It is probably not true that Roscoe Lee Ozum got to Kansas by crawling into a bass fiddle case and shipping himself. But it is true that he came here to escape from the long arm of the law.
Roscoe when he was young took a lot of chances. Basically he had more self-esteem than you could shake a stick at. On this one occasion, he owed money to a feed dealer, and to settle the debt, he bet the feed dealer he could train a monkey to play the banjo. The feed dealer says You're on. The bargain was that if Roscoe succeeded, not only was he debt-free, but the feed dealer would buy the monkey.
So then it took quite a while for Roscoe to figure out how to get a monkey, and what to feed it, and whether to go for three-finger style or frailing. Well, he got the monkey, and he taught it to frail, and even a little drop-thumb, which is quite an achievement for a monkey, and he got it to where it could play at least as well as Uncle Dave Macon, including with its feet. Incidentally it is a well-known fact that a monkey cannot learn to Scruggs-pick with its feet. Well, it is now.
Also a monkey cannot drop-thumb with its feet, for obvious reasons. So when it came to feet, it just frailed.
So anyway when Roscoe got the monkey to where it could play even a little better than Uncle Dave Macon he took it to the feed dealer. The feed dealer sat through the audition, but then he refused to pony up because, he said, something was wrong. It had dawned on him that if you just frail, you have got to sing. Roscoe offered to teach it to lip-synch to a recording, but the feed dealer said no, it had to sing. And this shows you how dumb the feed dealer was, because this monkey could have gone to MIT by now.
So Roscoe never did pay off his debt, and then he found out too late that there was a law against teaching a monkey to play the banjo. So of course he had to jump bail and high-tail it out West here.
I suppose you think that was a pretty strange law but there were a lot of pretty strange laws in those days. Roscoe made a good choice where to come, because back then Kansas would probably have let him banjify the monkey, as long as he didn't do it on Sunday.