Arthur Lee “Red” Smiley

Arthur Lee Smiley was born on 17 May 1924 in Marshall, North Carolina, and his red hair gave him his nickname. His father, a school administrator and teacher, was also a fiddler and a friend of the mountain music collector and performer Bascom Lamar Lunsford. Smiley is said to have been drawn to music at about seven, when he heard two hobos playing, and his early models included the Blue Sky Boys, the Delmore Brothers, Wiley Morris and Ernest Tubb. As a teenager he played guitar and sang in Smoky and the Carolina Ramblers with Harry and Harley “Smoky” Tallent and Lewis Sherrill of Bryson City, and by the late 1930s he was playing on WROL in Knoxville.

He joined the Army in 1943. In 1944 and 1945 he was working with Zeke Morris in Johnson City, Tennessee, with the Sauceman Brothers’ Blue Ridge Hillbillies in Asheville and with J.P. Sauceman and the Carolina Ramblers in Knoxville, and he also played with Red Rector and Fred Smith. After his discharge he went to diesel mechanic school in Nashville, where he saw Don Reno on the Grand Ole Opry stage with Bill Monroe without meeting him. He hoped for a solo career in country music and tried it briefly in Ohio.

In 1949 Smiley joined the fiddler Tommy Magness’s band, the Tennessee Buddies, at WDBJ radio in Roanoke, Virginia. When he heard that Reno had left the Blue Grass Boys, he persuaded Magness to call and offer him a job, and the two met when Reno arrived in Roanoke. On 6 March 1951, at King’s studio in Cincinnati, Smiley sang and played rhythm guitar on four of Reno’s sacred songs, issued on King’s Federal label as by Tommy Magness and His Tennessee Buddies. After Magness retired, Reno and Smiley spent a short stint in 1951 with Toby Stroud’s Blue Mountain Boys in Wheeling, West Virginia.

King’s owner, Syd Nathan, then offered to record the pair on their own. On 15 January 1952 they cut sixteen sides in Cincinnati as Don Reno, Red Smiley and the Tennessee Cutups, with Chuck Haney on mandolin, Gopher Addis on fiddle and Jay Haney on bass; among them was “I’m Using My Bible for a Road Map.” Without steady work for the band, Smiley went back to Asheville to work as a mechanic for the State Roads Commission, playing some with the former Blue Grass Boy Wilbur Wesbrooks. The King records sold, and the partners kept recording, in Charlotte in January 1953 with Red Rector on mandolin and in Cincinnati in 1954.

Over Easter weekend 1955 Smiley, Reno, the bassist John Palmer and the fiddler Mack Magaha played on a stage together for the first time, in Richmond, and the Old Dominion Barn Dance hired them as a regular act. Carlton Haney became their manager that December. On 31 December 1956 they began Top O’ the Morning, the first early-morning country music television show in Roanoke, on WDBJ-TV; it ran every weekday until 1968, and Smiley made more than 3,000 weekday broadcasts over those years. In the band’s comedy routines he appeared as Pansy, in a dress and wig. In 1957 he recorded in Nashville for Dot, with Mac Wiseman producing and Hank Garland on lead guitar, and in March 1962 he played guitar for Rose Maddox on her Capitol album Rose Maddox Sings Bluegrass, alongside Reno, Bill Monroe, Palmer and Magaha.

Smiley’s rhythm guitar was plain and tasteful. His runs and fills were not complicated, but because many of his songs were pitched out of a D position, in a lower range than his contemporaries sang, his backup phrases came out differently from the Lester Flatt G-run family of licks. His smooth, low singing drew on the mainstream country music of the day, and country songs were a staple of his repertoire. Songs he wrote, many of them with Reno, include “Drifting with the Tide,” “I’m Gone, Long Gone,” “Maybe You Will Change Your Mind,” “There’s Another Baby Waiting for Me Down the Line,” “Cruel Love,” “If It Takes Me a Lifetime,” “Brighter Mansion Over There” and “Tally Ho.”

The partnership ended amicably in 1964, shortly after Magaha left for Porter Wagoner’s band. Reno took the Tennessee Cut-Ups name and his son Ronnie; Smiley kept Palmer, the bus and the Roanoke television show. In February 1965, just after the duo’s first and only college concert, at Temple University, Smiley gave up regular touring. With his new Bluegrass Cut-Ups he stayed on the show, worked the WWVA Jamboree in Wheeling and made five albums for Rimrock and Rural Rhythm. He sang lead on the band’s Rural Rhythm LPs, played guitar behind Tater Tate’s fiddle albums and sang tenor to Jim Eanes’s lead on Eanes’s 1968 Rural Rhythm album.

When Top O’ the Morning was canceled in 1968, Smiley retired and the band went on as the Shenandoah Cut-Ups. He made one more try at a country career that year, recording ten sides for the Major label with electric country backing; “Best Female Actress of the Year” got some airplay, and Major also issued “Look What I Turned to Today” backed with “False Impressions.”

In 1969 he came out of semi-retirement to tour with Reno and his partner Bill Harrell. In May 1971, at Glen Burnie, Maryland, the three of them, with Buck Ryan on fiddle and Jerry McCoury on bass, recorded the Rome album Together Again; the same band recorded Letter Edged in Black in Baltimore and was taped live that July at the Lone Star Festival in McKinney, Texas, and Smiley also played rhythm guitar on Ryan’s Rural Rhythm fiddle album, made in Ohio. He fell seriously ill late in 1971 and died on 2 January 1972. He is buried in the DeHart Cemetery in the Jackson Line community of Bryson City, North Carolina. In 1992 he and Reno were inducted into the Bluegrass Music Hall of Fame.