Opry radio show was a hoedown Hay attended ‘in a log cabin about a mile up a muddy road’ outside a little Arkansas burg called Mammoth Spring.”

It’s a Monday in late August. I stand in the middle of a dirt road, flush on the line separating Arkansas from Missouri. I’m underwhelmed by the sight before me, but locals say this is the place. More than a century ago, right here, an all-night hootenanny planted the seed that eventually blossomed into the most iconic symbol of country music history. But historical treasure is not the first thing that comes to mind when you take a gander at the place. Before me, on a lot overgrown with sumac bushes and Johnson grass, sits a decrepit old house—actually, a cluster of old houses and sheds, connected to one another like the life-size Legos of a deranged hillbilly giant. When I’m told the house’s last resident, an elderly man nicknamed “Red Feathers,” was robbed and murdered here in 2018, I don’t bat an eye.