Dale Reno

He was born on 6 February 1961 in Roanoke. Instruments caught his interest at ten, when he built himself a drum kit out of old paint cans, and at eleven his father began teaching him the guitar. A year later, at a Bill Monroe festival, he saw Marty Stuart playing mandolin with Lester Flatt and took up the instrument, and at about the same time he went on the road with the Tennessee Cut-Ups, the band led by his father and Bill Harrell. Growing up in it, he learned from mandolin players such as Red Rector, Frank Wakefield, Jimmy Gaudreau, John Duffey and Sam Bush.

He plays mandolin on the band’s King Bluegrass album Spice of Life (1975), recorded at Lemco Studios in Lexington, Kentucky, with Harrell on guitar and lead vocals, Don Reno on banjo and tenor, Buck Ryan on fiddle and Ed Ferris on bass, and on The Don Reno Story (CMH, 1976), cut at Arthur Smith’s studio in Charlotte, North Carolina, with Arthur Smith and Clay Smith added on guitar; the same Charlotte sessions supplied Dear Old Dixie (1976). After Harrell left in 1977 he stayed with his father, and in November 1983 he was on mandolin when Don Reno recorded the instrumental album Family & Friends at Harbor Sound in Sausalito, California, with Ronnie on guitar, Don Wayne on bass, Byron Berline on fiddle and Tony Rice on guitar. In 1984, the year his father died, the family recorded the instrumentals of The Final Chapter at Reflections Studio in Nashville; Step One issued it in 1986.

With Ronnie and Don Wayne he then worked as the Reno Brothers, playing mandolin and singing in the trio’s three-part harmonies on records for Step One, Webco and Pinecastle from the late 1980s to the late 1990s. He sang baritone on Drawing From the Well (Webco, 1996), the brothers’ return to the Reno & Smiley songbook, and took a lead vocal on “Somewhere Tonight” on Three Part Harmony (Pinecastle, 1998). In 1999 the three of them overdubbed rhythm guitar, mandolin and bass onto Don Reno’s 1972 solo guitar recordings for King’s Golden Guitar of Don Reno. In those years he also played with Larry Cordle’s Lonesome Standard Time, Larry Sparks and the Lonesome Ramblers, the actor and singer Tom Wopat, and Grass to the Bone.

In 2000 he joined Hayseed Dixie, a band that began as a bluegrass tribute to AC/DC and built its strongest following in Europe, playing mandolin and guitar alongside its founder, John Wheeler, and his brother Don Wayne on banjo. He is on the band’s first albums for Dualtone, A Hillbilly Tribute to AC/DC (2001), A Hillbilly Tribute to Mountain Love (2002) and Kiss My Grass (2003), credited under the stage name Enus Younger, and on its Cooking Vinyl albums Let There Be Rockgrass (2004) and Weapons of Grass Destruction (2007), the latter as “Deacon Dale Reno.”

With Don Wayne and Mitch Harrell he formed a twenty-first-century Reno and Harrell, billed as Sons of the Legends, and their first album, Reno Bound, came out in 2013. In 2015 he was working at Blackwater Studio near Smith Mountain Lake, Virginia, and played mandolin in Clay Jones & Pure Drive on the EP Heritage Not Hate.