Happy Birthday Johnny Smith ... born 92 years ago today. Smith was a cool jazz and mainstream jazz guitarist. He wrote the tune Walk, Dont Run in 1954. He was born in Birmingham, Alabama. During the Great Depression, Smiths family moved from Birmingham through several cities, ending up in Portland, Maine. Smith taught himself to play guitar in pawnshops, which let him play in exchange for keeping the guitars in tune. At thirteen years of age he was teaching others to play the guitar. One of Smiths students bought a new guitar and gave him his old guitar, which became the first guitar Smith owned. Smith joined Uncle Lem and the Mountain Boys, a local hillbilly band that travelled around Maine, performing at dances, fairs and similar venues. Smith earned four dollars a night. He dropped out of high school to accommodate this enterprise. After becoming interested in the jazz bands he heard on the radio, Smith practiced playing jazz. He left The Mountain Boys when he was eighteen years old to form a jazz trio called the Airport Boys. An extremely diverse musician, Johnny Smith was equally at home playing in the famous Birdland jazz club or sight reading scores in the orchestral pit of the New York Philharmonic. From Schoenberg to Gershwin to originals, Smith was one of the most versatile guitarists of the 1950s. Smiths playing is characterized by closed-position chord voicings and rapidly ascending lines (reminiscent of Django, but more diatonic than chromatically-based). From those famous 1952 sides and into the 1960s he recorded for the Roost label, on whose releases his reputation mainly rests. Mosaic Records has issued the majority of them in an 8-CD set. His most critically acclaimed album was Moonlight in Vermont (one of Down Beat magazines top two jazz records for 1952, featuring saxophonist Stan Getz). His most famous musical composition is the tune Walk Dont Run, written for a 1954 recording session as counter-melody to the chord changes of Softly, As in a Morning Sunrise. Another guitarist, Chet Atkins, covered the song. Some musicians who became The Ventures heard the Atkins version, simplified it, sped it up and recorded it in 1960. The Ventures version went to No. 2 on the Billboard Top 100 for a week in September 1960. Johnny Smith stepped out of the public eye in the 1960s, having moved to Colorado in 1958 to teach and run a music store and to raise his daughter after the death of his second wife. Guild, Gibson and Heritage have all made guitar models designed and endorsed by Johnny Smith. In each case, the guitar was designed wholly or in part by Smith. Each design was a full-bodied archtop guitar with a top carved from solid spruce and a back and sides made of solid maple. All the on-board electronics for each guitar, from the small pickup in the neck position through the volume knob to the output jack, were mounted on the pickguard. Smith claims to have learned about guitar design by observing master luthier John DAngelico, who was his friend and guitar supplier when he lived in New York. In 1961, Ted McCarty, then president of Gibson, went to meet the retired Smith at his home in Colorado Springs. McCarty spent several days with Smith, during which time Smith designed the guitar he wanted built. The design was accepted by Gibson with a few minor cosmetic changes which were acceptable to Smith. Gibson began production of the resulting Gibson Johnny Smith model that year. Guild continued to produce their Johnny Smith guitar under the model name Guild Artist Award. When Gibson moved its manufacturing facilities from Kalamazoo, Michigan to Nashville, Tennessee, several of their managers and artisans chose to stay behind. Many of these ex-employees formed Heritage Guitars and bought the old Kalamazoo factory from Gibson. Given a choice between Gibson and Heritage building the guitar that bore his name, Smith chose to stay with the old artisans at the old location under new ownership. The Heritage Johnny Smith model was introduced in 1989. Like Guild before them, Gibson continued to manufacture their version of the Johnny Smith design with a new name: the Gibson LeGrand. William Schultz, chairman of Fender Musical Instruments Corporation, of which Guild Guitars was a subsidiary, asked Smith if he would be willing to return his endorsement to the Guild Artist Award. Familiar with Schultzs management, and knowing that the construction would be supervised by master luthier Bob Benedetto, Smith agreed. The Guild Johnny Smith Award by Benedetto was available through Guild dealers until early 2006 when Benedetto left Fender. Unlike Guild and Gibson, Heritage Guitars discontinued manufacture of their Smith-designed guitar after Smith withdrew his endorsement. Smith died on June 11, 2013 at age 90. Frank Beacham
Posted on: Wed, 25 Jun 2014 06:57:22 +0000
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