The kid from Kershaw, S.C., picked a guitar like his fingers were on fire. Hot licks flew from the instrument when Arthur Smith played – a wizard coaxing magic out of the strings.
In 1945, he wrote and recorded a sizzling instrumental that eventually hit the charts worldwide. “Guitar Boogie” would go on to influence generations of musicians, including Tom Petty, Eric Clapton, Glen Campbell, Roy Clark. A young Paul McCartney played the Kershaw kid’s boogie in a tryout for a Liverpool band that became the Beatles.
Smith, who died Thursday at home at age 93, was a Charlotte-based entertainer with a national presence.
Music great, innovator, TV pioneer, successful businessman: He was important on many levels. The amiable Sunday school teacher with a honey-dipped Southern drawl also had a feisty side; he took on Warner Bros. after his novelty song “Feuding Banjos” turned up uncredited as “Dueling Banjos” in the 1972 movie “Deliverance.” Smith filed a lawsuit and won a substantial settlement. Thousands of devoted fans watched his daily variety show “Carolina Calling” on WBTV, and a national audience later followed his syndicated “Arthur Smith Show.”
Smith and his band, the Crackerjacks, served up country music and sly humor while featuring such guests as Billy Graham and Johnny Cash, two of Smith’s friends. As host, Smith endeared himself to audiences; when he pitched an advertiser’s product, people listened and trusted.
“He was a good neighbor on radio and TV to so many people,” said Tom Hanchett, historian at the Levine Museum of the New South. “He was somebody who came to you every day in your living room or kitchen and felt like a member of the family in a way hard to imagine today. He was from the same mold as Doc Watson and Andy Griffith. He enjoyed the genial tradition of being a Southern gentleman. He relished that.”
Grand Ole Opry star George Hamilton IV, who worked with Smith on his syndicated TV show, called him a “good, decent man.”
“ ‘The Arthur Smith Show’ was where I got my country music education and inspiration,” said Hamilton, a native of Winston-Salem. “He was a childhood hero who lived up to his legend. He was the real deal. He connected with people. He was a man who walked his talk.” Born in Clinton, S.C., Smith grew up in Kershaw, where his father worked in a cotton mill and led a brass band.
As a child, Smith played trumpet in the mill group and absorbed all kinds of music, from big bands to rhythm and blues and gospel and the jazz guitarist Django Reinhardt. Around the age of 6, Smith started writing his own songs – and never stopped. He played in a Dixieland group with his brothers, Ralph and Sonny, and later mastered the mandolin, fiddle and guitar, among other instruments.
Smith passed up an appointment to the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis, Md., to pursue a career in music and entertainment. He was 15 when he cut records for RCA’s budget Bluebird label at the Andrew Jackson Hotel in Rock Hill. The band’s name was Smith’s Carolina Crackerjacks. The session produced no hits. That came later with “Guitar Boogie,” when Smith was 24. The kid with the hot guitar licks made a name for himself around the world. “Guitar Boogie” was recorded on acoustic guitar with help from Don Reno on rhythm guitar and Roy Lear on bass, said John Rumble, senior historian at Nashville’s Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum.
Smith was back in the Carolinas after serving in the Navy and had found work with the popular country band the Briarhoppers and with Cecil Campbell’s Tennessee Ramblers. The name on the “Guitar Boogie” record was the Rambler Trio, but Rumble said Smith’s lead guitar picking “drove the record’s substantial regional sales and gave Smith his familiar ‘Guitar Boogie’ moniker.”
The hit helped inspire a country boogie trend and led to Smith’s contract with the larger MGM label in 1947, Rumble said. MGM reissued “Guitar Boogie” in 1948, and this time the disc rose to No. 8 on Billboard magazine’s country popularity chart...
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