Isaac Stern (July 21, 1920 – September 22, 2001) was an American violinist. The son of Solomon and Clara Stern, Isaac Stern was born in Kremenets, Poland (now Ukraine), into a Jewish family. He was 14 months old when his family moved to San Francisco in 1921. He received his first music lessons from his mother. In 1928, he enrolled at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, where he studied until 1931 before going on to study privately with Louis Persinger. He returned to the San Francisco Conservatory to study for five years with Naoum Blinder, to whom he said he owed the most. At his public début on February 18, 1936, aged 15, he played Saint-Saëns' Violin Concerto No. 3 in B minor with the San Francisco Symphony under the direction of Pierre Monteux. Reflecting on his background, Stern once memorably quipped that cultural exchanges between the U.S. and Soviet Russia were simple affairs: "They send us their Jews from Odessa, and we send them our Jews from Odessa." Stern toured the Soviet Union in 1951, the first American violinist to do so. In 1967, Stern stated his refusal to return to the USSR until the Soviet regime allowed artists to enter and leave the country freely. His only visit to Germany was in 1999, for a series of master classes, but he never performed publicly in Germany. Stern was married three times. His first marriage, in 1948 to ballerina Nora Kaye, ended in divorce after 18 months, but the two of them remained friends. On August 17, 1951, he married Vera Lindenblit (1927–2015). They had three children together, including conductors Michael and David Stern. Their marriage ended in divorce in 1994 after 43 years. In 1996, Stern married his third wife, Linda Reynolds. His third wife, his three children, and his five grandchildren survived him. Stern died September 22, 2001 of heart failure in a Manhattan, New York, hospital after an extended stay.

Vassar Carlton Clements (April 25, 1928 – August 16, 2005) was a Grammy Award-winning American jazz, swing, and bluegrass fiddler. Clements has been dubbed the Father of Hillbilly Jazz, an improvisational style that blends and borrows from swing, hot jazz, and bluegrass along with roots also in country and other musical traditions. Clements was born in Kinard, Florida, but grew up in Kissimmee. He taught himself to play the fiddle at age 7, learning "There's an Old Spinning Wheel in the Parlor" as his first song. Soon, he joined with two first cousins, Red and Gerald, to form a local string band. In his early teens Clements met Bill Monroe and the Blue Grass Boys when they came to Florida to visit Clements' stepfather, a friend of fiddler Chubby Wise. Clements was impressed with his playing. In late 1949 Wise left Monroe's group, and the 21 year-old Clements traveled by bus to ask for an audition. When told he would have to return the next day, Clements was crestfallen, lacking the money for either a hotel room or return bus trip. Monroe gave him some money to a night's lodging, and the next day Clements auditioned and was hired. He remained with Monroe for seven years, recording with the band in 1950 and 1951. He soon became one of the most distinctive, inventive, and popular fiddlers in bluegrass music. His virtuosity and ability to blend several different genres, including swing and hot jazz, made him a pioneer in country music and much sought-after session musician. Between 1957 and 1962, he was a member of the bluegrass band Jim and Jesse & the Virginia Boys. He also gained recognition joining with the popular bluegrass duo of Flatt and Scruggs on the popular theme to the hit television sitcom The Beverly Hillbillies. Earl Scruggs' path-breaking banjo style had premiered with Bill Monroe in the late 1940s, and thereafter gained widespread renown with Lester Flatt and the Foggy Mountain Boys. Stardom was within his grasp. By the mid-1960s, however, his struggles with alcohol left him making his living in blue-collar trades, being employed briefly at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida as a plumber, in a Georgia paper mill, and as switchman for Atlantic Coast Line Railroad. He even sold insurance and once operated a convenience store while owning a potato chip franchise in Huntsville, Alabama. Sobering up, he returned to Nashville in 1967, where he became a much sought-after studio musician.

Charles Edward Daniels (October 28, 1936 – July 6, 2020) was an American singer, songwriter and multi-instrumentalist known for his contributions to Southern rock, country, and bluegrass music. He was best known for his number-one country hit "The Devil Went Down to Georgia". Daniels was active as a singer and musician from the 1950s. He was inducted into the Cheyenne Frontier Days Hall of Fame in 2002, the Grand Ole Opry in 2008, the Musicians Hall of Fame and Museum in 2009, and the Country Music Hall of Fame in 2016. Daniels was born October 28, 1936, in Wilmington, North Carolina, and raised on a musical diet that included Pentecostal gospel, local bluegrass bands, and the rhythm & blues and country music from Nashville's 50,000-watt AM radio stations WLAC and WSM. In 2016, he shared memories of his youth and baseball in Wilmington when he wrote the foreword for a book on the Tobacco State League. As a teenager, Daniels moved to the small town of Gulf, Chatham County, North Carolina. He graduated from high school in 1955. Already skilled on guitar, fiddle, banjo, and mandolin, he formed a rock 'n' roll band and hit the road.