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I was born on May 10, 1897. I started playing the banjo when I was seven years old. When I was three, I commenced playin’ on an old fire shovel. I was raised in an old log house that had a fireplace and my mother had a bar that went across the fireplace with hooks that came down to cook her stuff in the pots and then she had a big oven and lid and she’d bake her bread and pull out those coals with that shovel — cover it up with red-hot coals, you know — and bake her bread thataway. We didn’t have any cook-stove at that time. They said I was just three years old, I’d get that fire shovel and just pick on it; and they asked me what I was pickin’ and I just said "Sour Colics!"
My father and mother was both banjer pickers. I started the banjer at home. I didn’t learn the gittar at home; I learned it from different men. Now, the first of the gittar playin’ that I really liked was when a bunch of colored men came in there, oh, way back yonder. I was just about fourteen or fifteen years old. It was along about that time that Blind Lemon Jefferson came through and he stayed around there about a month. He stayed with the other colored fellers and they worked on the railroad there, and he’d just play and sing to entertain the men in that work camp. I think right about there I started on the gittar. I liked his type of playin’. I just watched his fingers and got the music in my head and then I’d thumb around till I found what I was wantin’ on the strings.
Now the first fiddle that ever I heard in my life, when I was a kid — there was an old colored man who was raised up in slave times. His name was Jim Spencer. He played "Jinny Put the Kettle On" and all those old tunes like that, you know. And he would come up to our house and he’d play one night for us, and he’d go over to my uncle’s and play one night for them, and then go down to my aunt’s in the other holler — we lived in three different hollers in the mountains, you know. He’d make a round. Now, that was the first fiddling I ever heard in my life, although both my grandaddies were fiddlers. But my granddaddy on my mother’s side died of TB in the old Civil War and my other grandaddy, I never did hear him but saw a little bit on it, buy my daddy said he used to be a good fiddler. So, I’d hear old-timey fiddlers in different places and I"d just get it in my head and work it out with my fingers.
My first life was farming. My daddy’d farmed all his life and I went into farming. And I went into wagoning long before the trucks came around, you know, or any cars at all. My daddy had a team and I had a team and we’d haul coal for people and move people and go to the station and get trunks out. And then I’m a pretty good painter; I used to paint a whole lot. And I was a butcher; I worked with the Olin-Mathieson people for twelve years, a-butchering for ’em. At the time of the first World War, I had got married and was lookin’ for my first kid. Well, I got fourth class and the war never lasted but sixteen months and I never was called.
I had a band. I had two boys that played with me. I played with Tom (Clarence) Ashley thirty or thirty-five years ago. I played in a minstrel show for two years. I played my own music and danced my own music — that’s one curiosity that everybody thought so much about. No, I wasn’t makin’ a livin’ out of it. We’d just go places and play and maybe they’d give us so much. I played in dance halls back along in Hoover’s time, you know, when you couldn’t get ahold of a dollar nowhere. I played the fiddle the most — tunes like "Golden Slippers" and "Coming Around the Mountain" — for dances.
The fact about it — I went into this pop’lar stuff and got to playin’ on that and then when I got in with Alan Lomax in 1942, he wanted me to pull back into the old folk music. And he said, "Don’t you ever leave it no more!" I had just about left it. I hadn’t owned a banjer in twenty-five years till the Vega people sent me that banjer from Boston as a gift several years ago. Pete Seeger got ’em to send it. I hadn’t owned one in twenty-five years. Maybe I’d go to somebody’s house and there’d be a banjer sittin’ there and maybe I’d pick it up and play just one tune and set it down. I’d been playin’ the fiddle and the gittar and the piano. And, you see, all of those old pieces on the banjer was just gettin’ away from me and I didn’t fool with ’em. But after I got this new banjer, why it came back to me in just a little time. In thirty days I was back just as good as I ever was.
So, I’ve had a life in music ever since I was a kid. I grew up into it and I’m still tryin’ to play it.
-Hobart Smith
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