EG Smith III BIO
It All Started Here

It all started in the late 1950s, seven years before I was born, with the man who struck the first chord in this story: my dad, Elson Smith Jr.

He was playing bluegrass under the hot lights of RCA Studio B in Nashville, Tennessee, picking his 1948 Gibson EM-150 Electric Mandolin with Horace Jones and the Country Boys. Back then, that was the real country dream.

In 1953, the band was booked to play the same New Year’s Day show Hank Williams never made it to. Hank’s death stayed with my father. Then in 1964, that ghost finally caught up with him when he wrecked his Harley Panhead on a gravel curve. That crash changed everything.

He walked away from the honky-tonks, found Jesus, got baptized, and left Nashville behind, along with the music world and friends like Roy Clark and Buck Owens. He was not a perfect man, but he was a changed man. No farewell show. No encore. Just a man who had seen enough and found something greater.

That same year, I was a fully grown seven-year-old, at least in my own mind. Dad was gone so much, I figured I was the man of the house. The night of his wreck, Mom and I were watching The Red Skelton Hour when the phone rang. It was his band members calling from the emergency room. At the hospital, Dad told us he was done with music, and he meant it. He did not touch a guitar again for ten years.

Then one day he brought home a Martin guitar, pulled out his 1960 Gibson Hummingbird, handed it to me, and said, “Son, it’s time we played a little music. You’re grown up now, so this is your Hummingbird.” That was the moment the spark got passed down.

By 1967, he was running his HVAC company and playing in church. Somewhere along the way, he decided I needed to learn music whether I liked it or not. He taught me to sing and play guitar, bought me a Yamaha spinet piano, an accordion, and an Oscar Schmidt Autoharp, then told me to learn all of them. That was not a suggestion. I hated it at the time because it kept me away from my friends, but I learned to play them all, mostly by ear.

In 1968, Dad decided to start a band, and I was in. We began as Smith, then after a battle of the bands in 1969, we found out another group already had the name, so we became The Smiths. It was my dad, me, my two younger brothers, and later our little sister, mostly for the cuteness factor, with my mother as our iron-fisted manager. And yes, she absolutely was.

Dad and I sang as a duo, with my brothers backing us up. We had sweet harmonies, or so I’m told. The singing was fine. The traveling was what I hated. We were on the road every weekend during the school year and all summer long, going from church to church, old folks home to old folks home, battle of the bands to tent revivals, all over the East Coast from West Virginia to Florida. Half the time, I felt like I was living inside Neil Diamond’s “Brother Love’s Traveling Salvation Show.”

I was the oldest, which meant I was also the crew. No stagehands. No road crew. Just me, sweat, cords, and conviction. Before I was old enough to drive, I was already the sound check guy, engineer, and roadie, the fellow behind the fellow behind the show.

In 1973, at sixteen, I graduated high school and ran to college as fast as I could. Because of my age, I ended up a ward of the dean. That is a story for another day. Let’s just say I made the dean’s list, just not the one mothers brag about.

By 1976, at nineteen, I landed at WAVY-TV 10 in Portsmouth, Virginia, working as a sound board engineer, audio editor, and producer. That was the real beginning of my own journey.

Now let’s jump ahead in time…