The banjo duel at the gas station in the 1972 film Deliverance looks flawlessly authentic, but the boy on the porch, actor Billy Redden, could not play a note. A local musician named Mike Addis crouched behind him with an arm threaded through a modified shirt sleeve to work the fretboard, while the audio came from studio musicians Eric Weissberg and Steve Mandell. This episode unpacks that piece of practical trickery and then follows the song's strange history back to its true origin.

Arthur 'Guitar Boogie' Smith wrote the tune as Feudin' Banjos in 1954 and recorded it in 1955 with Don Reno, pitting a four-string plectrum banjo against a five-string bluegrass banjo in a joyful musical argument. The hosts trace its 1963 appearance on The Andy Griffith Show with the Dillards, the uncredited use in Deliverance that led to Smith's successful co ...