Approaching His 80th Birthday, Legendary Roots Singer-Songwriter Chris Smither Reflects on Lessons from the Stage, Studio, and Woodshed

Chris Smither has been a force on the American folk and blues scene for over half a century, touring nationally and internationally at a steady pace on the arc of up-and-comer to journeyman to veteran to living legend. His driving rhythmic thumb and tapping feet have anchored audiences in the groove, while his harmonized guitar lines and craggy baritone have articulated a world-weary yet hopeful gravitas. 

Smither was raised in New Orleans, where his father was a professor at Tulane University. He attended middle school in Paris and college in Mexico City, and moved to Boston in the ’60s during the heyday of the folk revival. One of his friends from the Boston folk scene was Bonnie Raitt, whose cover of Smither’s “Love You Like a Man” (gender adapted to “Love Me Like a Man”) became a hit and a longtime staple of her live shows. The loping rhythm of Smither’s guitar part on that song, exactly (and thunderously) mirrored in the percussive lyric “You better believe me when I tell you/ I can love you like a, love you like a man,” established his signature strengths as a songwriter from the get-go, launching him on a sometimes rocky but ultimately fruitful path.

Almost six decades later, his 20th release, All About the Bones, is helmed by long-time producer David “Goody” Goodrich, and the release tour will carry Smither through his 80th birthday this November. Smither has been my mentor, road companion, and friend for 30 years. When Acoustic Guitar invited me to interview Smither, a neighbor in western Massachusetts, I was delighted to sit down in his study—he is the kind of guy who doesn’t have an office; he has a study—to talk about how his performance and writing have evolved over the years.

You’ve said, “My guitar playing is one-third Mississippi John Hurt, one-third Lightnin’ Hopkins, and one-third me.” How did you make that happen? Did you listen to the records, or did you study with a particular mentor?

No, I didn’t study with anybody. I really started out with trying to copy both of them.

From LPs?

Oh yeah, you know, it was an endless process of picking the needle up and putting it back two grooves and try to listen to that. And the two of them, they’re very different kind of approaches. Hopkins has that dead thumb blues. He just sort of pedals on an E or an A, depending on what part of the progression he’s in, and does little lead lines against it, whereas Hurt has a syncopated, alternating thumb. But what flipped me out about [Hurt] was that he was playing the melody and he was singing it! [Sings] “All you ladies gather round…” 

When you combine Hopkins—think of that thumb—and play melody lines but then harmonize the melody line: that’s the part that was me. I realized that it didn’t have to be single notes. It puts a whole other level into play.

One tune of yours that immediately leaps to mind is “Leave the Light On.” The entire thing is harmonized.

It is harmonized below the [melody] line. 

There’s the hard edge of the blues, and then the bright, soft edge of the blues, and John Hurt was very much on the soft edge of it all.

John Hurt didn’t even think of himself as a blues player. In fact, most of those guys didn’t think of themselves as blues players. If you asked him about it, he’d say, “I’m a songwriter.” It was the people who ran record companies that turned him into a blues player. They’d said, “Oh, you’re the blues.” “Okay. I’ll be a blues singer.”

Who were your strongest influences in terms of songwriting?

The two guys that that sort of woke me up were Randy Newman and Paul Simon, for two entirely different reasons. Paul Simon, because he, to my ear, understands the intrinsic value of the sound of words. Just the way they fit in your mouth. When you’re saying it, you don’t care what it means. And Randy is just the consummate… I always compare him to Matthew Brady, the Civil War photographer. He just paints the picture. You can’t take your eyes off of it. And it’s so clear! The whole thing just projects. [Listening to Newman’s] “So Long Dad”—you just go, “Oh, my God. It’s real. He didn’t leave a single thing out!”

What was the live concert that made you think, this is my calling?

When I was 18 or 19 at Tulane University, I went to a Julian Bream concert. He was a wonderful guitar player, but it was the performance. I mean, he just sat there! And the way he communicated was just captivating. It wasn’t what he was playing, but the way he just talked about it. He was so comfortable, you hardly noticed when he stopped talking and started playing. It was all seamless, just so transporting. 

Peter Mulvey and Chris Smither. Photo: Carol YoungDo you remember a single piece of music from that show? 

I don’t. I just remember his presence and how much I liked him. And that was a thing that took a long time for me to incorporate. I wasn’t even conscious of what it was that I liked, and it took me an awfully long time to understand performance. Because when I first started, it was something I didn’t want anything to do with. I was one of these people who would say, “I’m gonna sit up on stage, and I’m gonna play, and if you can’t get it just from what I’m doing…”

You didn’t talk much in your shows.

I just played. I think there was a degree of arrogance, but I didn’t understand how much of it was rooted in fear. I mean, there’s always the uncertainty, the abject fear.

Awkward self-consciousness. My guess is you just weren’t getting the result you wanted—you wanted to communicate.

It takes a long, long time. I shouldn’t say that categorically, because there are people who are natural-born performers of one sort or another. 

There’s all kinds of performance. People will sit up there and hit you over the head with everything they got, right? I aimed for a certain amount of comfort. I realized early that one of the things that makes performer look uncomfortable is looking at their left hand when they play. And I thought to myself, Doc Watson doesn’t have to watch what he’s doing. Why do I have to? I’d consciously play without ever looking down. For the most part, if you can, stay focused on your audience. It generates a comfort level within the audience that then bounces back to you, so that you feel more comfortable.

At first you’re worrying about whether the audience likes you, but you learn to focus on them.

Yes, that’s totally true. And not only do you focus on them in that sense, but also—and this took me a long, long time to learn—this is not an adversarial situation. They want you to be good! And they will hold you up for a certain amount of time until you are. All you have to do is fulfill that expectation. It’s not “Show me” at all. It’s “You can do this! Come on! Yeah!”

As for your guitar playing, between your thumb and tapping your feet, that’s the rhythm section. That’s the sound you built. I’m presuming you wanted that engine running underneath, because the content of your songs up top, the payload, is highly intellectual. It has to do with consciousness, ethics and goodness, absent some superstitious belief. You didn’t sit down and say, “Alright, this is heavy stuff. I better anchor it with some rock and roll.” 

No, it wasn’t that. It was simply that what I really wanted to do was just rock and roll. But I didn’t want a band, because I didn’t want anybody to find out how little I knew! And that’s what Lightnin’ Hopkins did for me. I was living in Mexico City at the time, and I was already playing a lot of guitar and singing all these Joan Baez and Bob Dylan songs and such. My roommate played me Lightnin’ Hopkins, and I loved it, because it was one man rock and roll. It was perfect for me. 

When I got up to the Northeast, I realized that I was going to have to write more songs, because nobody was going to get anywhere just doing covers. So what am I going to talk about? I’m not going to talk about getting behind the mule and plowing, right? I’m not going to talk about juke joints and roadhouses. I’m the son of a university professor; what do I talk about?

Let’s talk a bit about recording. David “Goody” Goodrich has produced all your records for over ten years now.  Most producers embellish, but over time, I think he’s said, “Well, why don’t we break open the thing you’re doing?”

My playing has really expanded. Probably as long as 20 years ago, he said, “Play me a major scale.” So I did. “Now play me a minor scale.” And I managed to get through it, but I couldn’t rip it off. And he said, “Get to the point where you can do a minor scale as fast as you can do a major scale. It’ll make all the difference.” He was right. It changed me and opened up all kinds of things. 

[As a producer] he says, “I want to put you at the center of things. Everything else is peripheral.” But what he did was change the setting. He contributed to changing me in such a way that I was more open to the peripherals. So it’s gotten to the point now where he says, “You want to try something?” and I don’t even question. I say, “Of course, I’ll try it.” I might not like it, but I’m not going to say no!

The core of your new record, All About the Bones, is you and Goodrich, with Zak Trojano on drums. BettySoo sings and plays accordion, and Chris Cheek plays saxophone.

BettySoo sings, and it’s the most intimate thing in the world. There’s a quality to her voice and to the harmonies that just gives me the shivers. And her accordion touches, there are places where you don’t know whether it’s an accordion or an organ. 

Chris Cheek is amazing. I knew nothing about him, except that Goody came up and said, “We’ve got a world-class saxophone player, one of the two or three best.” I had no idea what was going to happen.

Chris Smither. Photo: Hugh O’ConnorYou’ve been a parent now for 20 years. I’m sure you’ve noticed that kids are listening to what you say—and also watching what you do. You have a lot to say in your songs, but I think that the audience keeps coming back because they can also sense that you are walking the walk.

Yes, I understand. It goes back to what we were saying a few minutes ago. There’s all kinds of performance and all kinds of ways to approach it which are effective in their own way. Rock and roll is a kind of a joyful bombast. But my approach to performance—and again it took me so long to come to it—I realized that I don’t want to sing at people. I try to individualize the audience, because what I want them to feel is that I’m confiding in them. I’m not lecturing. I want them to have a sense of almost as though someone were coming up to you and saying, “Listen: I wouldn’t say this to just anybody. I got something to tell you.” That’s how I want it to feel—that I’m talking right to you.

You’ve told me about this guy who comes up to you every couple years at one of your shows, and says…

“You continue to tell me the story of my life.”

In singing what you know, you tell someone about themselves.

That would be the hope. 

Your publishing company is called Homunculus Music. The homunculus is a medieval idea. What is it again, exactly?

In Latin, homunculus literally means “little man.” It appears in lots of different guises. If you think of the mind within the mind, there’s a Cartesian concept of the man in your mind that’s pulling all the little levers. He’s the homunculus. I just liked it. One of my earliest songs was called “Homunculus.” It starts, “There’s a man that lives inside my mind/With eyes that see at the end of time.”

There’s an old saying: the way you do anything is the way you do everything. I’m beginning to see that with you: the way you play guitar is the way you talk about philosophy, is the way you communicate with an audience. Are you experiencing that from the inside? Is it all beginning to rhyme that way? 

I’m more comfortable. We spend our whole lives trying to build a viable construct, a framework within which we can comprehend the world. And at some point during everyone’s life, they discover that, “Oh, crap, I got it wrong. I’ve got to tear most of this down and start all over again.” Or at least halfway down and start all over again. And then finally, if you’re lucky, you get to a point where, oh my God, “I think this is gonna hold together until the end!” 

And that’s where I’ve gotten. I’ve gotten to that point where I say, “I think I have a model that I can live with that won’t betray me.” And it has a lot to do with getting rid of pretense and pride. A little humility, and the realization that you’ve got to leave space for the stuff you don’t know.

And then you take that room to room to room to room, with a guitar. People pick up on it.

And that’s the job.

What He Plays Chris Smither plays custom Collings 0002H 12-fret cutaways, built with Sitka spruce and East Indian rosewood, both at home and on the road. He uses bronze Elixir strings, original coating, light gauge but substituting a .013 for the high E, and plays with a Golden Gate thumbpick and two Jim Dunlop brass fingerpicks.

For amplification, he uses Fishman undersaddle pickups and an L.R. Baggs Para Acoustic DI. Under his feet is a piece of particle board with an attached PZM condenser mic.

“After years of consideration I’ve come to the conclusion that, within limits, gear is more important as a topic of conversation than as a way of making music,” Smither notes. “It’s just not that important.” —PM