Many of Smith’s most effective hits featured straight-ahead country arrangements highlighted by Weldon Myrick’s pedal steel guitar. Her material leaned heavily toward standard themes of lost love and heartache, as exemplified by such classic hits as Anderson’s “Then and Only Then” and Dallas Frazier’s “Ain’t Had No Lovin’,” but she also cut darkly personal songs, including “Ribbon of Darkness” and “The Last Letter.” She achieved nineteen Top Ten hits through 1973, establishing herself as a singer of consistent quality and rare emotional impact. In 1965, Smith joined the Grand Ole Opry, where she has remained a fan favorite for decades. She cut the Anderson-written “Once a Day” in July 1964 at RCA Studio B issued as her first single, it spent eight weeks at #1. Smith went into the studio with RCA staff producer Bob Ferguson, who would become an important studio collaborator. That May, she returned to Nashville and cut four demos of Anderson’s songs, which led Chet Atkins to sign Smith to RCA Records. With Anderson’s help, Smith performed on the Ernest Tubb Record Shop’s Midnite Jamboree in March 1964. Ushered to Nashville, Thanks to Bill AndersonĪnderson heard Smith sing again on a shared New Year’s Day bill in Canton, Ohio, and after the show, he encouraged her to come to Nashville. During the concert, headliner Bill Anderson noticed Smith’s talent. In August 1963, Smith won a talent contest in Columbus, Ohio, earning a performing spot that evening in a concert featuring members of the Grand Ole Opry. She began singing at local events, eventually joining the cast of a regional TV program, Saturday Night Jamboree, on WSAZ in Huntington, West Virginia. She has cited Kitty Wells and Jean Shepard as favorites, as well as jazz singers Sarah Vaughan and Nancy Wilson, and her voice shows both the straightforward spirit of her country idols and the moody inflections culled from jazz artists.Īs a young music fan, Smith taught herself to play acoustic guitar at age eighteen, while recuperating from a lawnmower accident. Her parents were migrant farm workers and times were often hard, so Smith escaped by listening obsessively to the radio, especially the Grand Ole Opry. Smith struggled with the demands of professional entertaining, especially leaving her children to travel and perform, but while these internal dilemmas interrupted her momentum, they also brought depth to her music’s emotional content.īorn Constance June Meador on August 14, 1941, Smith grew up in West Virginia and Ohio in a family of fourteen children. She didn’t focus on scaling the heights of the entertainment industry with the single-minded tenacity shown by some artists of her generation. After launching her career with a debut #1 single, Smith at times looked upon stardom with ambivalence. Her powerhouse vocals thrill audiences as much as ever as she enters her seventies and moves toward 50th anniversary of career in music.Connie Smith’s occasional reluctance to embrace celebrity marks her career almost as much as her inimitable talents. Her personal life has been less smooth than her career at times with three failed marriages although she has been happily married to country star Marty Stuart, seventeen years her junior, since 1997. Smith remained one of country's top female stars into the late 1970's when she decided to step back a bit from the limelight. Virtually every other record Smith released for the next decade was a top ten smash for her and she also racked up numerous Grammy award nominations. Widely regarded as one of country music's finest female vocalists, Connie Smith had a blockbuster smash right off the bat with her first record release in 1964, "Once A Day", a song that remained at number one on the charts for several months.
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