As a young boy moving about the Midwest with his family in the 1950s, Junior Brown became a good listener, and what he heard was country music “growing up out of the ground like the crops—it was everywhere; coming out of cars, houses, gas stations and stores like the soundtrack of a story.” Brown took that story and made it his own, becoming an accomplished guitarist known for his mastery across country genres—outlaw, Americana, Texas, neotraditional and classic—as well as the invention of an entirely new instrument, a combination of electric guitar and lap steel guitar he calls the “guit-steel.”