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Biography
Guitarist, singer and songwriter of the Hot Club of Cowtown, Austin, TX
For nearly thirty years, Whit Smith has been one of the foremost guardians of Western swing, the music born in Texas dance halls and made famous by Bob Wills. A guitarist, singer, songwriter, and educator, he co-founded the Hot Club of Cowtown in 1997 and has carried its sound to audiences around the world.
EARLY YEARS
Whit was born in Greenwich, Connecticut and spent his earliest years in New Canaan, Connecticut and later Wellfleet, Massachusetts. Born to musical parents, he was exposed right away to a life of practicing and performing. Says Smith:
“My mom and dad used to sing and play folk music every night after my dad got home from work. Every weekend my dad would spend hours sitting in front of the record player figuring out rural blues tunes by Robert Johnson and Mississippi John Hurt. Then for a couple of years he was really big on Manitas de Plata and flamenco guitar. I still have his old records with all the notes and diagrams he drew out for himself.”
NEW YORK
Self-taught on the guitar, at 19 Whit moved to New York City and began studying immediately with Bill Connors, the jazz fusion pioneer who had played with Chick Corea. A year later he began classical piano lessons with Professor Dowell Multer, who taught him music theory and many tools he employs to this day. At the same time he discovered vintage country records and split his time between jazz and trying to make his Telecaster sound like Ralph Mooney on the steel.
He then met the legendary New York guitarist and scholar Richard Lieberson, and every week for two years Whit made the long journey from the Lower East Side to the Upper West Side for lessons, often more than two hours long, on the guitar and also on the history and chronology of all the early twentieth-century music he was fascinated by.
Whit applied what he learned as fast as he learned it and started The Western Caravan, a thirteen-piece Western swing orchestra that played the music of Bob Wills, Milton Brown, and Tex Williams and featured triple fiddles, piano, steel, and trumpet! The band was a fixture of the long-gone Rodeo Bar and played to a jam-packed house every Monday for years.
HOT CLUB OF COWTOWN
It was during this time that he met violinist Elana James. He ultimately began the Hot Club of Cowtown with her, and the band has been his passion and chief focus since the group released its first recordings.
Whit has performed and recorded with Western swing legends Johnny Gimble and Bobby Koefer, as well as rock icon Patti Smith. With the Hot Club of Cowtown, he has recorded more than a dozen albums, including the Bob Wills tribute What Makes Bob Holler, and toured opening for Bob Dylan, Willie Nelson, and Roxy Music.
His stages have ranged from Austin’s Continental Club to London’s O2 Arena and Japan’s Fuji Rock Festival. As U.S. State Department Musical Ambassadors, the band has also toured all over the world from Australia to Azerbaijan, Europe, the U.K., and Algeria. The trio is a member of both the Texas Western Swing Hall of Fame and the International Western Music Association Hall of Fame.
STYLE
Whit’s style was shaped by years of hunting down rare recordings and tracking down the musicians who made them in the 1930s through the 1950s, interviewing them and, in many cases, befriending them. From that education he found his own voice, developing an advanced, highly ornate yet driving style, rich in double stops, that lets three musicians sound like a full orchestra while keeping an aesthetic true to the era. His playing is original rather than imitative, and it has become a model for a younger generation of swing guitarists. He is widely regarded as authentic because he learned the tradition from the people who lived it, and then added to it.
RECORDINGS & TEACHING
Whit has also released a solo album of all original instrumental guitar music, On the Nature of Strings, and Hell Among the Hedgehogs, a project with guitarist Matt Munisteri.
His educational DVD series is called Chordination, and he is often asked to teach at guitar seminars such as Red Hot Strings in Port Townsend, Washington, and Django in June in Northampton, Massachusetts.
VIDEOS
A selection of video clips, from television to fan-held cameras, is HERE on YouTube.