New Orleans-raised guitarist and singer/songwriter Chris Smither was part of the folk revival the 1950s and 1960s, which happened right as rock ’n’ roll surged into popular consciousness. As a youth steeped in music, he was immediately enamored with a certain style of country and blues guitar playing found not just in the South, but across the country.
The fingerstyle method of guitar playing has a vast number of practitioners, but Smither was immediately taken by the work of two artists, Lightning Hopkins and Mississippi John Hurt. He actually saw Hurt in concert several times, and even talked to the seasoned bluesman a bit as a nervous 20-year-old aspiring guitarist.
“I was basically tongue tied, I didn’t know what to say, but it was sufficient for me just to sit in the vicinity of one of my heroes and just watch and listen,” Smither said. “He drank a lot and so did I, so that was a commonality.”
Smither will perform as part of Tales from the Tavern at the Maverick Saloon on April 6, sharing his stories in between songs spanning 50 years of songwriting in fingerstyle blues and rock guitar.
The reason the style of Hurt and Hopkins appealed to Smither was twofold. He never took lessons but learned by watching and listening, and preferred to play alone. The style allows a guitarist to accompany themselves with bass, rhythm, and lead.
“It’s the fact that you get to orchestrate an entire piece on one instrument,” he said. “I never really wanted to be in a band. Being self-taught I was always a little self-conscious about playing with people because I don’t know the lingo, I don’t know how to talk about music, and I don’t read music.”
Whether he was formally educated or not, it didn’t matter in the long run for Smither. He became a known entity within the folk revival of the time, especially among fans of fingerstyle guitar.
He began collaborating more with other artists like Bonnie Raitt in the 1970s, who went on to cover a number of Smither’s songs on her albums. He continued to produce through the decades, and a retrospective double album of his songs was released in 2014 titled Still on the Levee. The album includes songs from across his career, including some of his earliest work, and even opens with his very first song.
“Going back to those early songs was actually quite an adventure; a couple of them I had to learn almost from whole cloth, it had been so long since I had played them,” he said. “I was pleased to discover that I had not painted myself into any corner on those early songs. They may not have been what I would have written today, but there really wasn’t anything I would want to take back either.”
The album includes lots of collaboration with a band setup, but Smither’s guitar work is always up front, sometimes unaccompanied. His seasoned voice is smoky and gravely in a pleasing way, and his precise guitar playing moves with infectious momentum.
Even though he hails from New Orleans, fingerstyle guitar such as his own is not a sound native to the famous epicenter of musical styles. But unquestionably, being raised in a city like that certainly shaped Smither as a musician, even after he left the port town, embarking on his journey of musical development and discovery.
“To me, the kind of music I grew up with in New Orleans was just music, and I didn’t see anything special about it, and it wasn’t until I left that I saw something was going on there,” he said. “The influence of New Orleans in my music is more easily perceived by other people than it is by me. For me, it’s just the way I think about things, it’s like asking a fish what he thinks about water.”
Arts Editor Joe Payne still needs to make his pilgrimage to New Orleans. Contact him at jpayne@santamariasun.com.
This article appears in Mar 24-31, 2016.