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It was the sound and feel of tires traversing a curvy dirt road deep in the Blue Ridge Mountains. Bumpy, scratchy, exhilarating. Rhonda Gouge couldn’t get enough of “Guitar Boogie,” Arthur Smith’s chugging 12-bar blues instrumental with a “hillbilly” twang.

Every morning before school, she tuned into Carolina Calling, the country-music variety show that Smith taped out of WBTV in Charlotte. Rhonda watched the show on the little TV set in her family’s home in the tiny mountain community of Ledger. And every morning, she was awed. She wanted to play the guitar just like Smith. And that’s exactly what she ended up doing.

I wanted to learn more about Rhonda, the 70-year-old woman who lives in North Carolina’s High Country, where she’s spent a lifetime preserving Appalachian music traditions and teaching generations of young people how to play in the older styles. Maybe, I thought, she might agree to teach an old dog like me a few new tricks.

These days, Rhonda not only performs bluegrass and old-time mountain hymns at churches and events across Mitchell County, but she also enjoys putting the spotlight on her five decades of students, many of whom, she says, have grown up to surpass her own abilities. She’s being modest, of course. Sitting in the home studio in Ledger that she calls “The Pickin’ Parlor,” she’s trading guitar licks on her Martin D-16 with former students Sam McKinney and Kathy Kuhne. Their vocal harmonies on standards like “I’m Winging My Way Back Home” and “Blessed Jesus, Hold My Hand” blend like a band of angels.

Rhonda’s been around music all her life. Her mother was a shape-note singer at Bear Creek Baptist Church in nearby Bakersville, and a family friend, Oscar “Red” Wilson, was well-known in the region for old-time fiddle tunes. He was her mentor, and under his tutelage, Rhonda learned not only the guitar but also the fiddle, mandolin, banjo, and bass. For years after high school, she performed occasionally with Wilson’s band, The Toe River Valley Boys.

But she always longed for more. Rhonda wanted to learn everything she could about the music that stretches back generations in her own bloodline. Music that fueled the talents of so many of her heroes: Smith, Wilson, Elizabeth Cotten of Carrboro, and Doc Watson of Deep Gap. So she returned to school as an adult, earning her master’s degree in Appalachian studies at Appalachian State University. When Rhonda pulls a tattered copy of the “red-back” hymnal from a nearby overstuffed bookshelf and demonstrates the way a shape-note hymn is sung, she knows what she’s talking about. She explains how the shapes revealed which notes and what pitch to sing in to mountain vocalists who couldn’t read conventional sheet music.

After hours of sitting around the Pickin’ Parlor with Rhonda, listening to her trio perform an encyclopedia of traditional mountain hymns and other tunes — “Goodbye, World, Goodbye”; “When You and I Were Young, Maggie”; “Wildwood Flower”; “Summertime” — the others eventually bid adieu. The room becomes silent for the first time all day. Rhonda looks up from her chair. “So you want to learn a little fingerstyle picking?” she asks.

From a master player like Rhonda? It’s the moment I’ve been waiting for.

And for another hour, she kindly and patiently guides me and my fingers through a step-by-step lesson on how to pick Elizabeth Cotten’s classic song “Freight Train.” Maybe one day, if I practice hard enough, I’ll learn to play the guitar just like Rhonda Gouge.