Biography

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Byther Smith – Blues On The Moon: Live At Natural Rhythm Social Club
Delmark DE 796 (2009)
Compact Disc – Also Available on DVD!

Byther Smith is a fighter, a scrapper, a hard worker and a survivor. As a child in Monticello, Mississippi he lost both his parents; his mother when he was one year old and his father six months later. Shipped off to Arizona as a young man, Smitty took up boxing in part to deal with the pain. “I had 69 amateur fights and I only lost one.” Smitty came to Chicago in the mid-’50s and by the early ’60s was playing at Theresa’s Lounge, where he backed Junior Wells. He also worked with Big Mama Thornton, George “Harmonica” Smith and Otis Rush. He recorded his first LP for the Grits label in 1983, two for Bullseye in the early ’90s, and this is his fourth Delmark CD – his first live album.


On the evening of Friday, August 17, 2007, Byther Smith brought his rugged ensemble of musical stalwarts to deliver a blast of straight-ahead Chicago blues as raw and uncompromising as anything that has ever emanated from the Windy City, and the crowd responded with rapture throughout the night. His performance, as usual, was both a throwback to the music’s postwar glory days and a timeless celebration of the struggles and triumphs of the human spirit. Complete notes by David Whiteis enclosed.

1. Judge Of Honor 5:16
2. If You Love Me 5:47
3. Blues On The Moon 6:35
4. Give Up My Life For You 5:53
5. Hard Times 6:37
6. Your Mama's Crazy 4:58
7. If I Misused Someone 4:20
8. Monticello 7:55
9. So Mean To Me 5:25
10. Rock Me Baby 6:28
11. Don't Start Me Talkin' 4:40

Byther Smith, vocals, guitar
Anthony Palmer, guitar
Daryl Coutts, keyboards
Greg McDaniel, bass
James Carter, drums

Recorded live on August 17, 2007

Also available on DVD (Delmark DVD 1796)


1. Judge Of Honor 5:16 (Byther Smith)
2. If You Love Me 5:47 (J.B. Lenoir, Conrad Music, c/o Arc Music Corp, BMI)
3. Blues On The Moon 6:35 (Byther Smith)
4. Give Up My Life For You 5:53 (Byther Smith)
5. Hard Times 6:37 (Byther Smith)
6. Your Mama's Crazy 4:58 (Byther Smith)
7. If I Misused Someone 4:20 (Byther Smith)
8. Monticello 7:55 (Byther Smith)
9. So Mean To Me 5:25 (Campbell/Sain, Arc Music Corp./Conrad Music, BMI)
10. Rock Me Baby 6:28 (Arthur Crudup, Unichappell Music Inc., BMI)
11. Don't Start Me Talkin' 4:40 (Sonny Boy Williamson, Arc Music Corp., BMI)

Album Production and Supervision: Robert G. Koester and Steve Wagner
Recorded by Steve Wagner and Eric Butkus
Mixed at Riverside Studio by Steve Wagner, Eric Butkus, Dave Specter and Dave Katzman
Photos by Jennifer "Lady Blues" Wheeler
Design: Dave Forte, ForDzign
Special thanks to Roberta Milan and the staff at Natural Rhythm Social Club


The Natural Rhythm Social Club is a modest urban juke on the corner of 59th and Damen on Chicago’s South Side. It’s a working-class neighborhood, predominantly African-American – the type of community that originally gave rise to the blues. Here, the music and its spirit continue to inform the day-to-day lives of people who work hard, play hard, and struggle to contend with the unpredictable, often daunting, realities of life in 21st Century urban America. These days, though, the “blues” that’s usually considered popular in neighborhoods like this is the R&B-influenced amalgam of styles known variously as “soul-blues” and “southern soul.” The more traditional twelve-bar postwar sound, at least according to stereotype, has lost its ability to capture the minds and hearts of contemporary African-American listeners.
But on the evening of Friday, August 17, 2007, Byther Smith brought his rugged ensemble of musical stalwarts to deliver a blast of straight-ahead Chicago blues as raw and uncompromising as anything that has ever emanated from the Windy City, and the crowd responded with rapture throughout the night. His performance, as usual, was both a throwback to the music’s postwar glory days and a timeless celebration of the struggles and triumphs of the human spirit. Smitty may not be as well-known, even in Chicago, as legendary figures like Muddy Waters, Elmore James, and Howlin’ Wolf; his name may not often be invoked along with the likes of Robert Johnson and Lightnin’ Hopkins when the subject of “blues poets” comes up. But in his own unpretentious and utterly dauntless way, he has earned a place in the same pantheon.
If you think that’s an overstatement, just listen to “Give Up My Life For You.” “Baby Jesus died!” Smitty hollers, in a voice as corrugated and wounding as a sun-baked Mississippi dirt road. “He died for this world!” He then follows it up with the harrowing clincher: “I am ‘Baby’ – don’t let Him die for you, girl!” Few, if any, other contemporary bluesmen could conjure up a lyric so layered with surrealistic juxtapositions of meaning, imagery and flat-out anguish –– and that’s just the first verse.
Smitty can be just as riveting when he’s revisiting others’ material. He cagily melds ideas and influences drawn from the postwar blues legacy, and in so doing imbues even the tried-and-true with new and exciting life. Here he digs into the Magic Sam lickbook for his recreation of Rice Miller’s “Don’t Start Me Talkin’” – and in the process transforms a trickster’s ode to signifying and troublemaking into a threat from a belligerent soul bent on wreaking havoc and leaving decimation in his wake. His take on the venerable “Rock Me” theme also invokes Sam’s trademark riff, but again, Smitty makes the material his own: when Muddy Waters sang the song, it was taut with erotic tension, yet it promised release and pleasure later on; Smitty’s leathery vocals, which pack a punch as potent as the ones his fists delivered back in his boxing days, make it clear that this Lothario does not intend to be denied, and may the Lord have mercy on any poor soul who tries it. (As he sings on “If You Love Me”: “I don’t care how bad I mistreat you, if you love me you won’t let me down” – hearts, flowers, and romance these blues are not.)
It’s never possible, of course, to say for certain what fuels the muse of a creative artist; but even a cursory overview of the Byther Smith story reveals a set of experiences that could almost serve as a template for the archetypical blues life. He was born in Monticello, Mississippi on April 17, 1933. Both of his parents died before he was one year old, and a few years later one of his sisters perished in a house fire. When he was fifteen, he left the Mississippi farm on which he was then living with an aunt and an uncle, and headed West. In Prescott, Arizona, he worked with cattle and played acoustic bass in a country band. This was also when he began to cultivate his interest in boxing – for a man who’d had to fight to live virtually since the day he was born, earning a living through fisticuffs must have seemed like the most natural thing in the world.
Some time in the ‘50s he moved to Chicago. There, under the tutelage of his cousin J.B. Lenoir (whose classic “Mama Talk To Your Daughter” Smitty refers to here, albeit somewhat obliquely, on “Your Mama’s Crazy”), he took up the guitar and began to gig around the local clubs. He attained a measure of neighborhood celebrity and he recorded a few sides for small labels; but it wasn’t until the ‘80s, when he began to tour more widely and he recorded his first full-length LP (1988's Housefire, on the Razor label) that he began to enjoy a reputation even mildly commensurate with his talents. Since then he’s become what one might call an aficionado’s bluesman – still somewhat obscure among mainstream fans, perhaps, but admired and even revered by the cognoscenti.
None of that, of course, means that his music is esoteric or difficult to understand. Smitty’s Mississippi roots are evident in everything he plays; even when he creates improvisational lines that refer to ideas associated with the likes of B.B. King, he strips them to their essence – less is more to Smitty, a man who has lived frugally and with unadorned directness all his life. Meanwhile, his sidemen create a context for him that both supports and challenges his ideas and his musical persona. Consider, for instance, the elegant reference to contemporary soul-blues legend Latimore’s “Let’s Straighten It Out” that rhythm guitarist Anthony Palmer contributes to Smitty’s brooding autobiographical vignette, “Monticello.” That kind of mix-and-match audacity could easily sound forced – in these hands, though, it’s a smoothly executed and utterly natural sounding bridge between generations and genres. As Chicago-based vocalist Sharon Lewis has said, “It’s all blues if it comes from the heart” – and that’s the locus of origin for every note, played or sung, on this incendiary CD.
The blues-savvy folks at Natural Rhythm knew a good thing when they heard it; it was almost impossible to get them to leave when Smitty and his band finally concluded their show. That kind of enthusiasm can be contagious: you might find it almost as difficult as they did to get Smitty’s music out of your ears after you’ve experienced it here. Hear that obsessive intensity in Smitty’s vocal delivery and finger-blistering fretboard attack? After his music works its dark magic on you, a bit of that same obsession may find a corner in your own soul, as well.
-David Whiteis, April, 2008


Other Delmark Albums of Interest:
Byther Smith, Hold That Train (774)
All Night long (708)
Mississippi Kid (691)
Junior Wells, Live at Theresa's 1975 (787) with Byther Smith, Phil Guy
Hoodoo Man Blues (612) with Buddy Guy
Southside Blues Jam (628) with Buddy Guy, Otis Spann
On Tap (635) with Phil Guy, Sammy Lawhorn, A.C. Reed
Blues Hit Big Town (640) with Muddy Waters, Elmore James
Southside Chicago Blues (912) with Byther Smith, Junior Wells, Carey Bell…
Tail Dragger, My Head Is Bald (DVD 1782, CD 782) with Billy Branch, Lurrie Bell
American People (728) with Johnny B. Moore, Billy Branch

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