Albert Smith...The Bluesman Who's Carved a Name for Himself

November 19, 2002

Albert Smith...The Bluesman
Who's Carved a Name for Himself

*****

By Jay Harrod
Arkansas Tourism

Watching Albert Smith carve and hand paint a cedar sign, it would be easy to assume he's been doing it all his life. Sign making, though, is actually his latest professional endeavor. Smith, 56, got started as a blues musician, and, like his signs, his music has brought the artist notoriety from near and far. He's recorded a top 10 hit on England's popular British Broadcasting Corporation's public radio network and has toured with big-name rhythm and blues entertainers such as Isaac Hayes and Albert King.

Born in the Delta between Stuttgart and DeWitt in Arkansas County, Smith was raised on a farm, his father a sharecropper. "Music was always around my house," he said with a smile. Smith's mother was a gifted singer in the church choir and his father a talented accordion player.

While music was important, money for instruments was hard to come by. Before he was able to buy his first guitar, Smith said he and his brothers would stretch wires and use bottles to create sounds. At the age of 9, a family friend lent Smith a drum set, which he quickly learned to play.

Smith's first experiences entertaining crowds soon followed. According to Smith, he would accompany his mother on Friday and Saturday nights to country stores that doubled as honky-tonks where local musicians gathered to play the blues. At first the pair would make the trip solely to purchase fish for the family's evening meal, but Smith said he soon found himself performing alongside the older men.

"If you chop cotton for two and half or three dollars a day, and your momma takes you up there to this honky-tonk and you come back home with 15 or 16 dollars, what you think she's going to tell you?" Smith asked. "You been workin' out in the field all the week for 15 dollars. Them rice farmers and all those guys would come in there throwin' all that money around, and saying, 'Let that little boy play.' And I did."

At an early age, though, Smith had aspirations much higher than entertaining locally. "My daddy got us a TV in 1955. When he got that TV, I looked up there and saw Ed Sullivan and Elvis Presley on that show and, man, I knew that's what I wanted to do," he said.

By 12, he was playing in a band with his older brothers. Not long after, Smith used money saved from chopping cotton and washing cars to buy an electric guitar from Sears & Roebuck for $37. At 15, Smith formed his own band, and before he graduated high school he traveled to a Memphis studio with blues singer Willie C. Cobbs and recorded his first song.

After high school, Smith moved to Detroit where he worked for the Ford Motor Company. "I stayed 'til the first winter -- when it got cold," he said, laughing. Smith said he returned to Little Rock where he played in clubs as part of back-up bands for traveling blues acts. Within a few years, Smith was performing with the likes of Al Green, Albert King, Johnny Lee Hooker and Earl Hooker.

Through a friend, Smith was introduced to Isaac Hayes, with whom he's recorded and toured (in 1974). "We played Reno, Las Vegas, Washington, New York, the Bahamas," Smith said. "We were in Las Vegas for four weeks. That was nice. I've never been on that level. We got paid $200 a night, and all expenses were paid. You didn't have to buy clothes -- you wore uniforms. They even paid to have your uniform cleaned."

Constant traveling, though, took a toll on Smith, who had two sons and a daughter at home. "So I came home off the road [in 1982] and got me a day job," Smith said. That job was as a sign maker for the Arkansas Department of Parks and Tourism. But he wasn't quite ready to give up music.

"I got my oldest son to play the bass and keyboard for me, and we put together a little band," he said. In 1989, the four-person band, the Superstars, entered a Budweiser Showdown. The Superstars won first place locally, second place in the region finals, and went on to the national finals in Los Angeles where they came in third overall.

"We were on TV and aired all over the country," Smith said.

Timeless Records of Yorkshire, England, took notice and signed a deal with Smith and the Superstars. "We first recorded a 12-inch, which has one song on each side," Smith said. The Superstars then recorded an album with Timeless, but, according to Smith, never recorded another because of disagreements with the recording company.

Singles the Superstars recorded with Timeless made it into the top 10 on the BBC. The band planned a trip to England to further promote the album, but the Gulf War in 1991 brought those plans to an end, according to Smith.

Smith describes these accomplishments as the summit of his musical career. "You get credit for what you do," he said. "When I played with Albert [King] or Isaac [Hayes], they got the credit."

To this day, Smith says he continues to receive royalty checks from songs played on European radio stations -- as little as $50, but sometimes as much as $1,000. Since his Superstar days, Smith said he primarily plays guitar at his church, and upon request he has occasionally backed up a musician. (In 1984, he played with Albert King at several summer festivals.)

His last gig was at Little Rock's Whitewater Tavern on Dec. 15, 2001. Smith has back problems and has developed diabetes. In November of 2000, he suffered a stroke. Smith said that while he enjoyed the show and loved the crowd, it might very well have been his last club performance. If so, it was an appropriate end to the sign maker's professional musical career. That night at Whitewater, he played with Willie C. Cobbs, the same bluesman who urged and then accompanied a very young Smith to record in Memphis.

Making First Impressions at Parks

While Smith's name lives on across European airwaves, for the past 20 years he's been busy creating legacies at state parks. His 6-foot-by-8-foot entrance signs have drawn attention from the Smithsonian Institution's Museum of American Art as well as park goers. More than a dozen of Smith's signs have been included on a list of publicly accessible outdoor sculptures under the Smithsonian's "Save Outdoor Sculpture!" program. (The list is available at www.americanart.si.edu.)

Smith, a Parks and Tourism Department employee since 1982, begins his creative process with a visit to get a feel for the park. After exploring its characteristics, Smith gathers input from park interpreters and superintendents and then develops a conceptual drawing. After the design is approved, Smith joins six 8-foot-long cedar boards and starts his work of art.

Once the 4-inch-thick boards form a contiguous surface, Smith enlarges and transfers the design from his drawing and begins the tedious task of carving the wood, mostly using simple hand tools. The last two weeks of the eight-week process are usually spent painting the three-dimensional creations.

The result is stunning. Smith's painting skills are accentuated by the carved surface, creating -- in many aspects -- layer upon layer of interest. Upon viewing even Smith's early signs, it's hard to imagine that he had no woodcarving experience when he took the job.

Experience in art, though, is a different story. By the time Smith joined the department in 1982, he was already an accomplished painter. He'd been drawing since a child, and from 1976 to 1978 studied art at the University of Arkansas at Pine Bluff. In the summer of 1979, during a slow point in his musical career, Smith worked in a nursing home and drew and painted portraits of residents with whom he developed close relationships. He would often sell these works to the residents' family members.

(The NAACP would later commission Smith to paint a portrait of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Smith also serves as the official portrait artist at Little Rock's Hearne Fine Art -- formerly the Pyramid Gallery -- which once commissioned him to paint a portrait of Daisy Bates, a leader in the 1957 civil rights struggle at Little Rock's Central High School. That painting now hangs on the fourth floor of Arkansas' Capitol. And he has painted -- upon request from the professional basketball star and Arkansas native -- a portrait of Scottie Pippen.)

Around the same time Smith decided he wanted to spend more time with his family and less time on the road, a former U.A.P.B. classmate who was working at Parks and Tourism told him about the sign making vacancy. "He called me and said, 'Albert, you can draw and paint. I think you can do this job. Just bring your paintings,'" Smith said.

Smith gathered his portraits and other prized artworks and went for an interview. His friend was right. Those interviewing Smith recognized his artistic talent and thought he'd be able to acquire the necessary carving skills.

Any doubts soon disappeared as Smith quickly learned the new trade. Over the years, he's created more than 500 signs -- about 25 a year, including smaller ones. And while he's now an experienced carver, he says he still considers himself an artist first and a woodcarver second. Regardless, he's clearly a master of his craft. In addition to the Smithsonian's recognition, Smith's work has been featured in the national trade magazine Sign of the Times.

Smith is also known for signs other than those made for state parks. Most noticeably, he created signs at Hot Springs and Hope when Bill Clinton was elected President in 1992. The signs inform visitors that Hope was Clinton's birthplace and Hot Springs Clinton's hometown.

Like many artists, Smith has a hard time determining which piece is his favorite. When pressed, though, he replied, "whichever one I just finished." By the way, Smith's most recent is an entrance sign for the Louisiana Purchase State Park -- completed just in time for the beginning of the bicentennial celebration of the most significant land purchase in United States history.
 

Submitted by the Arkansas Department of Parks & Tourism
One Capitol Mall, Little Rock, AR 72201, (501) 682-7606
E-mail: info@arkansas.com

May be used without permission. Credit line is appreciated:
"Arkansas Department of Parks & Tourism"