Billy Redden is synonymous with a singular type
of movie role: the banjo boy. He got his start in
the
1972 film “Deliverance,” which followed four
urbanites on a canoe trip through rural Georgia.
After a bit of exposition, the film really begins at
a backwoods gas station, where Redden, as Lonny,
sits with a banjo on a porch swing, arrestingly
still, his pale, flat eyes and stony face those of a
fledgling buzzard. (On a casting call at the local
Clayton Elementary School, the filmmakers had chosen
Redden for his insular look.) Ned Beatty’s
character, Bobby, glances at Lonny and murmurs,
“Talk about genetic deficiencies—isn’t that
pitiful?” But when Drew, played by Ronny Cox, strums
a chord on his guitar, Lonny answers it, and soon
the two are locked in a gleeful call-and-response,
the bluegrass hit “Dueling Banjos.” “Goddamn, you
play a mean banjo!” Drew shouts, going to shake
Lonny’s hand—whereupon the boy turns away. Redden’s
scene-stealing inscrutability foreshadows the events
to come, including Drew’s death and, notoriously,
Bobby’s being forced to squeal like a pig.
As it turned out, though, there wasn’t much demand
in
Hollywood for banjo boys. Several months ago,
when the director Tim Burton was on location in
Montgomery, Alabama, shooting “Big Fish,” he kept
asking where the boy from “Deliverance” was now,
because he had a banjo-picking role in mind for him.
No one knew. “The state film commissioners down
there tried to placate me, or laugh it off,” Burton
says. “But I was serious; the banjo boy was such an
iconic figure to me. Whatever that visceral thing is
in film, when you can’t explain why a scene grabs
you—well, that scene had it.” Eventually, two “Big
Fish” crew members drove through northeast Georgia
one Sunday, asking, “Anyone know where the banjo boy
lives?”
They finally found him in Dillard. Redden, who is
now forty-seven, works ten-hour days as a cook and
dishwasher at the nearby Cookie Jar Café, and he was
hesitant at first about taking time off to appear in
another film. For one thing, he had always regretted
being the poster boy for “Deliverance” ’s Gothic
view of rural America. For another, he hadn’t
enjoyed working with the film’s star,
Burt Reynolds.
“Burt didn’t want to say nothing to nobody,” Redden
says now. “He wasn’t polite. And he made us look
real bad—he said on television that all people in
Rabun County do is watch cars go by and spit.”
What’s more, Redden’s relationship to banjos
remained complicated. For starters, he didn’t know
how to play. John Boorman, the director of
“Deliverance,” had presented him with the instrument
he used in the scene, declaring, “You pick a mean
banjo!” Redden had always treasured the remark,
particularly because—after he proved unable to
convincingly fake the left-hand fretwork—Boorman had
had to deploy another boy to hide behind the swing
and slip his hand through Redden’s sleeve to finger
the changes. But Redden’s mother, a custodial
worker, had promptly sold the banjo. “I told her,
‘I’m not mad,’ ” Redden says. “My daddy had died
when I was a baby, and she needed the money so bad
for bills. It did mean something to me, though, that
banjo.”
The envoys from “Big Fish” convinced Redden that
their film—a picaresque fable about a traveling
salesman—would be respectful of him and of
small-town life. Redden was to be a part of the
folksy welcoming committee in the Utopian town of
Spectre, where the sun always shines. The sun never
shone this spring in Montgomery, however, and Redden
sat around the set for weeks awaiting his
opportunity. When the sky finally cleared, Tim
Burton says, “I didn’t give Billy any direction: I
told him to be who he was—sweet and a little eerie,
maybe—which he was doing all the time anyway. If
you’re watching the film and you don’t recognize the
solitary, enigmatic figure on the porch, that’s
fine. But if you do—well, it just makes me so happy
to see him, and I think other people will feel the
same way.”
In the finished film, Redden is onscreen for only a few seconds. We hear a
hint of “Dueling Banjos,” and he is smiling, or
almost smiling, and seems to be making amends for
the moment, long ago now, when his character spurned
an emissary from the larger world.
“Tim Burton said, ‘Just sit there and hold that
banjo, that’s it,’ ” Redden says. “He was a real
nice guy, a lot nicer than Burt Reynolds.”
This Banjo Boy Biography Page is Copyright © 2004 - 2006 Chuck Ayoub