Hobart Smith – In Sacred Trust: The 1963 Fleming Brown Tapes
What is folk music, anyway? This may seem like a silly question, but it’s one I’ve kicked around for years, and finally answered by saying folk music ends when you get paid for it full-time. Sure, it also has to do with perpetuating a tradition, but once you make it into a career you become something else. There’s nothing wrong with that, but it’s the point at which the folk process stops and the commercial process starts.
These thoughts arose when I played this wonderful album of Hobart Smith, a pure folk musician born in 1897, communicating his art to a younger, urban enthusiast in informal conditions in the latter’s rec room. Smith was in Chicago for a concert series, and Fleming Brown, a commercial artist who taught banjo on the side, had him over to pick his brain and generally relax with the older man, who was happy to play through his repertoire at regular and slow speed so that Brown could transcribe the songs for tablature.
Fortunately, though, a wide-ranging romp through Smith’s memory banks resulted, and before long he was reminiscing about the close connections between black and white banjo styles — and demonstrating them — and playing guitar, fiddle and piano. He played banjo tunes, hymns, old popular tunes, and even a blues, which he may or may not have learned from Blind Lemon Jefferson.
Was he a folk musician? He told Alan Lomax in 1946 that “I made practically two-thirds of my living at music,” but he was also a farmer, a wagoner, a house painter, and a butcher. Moreover, when he did play music, it was as part of a string band which played for dances, so that a large part of his repertoire was never used in public. Nor did he record commercially until after his encounter with Lomax, although he was friends with several other performers — most notably Clarence “Tom” Ashley — who did. Once discovered by the folkies, he became a star of the folk circuit and the festivals, and was doted upon by the youngsters.
So what we have here is a seminar, basically. Two versions of “Old Joe Clark” played in different styles, Smith’s take on a number of classic tunes, a bit of talking, and the aforementioned switching off on various instruments. Very good stuff, but for a better introduction if you’ve never heard him before, I’d recommend the Lomax recordings, issued on Rounder as Blue Ridge Legacy in 2001, which are astounding. After that, of course, you’ll have to have this, because the warmth and depth of Hobart Smith is the second thing you notice about him.
The first is, damn, could he ever play the banjo!