Mac sang these songs with his mother, around a pump organ, and often pored through her notebooks, sang to himself and taught himself guitar chords. He would become one of a handful of musicians who helped create bluegrass music.

The notebook songs, with lyrics written in his mother's handwriting from the radio in the 1930's, are folk songs, with roots in the British Isles. They are foundational to what is now known as country music, and they imparted in Mac Wiseman a love of song that would spur the longest recording career of any American singing star alive in 2014.

Wiseman became known as ''the voice with a heart,'' and that heart for music began beating back in Crimora, Virginia as he lifted his mother's hand-written words in melody. The notebooks were gifts from a mother to her son.