Red Smiley found his calling at age seven in 1932, watching two transient guitarists on a road in Bushnell, North Carolina. Don Reno found his in 1948 by walking uninvited onto Bill Monroe’s stage in Taylorsville after Earl Scruggs left, and playing well enough to be hired on the spot. This episode follows both men through World War II, Reno’s single-string, jazz-inflected banjo style, the malaria that pulled him off the road with Monroe in 1949, and the Roanoke radio band, Tommy Magness’s Tennessee Buddies, where they finally met.

After 1951 recordings for Federal Records and a 1952 King Records offer from Syd Nathan that yielded “I’m Using My Bible for a Road Map,” both men went back to day jobs, Red as a mechanic and Don as a sideman for Arthur “Guitar Boogie” Smith. A 1955 Easter show in Richmond and a set on the Old Dominion Barn Dance relaunched them as Reno and Smiley and the Tennessee Cut-Ups with John Palmer and Mack Magaha. The hosts detail the Roanoke schedule of daily live TV on Top of the Morning, a weekly evening show, Saturday night radio, and a new single every six weeks, the 1964 split, Red’s Bluegrass Cut-Ups, the 1969 to 1972 reunion with Benny Martin, their deaths at 47 and 57, and the 1992 International Bluegrass Music Hall of Honor induction.

• How Don Reno’s single-string style treated the five-string banjo like a jazz guitar
• What Armed Forces Radio in Burma did to a rural musician’s vocabulary
• Why a mosquito bite rerouted the history of bluegrass
• Why two men with a record deal went back to fixing engines and bagging groceries
• What daily live television demanded, and what it cost