Arthur “Guitar Boogie” Smith with Don Reno

Arthur Smith was born in Clinton, South Carolina in 1921 and came out of the textile-mill South by way of radio, scoring a genuine phenomenon with his 1945 instrumental “Guitar Boogie” — a record credited with selling in the millions and the source of the nickname he carried for life. He was a broadcaster and studio owner as much as a picker: The Arthur Smith Show was the first nationally syndicated country music programme on television, and in 1957 he opened the first commercial recording studio in the Southeast, in Charlotte Wikipedia ↗. In 1954 he wrote a banjo instrumental he called “Feudin’ Banjos”, and in 1955 he cut it for MGM with Don Reno, the Spartanburg-born bluegrass innovator whose single-string picking style made him one of the instrument’s pivotal figures. Smith played the four-string part; Reno answered on five-string. Smith died in Charlotte in 2014, aged 93.