  We study the properties of Cabibbo-Kobayashi-Maskawa (CKM) favored
semileptonic decays of mesons and baryons containing a heavy quark at the point
of no recoil. We first use a diagrammatic analysis to rederive the result
observed by earlier authors that at this kinematic point the $B$ meson decays
via $b\to c$ transitions can only produce a $D$ or $D^*$ meson. The result is
generalized to include photon emissions which violate heavy quark flavor
symmetry. We show that photons emitted by the heavy quarks and the charged
lepton are the only light particles that can decorate the decays $\bar{B}\to
D(D^*) + \ell\nu$ at zero recoil, and the similar processes of heavy baryons.
Implications for the determinations of the CKM parameter $V_{cb}$ are
discussed. Also studied in this paper is the connection between our
diagrammatic analysis of suppression of particle emission and the formal
observation based on weak currents at zero recoil being generators of heavy
quark symmetry. We show that the two approaches can be unified by considering
the Isgur-Wise function in the presence of an external source.
