Chris Smither is a hot ticket. But lately, his legions of fans, gained over more than half a century of performing and recording, have fewer opportunities to hear his bluesy, intelligent and open-hearted music in concert.
The 71-year-old singer-songwriter-guitarist scaled back his touring schedule after adopting a daughter, now 12, with wife and manager Carol Young. So when Boston-area radio station WUMB announced a free concert to be performed on Sept. 17 at the Strand Theatre in Oak Bluffs with Mr. Smither and opener Willy Mason, seats were quickly snapped up for what proved to be a generous 22-song set by the Amherst-based folk star.
“His songwriting is as terrific as his singing. He’s a poet,” said longtime fan Ruth Johnston, who stopped by the Strand on Saturday afternoon as Mr. Smither chatted with the Gazette in the theatre lobby. Ms. Johnston, a retired clinical social worker, and her husband Lee, a retired psychologist, live in the Martha’s Vineyard Family Campground in season and call Framingham home the rest of the year. This was their fourth Chris Smither concert — or was it the fifth? Ms. Johnston couldn’t be sure. But she still remembers the first.
“It was an outdoor folk festival in Concord, Mass., at least 30 years ago. Could’ve been 40. He was young, we were young,” she said.
Mr. Smither was raised in New Orleans, where his father taught Spanish, Portuguese and Latin American literature at Tulane University. After college, he headed north to the folk-music Meccas of Greenwich Village and Harvard Square. A musical relationship with Bonnie Raitt led to her 1972 hit recording of Mr. Smither’s Love You Like a Man, an early milestone in his career. More recently, jazz star Diana Krall also recorded the song and, like Ms. Raitt, made sure Mr. Smither receives credit for writing it.
The frank sexual swagger and throwdown of Love You Like a Man represents one side of Mr. Smither’s songwriting personality, which admits to some cheerful leering. During his set on Saturday night at the Strand he performed Don’t Call Me Stranger: “I ain’t evil, I’m just bad . . . . If you listen to your momma, you won’t ever have no fun.”
“My mother would have hated this song,” he confessed to the audience.
But any mother would be proud of Time Stood Still, which contains some of his most honest and unflinching lyrics about love: “She don’t want to know/If it’s a metaphor or something in disguise/She let me know, a long time ago/It’s better to say just what I mean/Truth to tell it can hurt like hell/But it keeps me clean.”
Mr. Smither’s set included songs in tribute to his father as well as Charles Darwin in Origin of Species, a witty number that made Rolling Stone magazine’s list of the 100 best songs of 2006.
“I’ve played this song for the wrong audience plenty of times,” he said.
His bluesy, textured baritone has never lost the cadences of New Orleans, particularly on songs like No Love Today, which echoes the cries of street vendors passing by his childhood home. Mr. Smither is an accomplished but never showy folk-blues guitarist — he has released an instructional guitar video through the long-established Homespun Tapes label. But he also has another instrument: his patting feet, so much a part of the act that they get their own microphone.
Opening the show, Island singer-songwriter Willy Mason performed five originals songs before being joined on stage by his wife, Marciana Jones, who sang harmony on another five songs including Talk Me Down. The couple recently joined forces with Evan Dando, formerly of Boston band the Lemonheads, in a trio called The Sandwich Police (TSP) which released a three-song single on Fat Possum Records in May. Mr. Mason also performs a weekly gig at the Ritz on Circuit avenue, Saturdays through the winter, he told the audience.
The free concert at the Strand was hosted by WUMB to reach and reward the membership-sponsored station’s local listeners.
“We like to get outside our little bubble in Boston,” announcer Brendan Hogan told the crowd.
Those who missed the concert have another chance to hear Mr. Smither perform, without leaving the comfort of home. His Sept. 25 appearance in Pittsburgh will be broadcast on the Mountain Stage radio program in late October or early November (information at mountainstage.org). He’s also working on songs for a new album to be recorded next year, he told the Gazette.
“The songs are in their infancy, but they’d better be ready by June, that’s the deadline in my head,” he said. The melodies are ready, and now he needs to write the lyrics, he added.
“You’re going to go into this room and you’re not going to come out for three hours,” he tells himself. “It doesn’t matter if anything happens or not.”
For more recording and touring information, visit smither.com.
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