Hobart Smith - Biography
In a 2005 National Public Radio profile of the late folk musician Hobart Smith, Stephen Ward – the producer and annotator of a then-current collection of the Virginia singer and multi-instrumentalist’s work – called Smith “something of a revered secret.”
The package for that ’05 album, In Sacred Trust: The 1963 Fleming Brown Tapes, carried a to-the-point tribute from the notoriously difficult-to-please bluegrass titan Bill Monroe, who shared the Newport Folk Festival stage with Smith: “Hobart Smith was a first-class musician and showman, all right. Played by himself. Didn’t carry a band. Played all the string instruments, too, and was a mighty fine buck-dancer. He was a good guitar bluesman, a great old-time fiddler, and I’d have to say, he was the best old-time banjo picker I ever heard.”
Smith was already in his early 60s by the time he became widely known during the folk music revival of the late ‘50s and early ‘60s. He never appeared on a commercial recording until folklorist Alan Lomax – who first recorded him in the field for the Library of Congress in the 1940s – featured him on a series of releases issued by Atlantic Records in 1960. He recorded just one album in his own name. For a few short years, his remarkable facility on banjo, fiddle, guitar, and piano made a singular performer on the folk circuit; he was considered a peer of such legends as Clarence Ashley (with whom he had performed decades earlier), Dock Boggs, and Roscoe Holcomb.
He was born May 10, 1897, in the farming community of Saltville in Smyth County, Virginia. The eldest son among eight children, he took up the banjo, the instrument his mother and father both played, at the age of seven, and fiddle and guitar in his teens. He also played piano and pump organ. He was exposed to a wide variety of traditional folk material, but he was also steeped in the blues; Smith would later recall that the early blues singer-guitarist Blind Lemon Jefferson passed through Saltville and performed in a nearby railroad work camp. His guitar work in particular reflects a strong blues influence.
Smith was schooled in the “double-note” banjo style by a local player named John Greer, who contributed “Coo Coo Bird” and the instrumental “Banging Breakdown” (so named because of its percussive interpolations, rapped out on the face of the instrument) to his pupil’s repertoire. Smith, who farmed for a living, played square dances in his hometown twice a week. At some point during the ‘20s or ‘30s, he played with singer and banjo player Clarence “Tom” Ashley, who went on to record for Columbia and Vocalion; both men would later become beneficiaries of the urban folk boom.
Beginning with appearances on minstrel and medicine shows, Smith performed regionally, sometimes with his sister, the noted ballad singer Texas Gladden. In 1933, First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt saw Smith and Gladden at Virginia’s White Top Folk Festival and later invited them to play at the White House. That performance probably led to Alan Lomax’s 1942 recording session with Smith, who cut 40 sides for the Library of Congress. (Part of the session was excerpted on the now out-of-print 2001 Rounder CD Blue Ridge Legacy, which also included live recordings and some of Lomax’s late-‘50s sessions with Smith.) An introduction from Lomax to folk record producer and label operator Moses Asch led to the release of four 1946 recordings by Smith and Gladden on Asch’s Disc label (later compiled on Blue Ridge Legacy).
Smith’s picking prowess was later spotlighted on the Tradition Records anthology Instrumental Music of the Southern Appalchians (1956). In 1959, under the auspices of Atlantic, Lomax revisited many of the artists he had previously recorded for the Library of Congress and cut fresh stereo sessions with them; Smith, who was 63 at the time, appeared on a couple of volumes of the resultant multi-volume collection, the Atlantic Southern Folk Heritage Series. (The 1960 LPs were reissued on CD in 1993 in the boxed set Sounds of the South.)
As the ‘60s dawned and traditional folk reached the zenith of its popularity, Smith was embraced by a new audience. His 1963 appearance at one of Ralph Rinzler, John Cohen, and Israel Young’s historic Friends of Old Time Music concerts in New York is documented on the Smithsonian Folkways boxed set Friends of Old Time Music (2006). Later that year, Norm Pelligrini, program director at Chicago’s WFMT and host of the station’s respected folk program “The Midnight Special,” recorded Smith’s lone commercial solo effort, Hobart Smith of Saltville, Virginia (1964), which was released by the small Connecticut label Folk-Legacy. An informal session cut with Fleming Brown of Chicago’s Old Town School of Folk Music at around the same time was belatedly issued by Smithsonian Folkways as In Sacred Trust (2005).
Sadly, recognition came to Smith only late in his life. After a long period of ill health, he died on Jan. 11, 1965, from a heart embolism.