Sammi Smith – The Best Of Sammi Smith
Sammi Smith is most frequently cited as a member of country’s Outlaw movement — her friend and touring partner Waylon Jennings dubbed her “Girl Hero” — but her music, at least on the surface, didn’t sound a thing like Waylon’s or Willie’s. In fact, she most often recorded in the very style that’s usually considered Outlaw’s exact opposite: Countrypolitan.
Make no mistake: Smith deserved the Outlaw tag. Like that movement’s more famous rebels, she fled Nashville for Texas, cultivated a counterculture fashion sense, covered Western swing, and spoke out politically. (A direct descendent of Apache chief Cochise, Smith moved to an Arizona reservation in 1975 and adopted three Apache children.) Most Outlawish of all, she consistently concentrated on songs that were about real women’s real dramas, during an era when depictions of female emotion remained limited. But she was never afraid to place these stories, and her remarkable voice, into the sort of pop-and-soul-influenced musical settings that Outlaw was, in part, reacting against.
When countrypolitan worked — and on the 16 cuts selected for this disc, it almost always did — the emotional effect could be devastating. For the lonely woman who finds reminders of her departed lover all over the house (“He’s Everywhere”), or for the mother who has endured a loveless marriage for her children’s sake (“For The Kids”), the emotions feel larger than life. The dynamic, string-filled arrangements Smith and producer Jim Malloy employed on her hits effectively capture the overwhelming, sometimes even obsessive, nature of everyday joys and all-too-common losses.
Born in 1943 in Orange, California, Smith moved around a lot as a child because her dad was in the Air Force. By the time her family settled in Oklahoma when she was 12, Smith was singing in clubs and developing what would become one of country’s most distinctive voices. She was still playing clubs in her early 20s when an Oklahoma promoter slipped her demo to Tennessee Three bassist Marshall Grant. “He played it for Johnny [Cash],” Smith says in the liner notes, “and about two weeks later I was in Nashville with a contract with Columbia Records.”
Though her warm, husky voice quickly became a favorite in Nashville’s Printer’s Alley, she never had much success at Columbia. But when she switched to Mega Records in 1970, one of those perfect combinations of voice, sound and song occurred that couldn’t help but create commercial and artistic gold. Before Kris Kristofferson played “Help Me Make It Through The Night” for Smith, the song had been recorded several times with no great success. But when Smith decided to change the song to a woman’s point of view, the result was a smoldering performance of great physical and emotional need. It’s one of the greatest singles in the history of country music.
Smith’s sensual reading caused quite a stir at the time, both because of her strong female narrator and because of the untraditionally lush-and-rough arrangement. But that only helped the single go top-10 on both the country and pop charts. From “Help Me Make It…” to her definitive cover of Merle Haggard’s “Today I Started Loving You Again” in 1975, Sammi Smith’s most Outlawish quality was simply her willingness to make untraditional music from an untraditionally realistic point of view.