Folk Musician Michael Smith Deserves More
Critic-at-large
I don’t know how many times I’ve listened to a great performer, wishing I could hear him or her in a quiet, intimate setting.
No distractions. No talkative fans. None of the standard concert rigmarole.
Just music.
That’s what Michael Smith delivered Oct. 5 in a store concert at Street Music. It was a concert that offered a chance to reflect on the nature of music and musicians and how they’re rewarded or ignored by society.
Store concerts and the even more-intimate home concerts are a growing trend as legitimate musicians who don’t attract enough paying customers to play larger halls gravitate to smaller and smaller venues.
But while intimacy is a virtue, it reached ludicrous dimensions last week as just eight folks turned out to hear Smith. Ten if you count Street Music owners Jack and Nancy Lindberg.
It was a surprisingly shabby showing, even considering the Al Stewart concert down the street, because Smith is one of the most important contemporary folk musicians.
He wrote “The Dutchman,” “Spoon River” and “This Old Mandolin,” all of which are folk-music standards.
In 1990, he wrote the music for the Steppenwolf Theater Company’s Tony Award-winning version of “The Grapes of Wrath.”
At Street Music, he played 13 songs. Some were serious and some were silly but, either way, the small crowd hung on every word. It was perfect - no distractions, no whispering in the row behind, and no shuffling feet, early departures or bathroom runs.
That’s maybe because the bathrooms at Street Music are behind the stage, but more likely because nobody wanted to miss a word of Smith’s masterful performance.
He’s not a consummate singer - he faltered occasionally on difficult passages and missed a note here and there - but he’s an outstanding guitar player and a terrific performer. His material ranged from selections from his new Flying Fish CD “Time” to his classics and even a couple of novelty tunes.
A self-confessed fan of both Harry Belafonte and Bing Crosby, he rendered a version of “Kingston Town” and sang a faux-Calypso tune called “Bing Crosby” that included a dopey whistling part and some of the worst rhymes ever written.
Smith’s own songs are brilliantly crafted and evocative. His lyrics work on the level of poetry. The “Ballad of Elizabeth Dark” caught a moment of time and one man’s pain in Bohemian Chicago, “The Ballad of Dan Moody” is a Western saga with a tragic ending, and the evocative “Spoon River” does as much to capture the heartbreak of the American Civil War as any textbook:
“All of the riverboat gamblers are losing their shirts
“All of the brave Union soldier boys sleep in the dirt
“But you know and I know there never was reason to hurt
“When all of our lives were entwined to begin with
“Here in Spoon River.”
Smith sang his brilliant interpretations of two of Edgar Lee Masters’ “Spoon River” tales and a ninth-century Chinese poem. All three traveled across the generations with all the power of a song written for these times.
Perhaps artists such as Smith resign themselves to toiling in obscurity. But at a time when music has become a tool of profiteers, it’s disheartening to see a great talent go unrecognized.
Smith laughed it off last week.
It would have been “dorky,” he said, to show up and play for no one.
We laughed, too, but it was a sad moment, all the same.