1978 The Odyssey of Arthur Smith Bluegrass Musician - 8-Page Vintage Article

Description

1978 The Odyssey of Arthur Smith Bluegrass Musician - 8-Page Vintage Article
Original, vintage magazine article
Page Size: Approx. 8" x 11" (21 cm x 28 cm) each page
Condition: Good
Mention the name “Arthur Smith” to
your average bluegrass fan today and
you have to qualify it by explaining which
Arthur Smith you’re talking about. Some
think of the fine banjo maker, Arthur E.
Smith; others of the the performer-
promoter, Arthur “Guitar Boogie” Smith.
But to anyone who grew up in the South in
the 1930’s or 1940’s, or to anyone who has
more than a nodding acquaintance with
fiddling and fiddling styles, the first
Arthur Smith that comes to mind is the
one they used to call Fiddlin’ Arthur
Smith, or the one the Hollywood press
agents called “The Original Arthur
Smith.” This Smith was a lean,
hawk-faced man who brought his fiddle
with him from Humphries County,
Tennessee in the 1920’s, parlayed his
music from the rural, one-room school-
house 25-cents-a-ticket “entertainment”
to the Hollywood sound stage and Las
Vegas casinos, drunk a lot of bad booze,
wrote a lot of good tunes, and along the
way took a crack at changing the face of
southern fiddle music.
Though Arthur Smith died in 1971, and
though few of his original records have
been available for years, his presence still
looms at contests and festivals today.
Many of the tunes he wrote or popularized
have become standards: “Red Apple
Rag,” “Blackberry Blossom,” “Dickson
County Blues,” “Florida Blues,” “Pig in
the Pen,” “Indian Creek,” “Peacock Rag,”
“Orange Blossom Special,” “Beautiful
Brown Eyes,” and, of course, “There’s
More Pretty Girls Than One.” Even more
pervasive is the influence of Smith’s
“quick-noting” style: young fiddlers have
absorbed it second or even third hand, and
veteran fiddlers from the late Paul
Warren to Howdy Forrester to Chubby
Wise have acknowledged Smith’s influ-
ence on their work. You can hear echoes of
Smith’s style in dozens of traditional
bluegrass fiddlers today, from Curly Ray
Cline to Kenny Baker. Many agree with
the comments of Bill Monroe: “There was
a day when Arthur was the fiddler all
through this country. You couldn’t beat
him with his kind of music.”
Just what kind of music was Arthur’s
kind of music? To get at an answer to this,
you have to go back to the rolling hills and
cold streams of Humphries County,
Tennessee, about 50 miles west of
Nashville, where Arthur was born in
April 1898. Smith’s father was a fiddler of
sorts, but died when Arthur was only a
boy; family stories tell of Arthur as a
yound lad of four or five trying to play a
fiddle by propping it up on the floor. As he
grew into adolescence, Arthur Smith
began learning from old fiddlers in the
Humphries-Dickson county area; appar-
ently at that time there existed in this...