Johnny Smith was born on June 25th 1922 in Birmingham Alabama. In the mid 1930s his family moved to Portland Maine. Although he had learned the violin Johnny decided to turn his attention to the guitar on which he was self taught. He joined a country hillbilly style band and was able to earn some quite significant pocket money playing with them. At this time he started to become interested in jazz guitar players like Django Reinhardt, Charlie Christian and Les Paul.
During the war years Johnny joined the US Air Force but was not allowed to fly due to having less than perfect vision in one eye. Instead he joined the Air Force Band where he had to teach himself the cornet very quickly. He was also required to play the viola in a string quartet which one of the senior officers organised.
After the war Johnny moved to New York City where he became a staff musician at N.B.C. playing both trumpet and guitar. In 1947 he recorded a couple of tunes with jazz pianist Mary Lou Williams for the Disc label. In late 1949 he was asked to play the guitar part for a performance of Schoenberg's Serenade. The conductor Dimitri Mitropoulos had not been able to find a classical guitarist capable of playing the difficult guitar part and turned to Johnny in last minute desperation. Johnny mastered the part in a matter of days playing it unamplified on his large bodied Epiphone Emperor and using a plectrum.
In 1950 and 1951 Johnny recorded with Benny Goodman. In 1952 his career took a major step forward when he recorded as a leader for Teddy Reig's Roost label. This was a 78 rpm record whose A side was the title Tabu. However it was the B side Moonlight In Vermont which became a hit being voted Jazz Record of the Year by Down Beat magazine. This track was notable for both Stan Getz's supportive tenor saxophone playing and Johnny's remarkable close voiced chording and rapid multi-octave runs which were very pianistic in nature. Johnny once quipped that he had spent a lot of time playing with and listening to pianists and nobody had told him that those things couldn't be done on the guitar.
Over the next five or so years Johnny made a large number of excellent LP records for Roost with fine sidemen such as pianists Bob Pancoast, Sanford Gold and Hank Jones; guitarist Perry Lopez; bassists Arnold Fishkin, George Roumanis and Knobby Totah; and drummers Mousie Alexander and Don Lamond. Not many of these records were reissued (perhaps because many of the tapes could not be located) and so the originals became scarce and very highly priced as collectors' items. However in 2002 Mosaic Records discovered the master tapes in Roulette's London tape vault and reissued most of the original LPs as an 8 CD set.
In 1957 Johnny's wife died and he felt he could not continue as a full time musician in New York City and give his four year old daughter the attention she needed. He had relations in Colorado Springs and moved out there early in 1958. After some time Johnny remarried and this allowed him to return East for occasional concerts although he no longer recorded with anything like the same frequency.
In 1960 the Gibson Guitar company approached Johnny to ask if he would like to design a signature guitar model. Johnny was enthusiastic about this as he saw it as a way to match the quality of his D'Angelico guitar but with the ability to produce the instruments on a much larger scale. He had previously had an endorsement deal with Guild Guitars who made the Johnny Smith Award Model but had terminated this arrangement because he was unhappy with certain aspects of their manufacturing process. The Gibson Johnny Smith model used a floating pickup and the neck was closely integrated with the body bracing to improve the sustain of the high notes. Johnny was in the process of setting up a music store in Colorado Springs so he asked Gibson if, rather than being paid royalties in cash, he could receive some of their products to stock in the store.
In the late 1960s Johnny returned East to cut three albums for Verve in the company of pianist Hank Jones and bassist George Duvivier. The second of these albums Kaleidoscope was particularly noteworthy with some beautiful playing on tunes like Sweet Lorraine.
After this Johnny undertook very little more studio recording activity. He accompanied Bing Crosby on a European tour in 1977 but for most of the time stayed close to his home in Colorado. In 2003 he visited the UK for only the second time in the company of his close friend Mundell Lowe to attend the North Wales International Jazz Guitar Festival (see below).
Thanks to Friedhelm Rump for providing the above article and also many of the original LP Covers.
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