It All Started Here

It all started in the early 1950s, a few 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.

At the time, I was a seven-year-old—fully grown, at least in my own mind. Dad had been gone so much on the road that I already 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. We rushed to the hospital, and right there from his bed, Dad told us he was done with music. And he meant it.

When he got back home, sitting in his favorite knotty-pine den and studio, he became a born-again believer. He got baptized, walked away from the honky-tonks, and left Nashville behind—along with the music world and friends like Roy Clark and Buck Owens. He didn't touch a guitar again for five years. He wasn't a perfect man, and he'd be the first to admit that, but he was a changed man. No farewell show. No encore. Just a man who'd seen enough and found something greater.

Then one day in December 1968, completely out of the blue, he brought home a Martin guitar. He pulled out his old 1960 Gibson Hummingbird—I didn't even know he still had it—handed it to me, and said, “Son, Merry Christmas. It’s time we played a little music. You’re grown up now, so this is your Hummingbird.” That was the exact moment the spark got passed down.

By 1969, 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 them all. It wasn't 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.

Later that same year, Dad decided to start a family band, and I was in. We began simply as Smith, but after a battle of the bands, we discovered another group already owned 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 running things 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 part was fine; it was the traveling I hated. We were on the road every weekend during the school year and all summer long—traveling from church to church, old folks' homes, battle of the bands, and 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.”

Being the oldest meant I was also the crew. No stagehands, no roadies. Just me, sweat, cables, and conviction. Before I was old enough to drive, I was already the sound check guy, the engineer, and the heavy lifter—the fellow behind the fellow behind the show. Working with my dad in the band was a great experience, but like many bands, it was also the very thing that pushed us so far apart. It took twenty-two years before we even tried to be family again. So much time was lost; I was just too angry, and my dad was a proud man who would never admit he was wrong. We hit a total impasse. Sadly, he has passed away now, and that time will always be lost—until I see him in heaven again. Anyway some of the pain in my songs was from that part of my life, but I digress...

In 1973, at just sixteen years old, I graduated high school and ran to BJU in Greenville, South Carolina as fast as I could. My parents had decided to go to Japan to serve as missionaries for four years, and since I didn't want to go with them, college was my ticket out. Because of my age, I ended up a ward of the dean at BJU. That's a story for another day, but let’s just say "I made the dean’s list"—just not the one mothers brag about.

By 1976, at nineteen, I landed a job 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 independent journey.

Now let’s jump ahead in time…