There’s Another Baby Waiting for Me Down the Line · Drifting with the Tide

Don Reno was one of the few banjo players who could have replaced Earl Scruggs in Bill Monroe's band — and briefly did. Paired with the warm-voiced guitarist and lead singer Red Smiley, he spent the 1950s building one of the most distinctive catalogs in bluegrass, and almost all of it came out on a single label: King Records of Cincinnati.

Reno and Smiley first recorded for King in 1951, with a band they called the Tennessee Cut-Ups. King's owner Syd Nathan ran a famously high-volume operation — country, bluegrass, and rhythm-and-blues all cut in the same plain studio on Brewster Avenue — and Reno and Smiley fed it steadily for more than a decade, with occasional detours through Charlotte and Nashville. Their singles ran from gospel quartets to novelty numbers to flat-out instrumental showpieces.

It was the instrumentals that made Reno a legend. "Tennessee Cut-Up Breakdown," "Choking the Strings," "Double Banjo Blues" — these records showed off a banjo style entirely his own, full of single-string runs that owed as much to flat-pick guitar and jazz as to Scruggs. With fiddler Mack Magaha added in the mid-1950s, the Cut-Ups became a tight, versatile show band.

For all that, Reno and Smiley never chased the folk-revival college circuit the way some of their peers did; they worked the southern television and schoolhouse circuit, and their King singles were aimed squarely at that audience. Red Smiley's failing health forced him to scale back in the mid-1960s, and the partnership wound down — but the body of work they left, almost entirely 45s and 78s, is one of the deepest in the music.

Session details drawn in part from the Bluegrass Discography.