The current discussions concerning J. T. Funny "Paper/Papa" Smith here and on the Lyrics Forum has prompted me to unearth the first 'in-depth' look at Smith and his body of work. This was written by Tony Russell using his Smith 78 collection as the basis and published in From Jazz & Blues magazine (April 1971.) It should perhaps be noted that what follows was written 18 months before the release of the Yazoo LP (and its copious historical and musicological notesd) and at a time when there were only three titles commonly available on three different compilations from 1968 - Howlin' Wolf Pts 1&2, Fools Blues and Before Long.
Blues Masters Of The 30s - J T Smith
Tony Russell
'Aaargh!', the recent exhibition of comics at the ICA, may have influenced my choice of this month's Blues Master, for J. T. Smith, though well known as 'The Howling Wolf', was also billed on all his records as 'Funny Paper' Smith; and what can this mean but that he was an avid reader of comics? It was only a stroke of bad luck, one feels, that prevented him recording a Krazy Kat blues. But perhaps accuracy's chilly breath will blow away this fanciful theory; for the recently discovered Texan bluesman Thomas Shaw has claimed that Vocalion got it wrong: he was 'Funny Papa' Smith. Oh, well.
As for his other nickname, it was probably suggested by the success of his debut record, the two-part Howling wolf blues (Vocalion 1558) that appeared in late 1930. This sold extremely well, perhaps partly because Smith established his identity very firmly in the opening stanza:
I'm that wolf that everybody's been tryin to find out where in the world I prowl; (x2)
Don't nobody ever get to (see) me, but
they all hear me when I howl,
Like Peetie Wheatstraw, Smith fashioned an assertive and sexually threatening image, but he was less aggressive than 'The Devil's Son-in-Law', and, as subsequent records proved, somewhat more imaginative. Seven Sisters Blues, (Vocalion 1641), another two-part song, is a detailed story of his encounter with that celebrated family of fortune-tellers in New Orleans. 'They tell me they've been hung,' he sings, 'been bled and been crucified'; and 'you can't name them Sisters apart, because they all look just the same'. His consultation has a pleasant result:
The Seven Sisters sent me away happy,
round the corner I met a nice little girl; (x2)
She looked at me and smiled, and said,
'Go tell them that you saw the world'.
And the soothsayers' last message is that The Howling Wolf 'won't have no more trouble' but will 'live twenty days in the week'.
Smith's concern with the Seven Sisters may have been stimulated by his dissatisfaction with conventional religion. Immediately before recording Seven Sisters blues he cut Fools Blues (Vocalion 1674; Yazoo L-1010), in which he declared 'it must be the devil I'm servin', I know it can't be Jesus Christ, 'cause I asked him to save me and it look like he's tryin' to take my life'. 'Some people tell me God takes care of old folks and fools,' he had begun; but by the end of the song he was sure that he did not believe it.
It should be clear already that Smith's blues are rather unusual; the textual lines are long, his thoughts are vividly expressed, and his themes are not run-of-the-mill ones. An artist of whom he always reminds me is Leroy Carr; it may be significant that they were both recording frequently for the same company in 1930-31. Smith has a habit of dropping his voice an octave, or most of an octave, at the end of a stanza?a very distinctive trick, which gives the melody a wistful air?and the same device is to be found in a few of Carr's blues such as Hurry Down Sunshine. The gentle, easy-going swing of the Carr-Blackwell recordings is not unlike that of Smith's, which were customarily voice-and-guitar pieces; The Howling Wolf played with a fluidity and grace that reminds one less of Willie Reed, say, or Carl Davis, than of Big Bill Broonzy. He was, in fact, a most accomplished guitarist, who could pull off double-tempo phrases (as in Seven Sisters Blues?part 2) with the panache of Blind Blake. His strong sense of rhythm would not, one might think, have made him the best accompanist in the world for Texas Alexander, but the two worked together for a time in the late '30s.
Joe Pullum, of whom I talked in the January Jazz Monthly, was obscure enough, but even less is known of the life of J. T. Smith. According to Thomas Shaw he committed murder in Oklahoma in 1931; he was indeed absent from the studios for four years between 1931 and 1935, and one of the first songs he recorded in '35 was Life In Prison Blues. He also made parts 5 and 6 of the Howling Wolf saga, but they were not issued?fortunately, in a way, because he had prefaced the 1931 recording of Howling Wolf blues?part 4 (Vocalion 1614) with 'well, it looks like the last of old Howlin' Wolf'. On one of the '35 items he was accompanied by a guitarist named 'Little Brother'; several claimants to this title were found by Paul Oliver in 1960. It does seem likely that Smith's friend was Willie (Little Brother) Lane, who recorded a Howling Wolf Blues (Talent 806) in Dallas in 1949; the piece ?which ends with vulpine howls?is largely taken from Smith's Howling Wolf Blues?part 3, certainly the best remembered of the four issued sections. Lightnin' Hopkins 1948 Howling Wolf Blues (Imperial unissued; Liberty(E) LBL83213) goes back to the same recording; so does part of West Texas Slim's Little Mae Belle (Flame 1007), which also draws on part 2 of the series. (In other words, Smith's most popular theme was disseminated and disintegrated in precisely the same way as Joe Pullum's Black Gal. Probably one could trace a similar process in the history of the Penitentiary blues song. Is it at all significant that each of these micro traditions developed almost exclusively in Texas?)
A few semi-biographical notes can be added. Smith recorded a pair of two part duets, one with Dessa Foster and the other with Magnolia Harris (who is said to have been Victoria Spivey); they seem to be offspring of the very popular Kansas Joe-Memphis Minnie recordings like Can I Do It For You? J. D. Short, according to Bob Koester, 'knew some of the Smith songs letter-perfect', and may have known the man too. (He actually said he was Smith, but that just couldn't be true.) Frankie Lee Sims could probably tell us a lot, as could Ernest Lewis (West Texas Slim) if he were traced. The Thomas Shaw interview, when it comes into being, will surely have much to say. For the present we have only the records.
These, I suspect, were fairly popular, and so they deserved to be. Smith had a rare ability to create vocal melodies and accompaniment-patterns of subtle novelty, and his compositions repeatedly suggest that he had an unusual personality. (And that he may have been untypically well educated.) Even the metaphors and jokes of Hoppin' Toad Frog (Vocalion 1655) are wittier than one would expect. It is quite possible that he had some effect upon Mance Lipscomb ? some of the blues on Mance's latest LP hint at it ? and his approach to the guitar often seems to anticipate Lightnin's. He is the kind of musician without whom even if he had had no influence upon others whatsoever?the blues of the '30s would have been considerably poorer.
[Edit note - forgot to add this link http://www.wirz.de/music/smifpfrm.htm]
Blues Masters Of The 30s - J T Smith
Tony Russell
'Aaargh!', the recent exhibition of comics at the ICA, may have influenced my choice of this month's Blues Master, for J. T. Smith, though well known as 'The Howling Wolf', was also billed on all his records as 'Funny Paper' Smith; and what can this mean but that he was an avid reader of comics? It was only a stroke of bad luck, one feels, that prevented him recording a Krazy Kat blues. But perhaps accuracy's chilly breath will blow away this fanciful theory; for the recently discovered Texan bluesman Thomas Shaw has claimed that Vocalion got it wrong: he was 'Funny Papa' Smith. Oh, well.
As for his other nickname, it was probably suggested by the success of his debut record, the two-part Howling wolf blues (Vocalion 1558) that appeared in late 1930. This sold extremely well, perhaps partly because Smith established his identity very firmly in the opening stanza:
I'm that wolf that everybody's been tryin to find out where in the world I prowl; (x2)
Don't nobody ever get to (see) me, but
they all hear me when I howl,
Like Peetie Wheatstraw, Smith fashioned an assertive and sexually threatening image, but he was less aggressive than 'The Devil's Son-in-Law', and, as subsequent records proved, somewhat more imaginative. Seven Sisters Blues, (Vocalion 1641), another two-part song, is a detailed story of his encounter with that celebrated family of fortune-tellers in New Orleans. 'They tell me they've been hung,' he sings, 'been bled and been crucified'; and 'you can't name them Sisters apart, because they all look just the same'. His consultation has a pleasant result:
The Seven Sisters sent me away happy,
round the corner I met a nice little girl; (x2)
She looked at me and smiled, and said,
'Go tell them that you saw the world'.
And the soothsayers' last message is that The Howling Wolf 'won't have no more trouble' but will 'live twenty days in the week'.
Smith's concern with the Seven Sisters may have been stimulated by his dissatisfaction with conventional religion. Immediately before recording Seven Sisters blues he cut Fools Blues (Vocalion 1674; Yazoo L-1010), in which he declared 'it must be the devil I'm servin', I know it can't be Jesus Christ, 'cause I asked him to save me and it look like he's tryin' to take my life'. 'Some people tell me God takes care of old folks and fools,' he had begun; but by the end of the song he was sure that he did not believe it.
It should be clear already that Smith's blues are rather unusual; the textual lines are long, his thoughts are vividly expressed, and his themes are not run-of-the-mill ones. An artist of whom he always reminds me is Leroy Carr; it may be significant that they were both recording frequently for the same company in 1930-31. Smith has a habit of dropping his voice an octave, or most of an octave, at the end of a stanza?a very distinctive trick, which gives the melody a wistful air?and the same device is to be found in a few of Carr's blues such as Hurry Down Sunshine. The gentle, easy-going swing of the Carr-Blackwell recordings is not unlike that of Smith's, which were customarily voice-and-guitar pieces; The Howling Wolf played with a fluidity and grace that reminds one less of Willie Reed, say, or Carl Davis, than of Big Bill Broonzy. He was, in fact, a most accomplished guitarist, who could pull off double-tempo phrases (as in Seven Sisters Blues?part 2) with the panache of Blind Blake. His strong sense of rhythm would not, one might think, have made him the best accompanist in the world for Texas Alexander, but the two worked together for a time in the late '30s.
Joe Pullum, of whom I talked in the January Jazz Monthly, was obscure enough, but even less is known of the life of J. T. Smith. According to Thomas Shaw he committed murder in Oklahoma in 1931; he was indeed absent from the studios for four years between 1931 and 1935, and one of the first songs he recorded in '35 was Life In Prison Blues. He also made parts 5 and 6 of the Howling Wolf saga, but they were not issued?fortunately, in a way, because he had prefaced the 1931 recording of Howling Wolf blues?part 4 (Vocalion 1614) with 'well, it looks like the last of old Howlin' Wolf'. On one of the '35 items he was accompanied by a guitarist named 'Little Brother'; several claimants to this title were found by Paul Oliver in 1960. It does seem likely that Smith's friend was Willie (Little Brother) Lane, who recorded a Howling Wolf Blues (Talent 806) in Dallas in 1949; the piece ?which ends with vulpine howls?is largely taken from Smith's Howling Wolf Blues?part 3, certainly the best remembered of the four issued sections. Lightnin' Hopkins 1948 Howling Wolf Blues (Imperial unissued; Liberty(E) LBL83213) goes back to the same recording; so does part of West Texas Slim's Little Mae Belle (Flame 1007), which also draws on part 2 of the series. (In other words, Smith's most popular theme was disseminated and disintegrated in precisely the same way as Joe Pullum's Black Gal. Probably one could trace a similar process in the history of the Penitentiary blues song. Is it at all significant that each of these micro traditions developed almost exclusively in Texas?)
A few semi-biographical notes can be added. Smith recorded a pair of two part duets, one with Dessa Foster and the other with Magnolia Harris (who is said to have been Victoria Spivey); they seem to be offspring of the very popular Kansas Joe-Memphis Minnie recordings like Can I Do It For You? J. D. Short, according to Bob Koester, 'knew some of the Smith songs letter-perfect', and may have known the man too. (He actually said he was Smith, but that just couldn't be true.) Frankie Lee Sims could probably tell us a lot, as could Ernest Lewis (West Texas Slim) if he were traced. The Thomas Shaw interview, when it comes into being, will surely have much to say. For the present we have only the records.
These, I suspect, were fairly popular, and so they deserved to be. Smith had a rare ability to create vocal melodies and accompaniment-patterns of subtle novelty, and his compositions repeatedly suggest that he had an unusual personality. (And that he may have been untypically well educated.) Even the metaphors and jokes of Hoppin' Toad Frog (Vocalion 1655) are wittier than one would expect. It is quite possible that he had some effect upon Mance Lipscomb ? some of the blues on Mance's latest LP hint at it ? and his approach to the guitar often seems to anticipate Lightnin's. He is the kind of musician without whom even if he had had no influence upon others whatsoever?the blues of the '30s would have been considerably poorer.
[Edit note - forgot to add this link http://www.wirz.de/music/smifpfrm.htm]