Albums Blues Got A Hold Of Me, Guitars & Blues

Press Reviews Billy Smith and the Blue Collar Blues Review by J.C. Gamble From Cuyahoga Falls, Ohio come the Billy Smith Band, a six-piece outfit dedicated to the working man’s blues. Think simple, clean riffs complemented with speed on the fret and low-down throaty phrasing and you get some idea. With a raspy voicing part George Thoroughgood, part Tom Waits, guitarist Billy Smith leads his band through a jagged collection of boogie-woogie blues on Guitars and Blues. The follow-up to ‘93’s twelve-track Blues Got A Hold of Me, Guitars is a collection of 15 original no-frills blues jams, each highlighting a vintage guitar with a notable place in the instrument’s evolution. Smith fingers a different guitar on each track, among them rare instruments like a ’65 Fender Jaguar on “Wealth of the World” or a ’67 Gretsch Tennesseean on “I Can’t Take Care of You.” While it’s not unique for guitar players to rotate their instruments on a recording, it is noteworthy for a musician to feature each guitar alongside song titles on the album’s back cover. “I featured a wide variety of guitars because I wanted to document what classic guitars sound like,” said Smith of the recent release. When on the road and confined by van space, he carries a Dan Shinn custom Stratocaster and a Les Paul customized by Ray Lay. The slow ballad “Wealth of the World” is perhaps the best cu on Guitars, featuring low down saxophone fills by Ted Harris. “People I’ll tell you straight about true love and fate, you see the children will smile for just a little while but the wealth of the world and a thousand armies cannot change my love,” sings Smith before launching into a dreamy lead that brings to mind the late Stevie Ray Vaughn. When Guitars and Blues was released in April 2001, “So I Been Told” cracked the top 40 on MP3’s blues charts and all of the tracks have secured top 40 slots on MP3 in the Ohio Blues charts. To date, the Billy Smith Band is the leading Ohio blues act on the MP3 music server. As for the live performance, Smith, a 20-year veteran,, is a showman with the axe and well worth the price of admission. The music throttles along to the steady piano of Rockin’ Robin (actual name in liner notes) while Billy hams it up – behind the back, with the teeth, using a bottle, and on a the bar rail. “It gets wild and crazy,” said Billy. “All of the Hendrix style tricks I can do. I set the guitar flat on the table and play it upside down. I tell people ‘move your beers’ and then play it like a piano.” Smith, who favors a cordless set up to allow free movement while jamming, sometimes rambles out into a bar crowd, his fingers dancing up the fretboard as he alternates pedal sounds from his on stage amplifier set up. “I can click a button on the remote that scrolls through the effects from across the room.” During one smoky night in ’96 while Billy was mixed in with a Savannah nightclub crowd, a brawl erupted inches away and true to the tune, he kept in time while throwing a few punches into the fray with the guitar neck. While the BSB’s home base is technically Akron, Billy spends his time at home in Cuyahoga Falls where he produces albums in his home studio. He has a long-standing reputation around Ohio as a highly-qualified soundman due to his eight years as the audio engineer for the National Park Service as well as his years of work with the National Folk Festival and Kent State Folk Festival. Alongside John Reynolds, recording engineer at Cleveland’s Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, Smith worked on the museum’s Hendrix exhibition and hung out with former Experience member Mitch Mitchell and bandmate Billy Cox. Although Smith enjoys his studio work, he relishes the live performance and has established a reputation as a fierce talent. Two cities close to his heart, and ones for which he will always return, are Savannah and Montreal. “I’ve been coming down for years and I like it, it’s a nice town,” said Smith of Savannah where he lived before ‘96’s Hurricane Fran uprooted him from his Tybee island apartment. He remembers jamming “Stormy Monday” and “Boogie Children” with Eric Culberson of EROC during Culberson’s stint as the house band at the former Crossroads Blues Bar. When not touring or doing production work, Billy is a sponsored guitarist for Ohio-based Galveston Guitars and often can be found demo-ing their six strings at music conventions across the country. He is also endorsed by Audio Technica Microphones whom he has helped design wireless sound systems. “Companies like to use me as a test pilot,” he admits. Typically, a month before BSB rolls into a venue near you, they ship down a Galveston Guitar to hang in the rafters to be given away as a door prize on the night of his performance.

Location Cuyahoga Falls, Ohio - USA

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