Chris Smither

A shearsman of sorts. The day was green.
They said, "You have a blue guitar,
You do not play things as they are."
The man replied,"Things as they are
Are changed upon the blue guitar."
And they said then, "But play, you must,
A tune beyond us, yet ourselves,
A tune upon the blue guitar
Of things exactly as they are."

With only a nudge from an uncle, Chris Smither started playing music as a kid growing up in Crescent City in the late 1950s. "Uncle Howard gave me a ukulele. He showed me that if you knew two chords, you could play a lot of the songs you heard on the radio. And if you knew three chords, you could pretty much rule the world."

With his rhythm and percussive-style guitar playing, Chris is etching a deep impression in the world of American roots music, playing mostly on the "sweet side of the blues" (Utne Reader). Carefully crafting his songs and style, he's a "one man band to the bone," just like he says in his song "Help Me Now" on his latest recording, Small Revelations.

After spending his teenage years woodshedding to perfect his craft, then winning a battle of the bands, Chris went in search of a place where he could develop a career playing his guitar. "There's a certain amount of hipness, rightly or wrongly, associated with New Orleans," he comments, "but at that time I was a big fish in the little pond of New Orleans' folk music."

In the mid-'60s, Chris headed to Boston, his home ever since, where acoustic music was flourishing in streets, coffeehouses and homes, and it was there that Chris met Bonnie Raitt (who refers to Chris as "my Eric Clapton") when they lived in the same neighborhood, and they've been close friends ever since.

Soon he was playing regular gigs on the northeast music circuit. After recording two successful albums in the early '70s, and a third that fell through the cracks in a corporate restructuring, Chris underwent a bit of a lapse until 1985 when he returned to the studio to produce It Ain't Easy. And by the early '90s Chris was back at it, writing and recording his music and touring the U.S., Canada and Europe.

His 1991 live album, Another Way to Find You, was followed by Happier Blue, which received the National Association of Independent Record Distributors award as the best folk recording of 1993, and was the first of his albums to hit the Triple-A radio charts. His 1995 release Up on the Lowdown rode the crest of the newly formed Americana wave, an alternative country radio format in the South that plays a more sincere adult music to an audience often forgotten in the big business world of pop music.

Though the seed was planted in his youth, it wasn't until 1989 that Chris Smither became "the man with the blue guitar." It wasn't until his guitar-an old Epiphone, which he'd been playing for 25 years-was close to "toothpicks" that he ventured to look for another. What he found was a blue-bright blue-Alvarez guitar. "I was crazy about Wallace Stevens' poem called "The Man with the Blue Guitar." That guitar "spoke to me immediately because it was blue."

  -- LC