Roy Exum: The Banjo Boy’s Secret

  • Saturday, October 3, 2015
  • Roy Exum
Roy Exum
Roy Exum

There is a wonderful email now making the rounds that shows Billy Redden standing in front of the Walmart store where he now works in Clayton, Ga. There is nothing remarkable about the picture because Billy’s looks have changed considerably in the last 40-odd years. But back in the early 1970s, his face was memorized by millions upon millions of people and he was universally known as “The Banjo Boy.”

The great writer James Dickey wrote a book entitled “Deliverance” in 1970 and after it became a huge best-seller, a movie by the same name was produced starring Jon Voight, Burt Reynolds, Ned Beatty and Ronny Cox.

The movie is about four guys from Atlanta who decided to go into the North Georgia Mountains to canoe a fictional river but the tale soon got gritty when the “city slickers” got crossways with the mountain hillbilly types.

There was even a notorious male-rape scene, which scalded the big screens back in the day, with a nauseating trademark of a line, “I bet you can squeal like a pig.” The movie was good – not great – but what sent it over the top was a five-minute music scene that is arguably one of the best ever recorded. Actor Ronnie Cox is seen tuning his guitar when a “simple-minded” 15-year-old boy sitting in a porch swing mimics every note Cox plays with a five-string banjo.

The resulting song, called “Dueling Banjos,” immediately sold over 10 million records when the movie came out. It climbed high in the charts and – to this very day – can be heard on various radio stations around the country because it is a timeless classic. Billy Redden became the rage, with offers from Hollywood and music contracts and an adoring public. There was just one problem – Billy Redden couldn’t play a lick on a banjo.

He was picked for his looks in a cast call and had no idea he would be cast as a banjo player. What director John Boorman first did was to lay down a track in a music studio but they couldn’t seem to synchronize the scene. So then he got a skilled local picker named Mike Addis to be “Billy’s hands.” That’s right, with Addis hiding behind Billy and some clever camera angles, you can’t see who is actually playing the banjo.

You can see Billy is wearing a huge shirt, that covered his arms and allowed Addis’ hands to function, but the picker could see the instrument. Add the poor 15-year-old was wearing such heavy make-up that people searching for ‘The Banjo Boy’ could never recognize him. Without the face-altering make-up and prosthetic teeth that some Hollywood type figured a simple-minded boy might look like Redden was a perfectly normal teenager.

Incidentally, Billy hit it off famously with Ronnie Cox, the guitar player, but, for some reason, despises actor Ned Beatty. The script called for Billy to harden his expression towards Cox at the end of the song but Billy couldn’t; he liked Cox that much. So the crafty Hollywood types got Beatty to step towards Billy, which is why Redden looks away.

When they first started shooting the music scene, Jon Voight described Redden’s character as “a boy who has a genetic imbalance – a product of his mother and his brother, I think. Actually (Billy) was quite amazing … a very talkative fellow.”

Sadly, neither Redden or Addis was ever paid but as “Deliverance” soared at the box office, gifted guitar guru Arthur Smith, who gave lessons to Johnny Cash and a bunch of other stars, heard the catchy tune. So he stepped forward to say he wrote the song “Feuding Banjos” in 1955. Some believe another Smith song, “Guitar Boogie” was the first rock ‘n roll song ever recorded, for that matter.

Many have wondered why the song is called “Dueling Banjos” when a guitar and a banjo are used. It seems that when Smith first wrote the song and performed it on the Andy Griffith Show, two banjos were used. There was no guitar. Smith played a four-string banjo while Don Reno, member of his band answered with five-string banjo, which sounds notably different. So why did Cox play a guitar? Like Billy Redden, he couldn’t play a banjo either.

It just so happened that Smith was a good friend of actor Andy Griffith and when the studio offered him $15,000 “just to make the problem go away,” Smith promptly lawyered up. At the opening of the trial, Smith played a tape of an Andy Griffith episode taken in the ‘60s and it included Smith playing “Feuding Banjos.” He won a huge settlement, rights and royalties were restored.

Another great note is that during the filming of a canoe scene, author James Dickey showed up in an inebriated state and got in a royal argument with director Boorman who had altered his script. A fist fight ensued and Dickey broke the producer’s nose and shattered four of his team. Believe it or not, they later made up and became good friends, which is why Boorman let Dickey appear in a cameo at the end of the movie as the sheriff.

That wasn’t the only broken bone. Burt Reynolds begged to have a scene reshot that showed a canoe with a dummy of Reynolds going down the river. Burt claimed it looked phony so Reynolds jumped in a canoe and darn near killed himself in the fast water. Afterwards, as he coughed up a lot of river water and learned he had broken his coccyx (tailbone), he asked about the retake. “Looked like a canoe with a dummy in it,” said the director.

So now you know the secret of ‘The Banjo Boy.’ If you are ever in Rabun County, Georgia, stop by the Walmart and speak to Billy Redden. He may even give you an autograph.

Click here to see the video.

royexum@aol.com

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