Don Reno

He was born on 21 February 1926 in Spartanburg and grew up in nearby Clyde, North Carolina. His own family was not musical, but through relatives he heard the fiddlers Art Wooten and Tommy Magness. The first time he picked up a banjo, at five, he found he could play “Brown’s Ferry Blues,” and by eight he had a guitar as well. Snuffy Jenkins was his direct model for three-finger banjo, and he worked blues and jazz into what he played. Before he reached his teens he was on the radio, first as a guitar and harmonica act and then as the banjo player for the Morris Brothers, until Earl Scruggs, visiting the station, took his place with them in early 1942. Reno moved on to Arthur “Guitar Boogie” Smith and His Crackerjacks, where he played several instruments and did comedy.

When Bill Monroe came through town in 1943 he offered Reno the banjo job in the Blue Grass Boys, but Reno chose the Army instead. Inducted in March 1944, he turned down a post as a musician and served as a company barber with Merrill’s Marauders in Burma and China. After the war he ran a grocery store in South Carolina and played jazz and country at night. In 1948 he heard on the Opry that Scruggs had left Monroe, drove to Nashville and on to Taylorsville, North Carolina, and joined the band onstage without being asked. He stayed until July 1949, working alongside Lester Flatt, Chubby Wise, Joel Price, Jackie Phelps, Benny Martin and Mac Wiseman, and playing left field and third base on Monroe’s baseball team.

A return of malaria he had caught in the service weakened him, and he left Monroe to form a band in South Carolina with his nephew Verlon Reno. Later in 1949 he was called to Roanoke to work with Tommy Magness and the Tennessee Buddies, where Red Smiley was already in the band, and the two teamed up as the Tennessee Cut-Ups. Their first 16 recordings for King, made in January 1952, included “I’m Using My Bible for a Road Map,” but by the time it came out the Cut-Ups had broken up and Reno was back with Arthur Smith on radio and television in Charlotte. He and Smiley kept recording, and in 1955 they re-formed as a touring act with Mack Magaha on fiddle, John Palmer on bass and Carlton Haney as manager.

That band’s first session, in August 1956, produced “Country Boy Rock ’n Roll,” “No Longer a Sweetheart of Mine” and “I Know You’re Married (But I Love You Still),” which Reno wrote and which became their most popular composition. His son Ronnie joined on mandolin the same year, at the age of eight. Reno and Smiley worked television in Richmond, Petersburg, Roanoke, Harrisonburg and Washington, D.C., where their stage characters included Chicken Hotrod (Reno), Pansy (Smiley in a dress) and the Banty Roosters. In February 1965, just after the pair played their first and only college concert, at Temple University, Smiley’s health forced him off the road.

Reno carried on with a new set of Tennessee Cut-Ups, and in September 1965 they played the first multi-day bluegrass festival, at Fincastle, Virginia, where he announced a short partnership with the fiddler Benny Martin. From late 1966 to early 1977 he worked with the guitarist Bill Harrell, and Smiley came back from semi-retirement to tour with them from 1969 until his death in early 1972. Reno’s son Dale was playing mandolin in the band by 1975, and his son Don Wayne joined on banjo in the late 1970s.

Reno was a guitarist as well as a banjo player. He played fiddle tunes note for note on a flatpicked guitar, and Doc Watson said in an interview that Reno was the first person he had heard play fiddle tunes on the guitar; in the 1940s Reno also gave guitar lessons to Hank Garland. He died in Charlottesville, Virginia, on 16 October 1984 and is buried in Spring Hill Cemetery in Lynchburg. In 2020, nearly three decades after the Hall of Fame induction he shared with Smiley, he was inducted into the American Banjo Museum Hall of Fame.