Johnny Smith

Johnny Henry Smith II was born in Birmingham, Alabama, on June 25, 1922. He discovered the guitar at age five and taught himself by practicing on instruments in pawnshops, where owners let him use guitars in exchange for maintenance work. Django Reinhardt and Charlie Christian shaped his early style through their recorded solos. By age thirteen, Smith was already teaching other musicians. During the Great Depression, his family moved to Portland, Maine, where he performed with Uncle Lem and the Mountain Boys, a hillbilly ensemble that paid four dollars per night.

Smith served in World War II and studied music theory while in the Army. He learned cornet in six months and earned the lead position in an Army band due to vision problems that prevented Air Corps service. After discharge in 1947, he moved to New York City and joined the NBC radio and television orchestra under conductor Arturo Toscanini from 1947 to 1951. His closed-position chord voicings and rapidly ascending lines distinguished him from Django’s chromatic approach. Smith became a regular at Birdland jazz nightclub and performed complex modern compositions by Arnold Schoenberg with the New York Philharmonic. His breakthrough came in March 1952 when he recorded “Moonlight in Vermont” as a leader with tenor saxophonist Stan Getz on Royal Roost Records. The recording became a commercial hit and earned Smith the nickname “King of Cool Jazz Guitar.”

Success with Roost Records led to approximately twenty albums featuring solo guitar and trio arrangements. “The Sound of the Johnny Smith Guitar” (1961) and “The Man with the Blue Guitar” (1962) became signature works, with the latter becoming one of jazz guitar’s most transcribed recordings. By 1954, Smith won both Metronome and Down Beat readers’ polls for guitarist of the year. He collaborated with Guild founder Alfred Dronge to design the Guild Johnny Smith Award in 1955, becoming the company’s first signature artist. Gibson executive Ted McCarty visited Smith in Colorado in 1961 to develop the Gibson Johnny Smith model, which set new standards in archtop guitar design.

Smith’s composition “Walk, Don’t Run” (1954) gained wider recognition when The Ventures recorded it in 1960, reaching number two on the Billboard charts. Following his second wife Ann’s death during childbirth in 1958, Smith relocated to Colorado Springs to raise his young daughter with family support. He opened a music store and maintained a private teaching practice while recording sporadically. Smith recorded three albums for Verve Records: “Johnny Smith” (1967), “Johnny Smith’s Kaleidoscope” (1968), and “Phase II” (1968). Guitarist Bill Frisell later cited Smith’s profound influence on his own work. The Alabama Jazz Hall of Fame inducted Smith in 1984. The Smithsonian Institution awarded him the James Smithson Bicentennial Medal in 1998. Smith died in Colorado Springs on June 11, 2013, at age ninety from complications of a fall, leaving a legacy as one of jazz history’s most innovative guitarists and a pioneer of chord melody playing.