Chris Smither Covers, Redux:
(John Hiatt, The Grateful Dead, Little Feat, Chuck Berry, Dylan and more)
As always, I’m offline at our annual Falcon Ridge Folk Festival pilgrimage for the last weeks of July; feel free to stop by the Teen Crew tent some morning and say hi if you’re at the fest. But arriving early to help set up the festival site means making hard choices, and there’s none harder than missing this year’s Green River Festival, which featured an incredible Friday night line-up of fifteen Signature Sounds artists in honor of the label’s fifteenth anniversary year.
Signature Sounds is at the top of my favorite folk labels list, both for their incredible stable of artists and their tendency towards rich contemporary production values; it helps that they’re local, too, and that I’ve spent years as an adult audiophile listening to founder Jim Olsen spin the tunes on local radio. In the earliest days of Cover Lay Down, we featured numerous artists from their ranks, and serendipitously, two of these artists — Peter Mulvey and Chris Smither — have new CDs hitting the pavement at summer’s end. This week, we feature those artists, with bonus tracks from their upcoming releases, both of which come very highly recommended.
I seriously considered Chris Smither for our Covered in Folk series. After all, for much of his forty-year career Smither was a total unknown outside a very small community…unless you happened to know who wrote Bonnie Raitt’s hit Love Me Like A Man. Smither has cred as a performer in his own right; he deserves to be touted for his own deceptively simple musicianship, not just his writing. The problem is, while his songs have been pretty consistently out in the open since he started out, his career path yaws like a ship in a storm.
Smither joined the Cambridge, MA folk scene in the late sixties, and hit the national radar in the early seventies with a spate of albums that showcased his emerging songwriting and raw, bluesy swamp folk style. But he faded into relative obscurity by the end of the decade, touring sporadically, releasing only one album in the eighties while his songs lived on in the hands of others. For a while, it looked like another promising musician had gotten lost.
But when Smither came back in 1991 with intimately recorded live album Another Way To Find You, it put him right back in the groove, winning awards and filling bars across the country. Since then, he’s been prolific and celebrated; today, where the Dixie Chicks still sell more Patty Griffin than Patty Griffin, Chris Smither has transcended life as “the guy who wrote that song” to become a headliner again, reemerging from the dark eighties to impress a new generation with his foot-stomping blues/folk guitar style, his throat-scratching Florida by way of New Orleans tenor drawl, and his interpretation of both his own well-crafted tunes and familiar standards from the folk canon.
At his best, Smither’s signature sound is a holdover from the days of Leadbelly, before blues and folk music split into distinct genres. Like those that came before him, he can play fast and loose with tempo, speeding through phrases on the guitar in raw emotive power. What distinguishes his style from the great grandaddies of interpretive fingerplucking is a preference for fastfinger slide over chord-playing, and a mellow, weathered grin all his own that shines through his lyrical play to flavor even the most wistful of folksongs.
The edgy, bluesy style Smither favors in performance is best featured on Another Way to Find You, in all its live, foot-stomping glory; his produced work shows an equally gifted ability to play the power of that wailing voice and sweet guitarplay off a full wash of sound. Here’s a full house of covers from his second wave of fame — a trio of solid tracks from Another Way, and a pair of more recent, more produced cuts — just to prove that you can rise again:
Chris Smither: Friend of the Devil (orig. Grateful Dead)
Chris Smither: Down in the Flood (orig. Bob Dylan)
Chris Smither: Tulane (orig. Chuck Berry)
Chris Smither: Rock and Roll Doctor (orig. Little Feat)
Chris Smither: Real Fine Love (orig. John Hiatt)
Chris Smither sells all his in-print works, from 1984’s amazing It Ain’t Easy to his more mellow, bluesy recent gems, through his website, so you know where he’d prefer you buy them. Unfortunately, if you’d like to go back to his work from before the resurrection, you’ll have to scour the used recordshops — but they’re well worth the vintage price, if you find one in good condition.
Today’s bonus coversongs are a full house, too:
- Smoothjazz chanteuse Diana Krall covers Smither’s Love Me Like A Man
- Bonnie Raitt covers Love Me Like A Man, too (live, from Road Tested)
- Chris Smither’s original 1970 version of Love You Like A Man(our first NON-cover here on Cover Lay Down!)
- Smither makes Roly Sally’s Killin’ the Blues his own
- Shawn Colvin covers Smither’s version of Killing the Blues
Special BONUS EXCLUSIVE COVER PREVIEW from Chris Smither’s upcoming album Time Stands Still, due out on Signature Sounds in September:
- Chris Smither: Madame Geneva’s (orig. Mark Knopfler)
Category: Uncategorized
July 26th, 2009 at 7:19 pm
Thanks for these reminders of what a talent he is. I first heard him on Tufts radio station in Boston in the late 80’s and went to see him at Passim - just me and ten others. Real gentleman, quiet and deep.
July 26th, 2009 at 9:35 pm
I’ve heard one of his Dylan covers - um, which one…
“Little boy lost, he takes himself so seriously…”
Can’t come up with the title, I’m getting old.
Anyway, liked that one so keen to hear these ones.
July 28th, 2009 at 2:04 am
Had a great time at Grey Fox - thanks again for the tickets!!!
August 2nd, 2009 at 9:24 pm
OK, dissenting opinion time . . . .
I’m not gettin’ it, at least on his recent tracks you posted. I can’t decide whether he’s using a really fast vibrato or his voice has just gotten that wobbly, but either way I find it unpleasant to listen to.
(And he didn’t win any points from me for either rewriting or not learning properly the words to “Friend of the Devil!”)
December 20th, 2009 at 10:04 pm
[...] of singer-songwriter solicitation this year included note of new releases from Caroline Herring, Chris Smither, Peter Mulvey, Sometymes Why, Eilen Jewell, and Richard Shindell; as the archives show, each was a [...]
March 27th, 2010 at 6:45 pm
Chris Smither’s version of Friend of the Devil has always been my absolute favorite version, and I know there have been many. I first heard it back in the 1970s, early 70s and his voice sounded wavery and I liked it that way.