They were one of the most acclaimed duos in country and bluegrass music in the s and early s. Little is known about his early life, but his musical inspiration is said to have surfaced at the age of seven when seeing two hobos playing in Bushnell, North Carolina.
In , he joined the Army. At this time, he was also performing in East Tennessee and western North Carolina. He was known as a showman, vocalist, multi-instrumentalist, songwriter, and composer, [ 2 ] although his immediate family was not musical. He was exposed to fiddlers Art Wooten and Tommy Magness through the wife of his older brother Harley, in which she had brothers that had a band.
He first picked up the banjo at the age of five and by age eight, he owned a guitar. Reno's musical approach was different than others in bluegrass at the time in that his was more innovative rather than traditional, injecting blues and jazz into his playing.
As he wavered between guitar and banjo, he was a star on both. After the war, he operated a grocery store in South Carolina and played jazz and country music at night. In , he heard that Bill Monroe needed a banjo player after Earl Scruggs had left, so he drove to Taylorsville, North Carolina, where he got onstage without invitation and played banjo with Bill Monroe and the Blue Grass Boys.
He stayed with them until , when Reno left the Blue Grass Boys because of an occurrence of malaria and formed the first edition of the Tennessee Cut-Ups in South Carolina with his nephew, Verlon Reno. Red Smiley was already an active member of the group when Don Reno was called to join them. Smiley also joined the group in , playing at WDBJ radio. The first records that Red and Don recorded together were with Tommy Magness in for Federal Records , a subsidiary of King Records , recording four Reno-penned sacred songs, where they found that their playing worked well together.
