Ronnie Reno

Ronald Reno was born on 28 September 1947 in Buffalo, South Carolina. In 1955, at seven, as “Little Ronnie Reno,” he stood on a milk crate to reach the microphone and sang with his father and Red Smiley on the Old Dominion Barn Dance in Richmond, Virginia. He took up the mandolin in the Tennessee Cut-Ups and kept at his schooling between the band’s television tapings and shows. By October 1959 he was playing mandolin on Reno & Smiley’s King sessions in Cincinnati, with Steve Chapman on electric guitar, Ray Pennington on drums and Mack Magaha on fiddle, and he stayed on their records through the early 1960s, including a live show in Spartanburg, South Carolina, in September 1963 at which Carter and Ralph Stanley joined in. His own first single, “You Gotta Be My Baby,” credited to Little Ronnie Reno and the Blue Grass Cut-Ups, was cut at King’s studio in February 1961 and issued on the New Dominion Barn Dance label. In these years he also filled in with other acts, the Louvin Brothers among them.

After Reno & Smiley broke up he stayed with his father, and as a teenager and young man he was often a full-time member of the band Don Reno led with the guitarist Bill Harrell. He played mandolin on their sessions of January 1967 in Baltimore and around February 1967 in Akron, Ohio, the latter for Rural Rhythm with George Shuffler on bass, and, probably in July 1968, on a Rebel session that paired his father with the banjo player Eddie Adcock.

In 1968 he joined the Osborne Brothers, playing guitar and singing harmony, and he is on their Decca sessions at Bradley’s Barn in Mount Juliet, Tennessee, from June 1968 to December 1972. Those were the duo’s most commercially successful years, and in 1971 the Country Music Association named them Vocal Group of the Year.

His work caught Merle Haggard’s attention, and Reno spent about eight years with Haggard, singing harmony and playing guitar with Haggard, Bonnie Owens and the Strangers in the 1970s and early 1980s and opening Haggard’s shows. He sang on ten of Haggard’s albums and on records such as “If We Make It Through December,” “If We’re Not Back in Love by Monday” and “Ramblin’ Fever,” and he wrote “I’ve Got a Darlin’ (For a Wife),” which Haggard recorded. In 1978, while he was touring with Haggard, Conway Twitty recorded his “Boogie Grass Band,” which reached No. 2 on the country chart and No. 1 in Canada. He signed with MCA as a solo artist and recorded For the First Time, issued on its Tally imprint, produced by Bill Compton at Jack Clement’s studio in Nashville in 1974 and 1975 and released in July 1975, and he did session work with Johnny Cash, Willie Nelson and Johnny Paycheck. He also appeared in the film Bronco Billy.

In 1983 he recorded with his father and his brothers Dale and Don Wayne as the Reno Family, and after Don Reno’s death in 1984 the three brothers worked together as the Reno Brothers. Their albums included Brothers (Step One, 1988), Kentucky Gold (Webco, 1992), Swing West (1995), Drawing From the Well (1996) and Three Part Harmony (Pinecastle, 1998).

Television took up much of his later career. In 1993 he began producing and hosting Reno’s Old Time Music Festival, a national cable program devoted to bluegrass and traditional country music, which was nominated for a CableACE Award. He worked with Stan Hitchcock in cable television, helped launch the Blue Highways TV network in 2004 and stayed with it until 2014, and the show’s successor, Reno’s Old Time Music, aired weekly on RFD-TV. The IBMA named him Broadcaster of the Year for 2013.

His band in this period was Reno Tradition. Portfolio (2002), recorded in Nashville with Don Wayne and Dale Reno, Danny Roberts, Mike Scott and Rob Ickes among the players, included “I’m Using My Bible for a Roadmap,” “I Know You’re Married But I Love You Still” and a new recording of “Boogie Grass Band.” A live album from Roanoke followed in 2004, then Front Porch Gospel (2006) and a set recorded at DelFest in Cumberland, Maryland, in May 2008. Lessons Learned, released by Rural Rhythm in March 2015, had nine new songs of his, with Reno on lead vocals and guitar and his television house band, Reno Tradition, behind him: Mike Scott on banjo, Heath Van Winkle on bass, John Maberry on mandolin and Steve Day on fiddle. As a producer he made Haggard’s The Bluegrass Sessions (2007) and the Haggard and Mac Wiseman album Timeless (2015).

He served two terms on the IBMA board and sat on the boards of the Bluegrass Music Hall of Fame & Museum and the Kentucky Center for Traditional Music at Morehead State University. In January 2019 he announced that he would retire at the end of the year; in July he received the Smithville Fiddlers’ Jamboree’s Blue Blaze Award, and he retired in October 2019.

• 2006: IBMA Distinguished Achievement Award
• 2013: IBMA Broadcaster of the Year
• 2016: SPBGMA Preservation Hall of Greats
• 2019: Blue Blaze Award, Smithville Fiddlers’ Jamboree