When Huey "Piano" Smith Came to Baton Rouge

Huey “Piano” Smith is the rock and roll star from New Orleans who lived out of the limelight in Baton Rouge for forty-three years.

The songwriter and pianist recorded infectiously fun national and regional hits in the 1950s and ’60s. His best known songs include 1957’s “Rockin' Pneumonia & the Boogie Woogie Flu,” 1958’s “Don’t You Just Know It” and 1959’s “Sea Cruise.” And with his singing, dancing, clowning group, the Clowns, he performed everywhere from Catholic Youth Organization dances in Baton Rouge, to Dick Clark’s top-rated American Bandstand, to the Apollo Theater in New York.

In 1980, Smith moved with his wife, Margrette, to Baton Rouge, shortly afterwards retiring from his music career. But the music never disappeared. From the 1950s to the present, major artists recorded and performed his material. That starry list includes Bruce Springsteen, Patti LaBelle, Jimmy Buffett, Jerry Lee Lewis, Jason Isbell, Tom Jones, Paul Simon, Aerosmith, the Grateful Dead, Sonny and Cher, KC and the Sunshine Band, Boz Scaggs, Chubby Checker, and Deep Purple. Johnny Rivers, the 1960s and ’70s recording star who grew up in Baton Rouge, released the biggest-selling remake of a Smith song: a 1972 take on “Rocking Pneumonia,”  which reached number six on the Billboard Hot 100.

In 1980, Smith moved with his wife, Margrette, to Baton Rouge, shortly afterwards retiring from his music career. But the music never disappeared.

Despite Smith’s songwriting talent, pianistic prowess, and chart success, the music business brought him many disappointments—not the least of which was the failure of Ace Records and Ace Publishing to make proper royalty payments for his compositions and recordings. Perhaps his greatest disillusionment came when Ace Records, the Mississippi label he’d signed with in 1956, replaced the original vocals on his song, “Sea Cruise,” with a solo voice track by another Ace artist, Frankie Ford. In the era of teen idols, Ace Records assumed that Ford, a white teenager, would sell millions more records than Smith, a Black artist in his mid-twenties.

[Read John Wirt's story about contemporary Baton Rouge bluesman Kenny Neal, here.]

Smith temporarily left music after his recording career declined in the 1960s, though he returned in the late 1970s, at his manager’s behest, and recorded a new album. He also performed with the reunited Clowns at Tipitina’s and other New Orleans venues, at The Kingfish in Baton Rouge, and the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival. Smith’s brief second era in music continued until spring 1981. Leaving the stage and studio again, he made only one more major appearance, in 2000 at the Rhythm and Blues Foundation’s Pioneer Awards gala in New York City.

In 1992, Smith, his wife Margrette, and their granddaughter Tyra were living in Baton Rouge’s Beauregard Town. Rhadd Hunt, a young musician who enjoyed taking early evening walks in summer, encountered the neighborhood’s inconspicuous music star. “When he told me who he was,” Hunt recently recalled, “I was surprised that somebody quite famous was living just around the corner from me.”

Hunt surprised Smith when he shared that he was listening to New Orleans singer-pianist Professor Longhair, one of Smith’s inspirations, on his Sony Walkman during his stroll. “Huey,” Hunt remembered, “was like, ‘You know who that is?’” Hunt added that he knew Smith’s own music, and recordings others had made of his songs. “The first time I probably put a name to it,” Hunt recalled, “was Dr. John’s album, Gumbo, where he does a medley of Huey’s songs. I remember thinking ‘these are really great songs.’”

“If Huey hadn’t told me who he was, I’d never have known. He was just a quiet, mild mannered fellow. Pleasant to chat with and he always waved if I rode by.” —Rhadd Hunt

One evening as Hunt was driving to a gig with Henry Turner Jr. and Flavor at Tabby’s Blues Box and Heritage Hall, he spotted Smith on the sidewalk and stopped. Smith asked Hunt if he knew of the Rose and Thomas Café, the restaurant that shared one side of a single-story brick building with Tabby’s Blues Box. He knew it well. “I ate there all the time,” Hunt said. “I was a starving young musician, but I could get a giant plate of red beans or white beans and a big link of sausage and cornbread and greens for a buck-and-a-half at Mama Rose’s.”

Hunt gave Smith a ride and they had dinner together at the Rose and Thomas Café. Other patrons at the soul food restaurant on North Boulevard included swamp-blues musicians who played at Tabby’s Blues Box: Silas Hogan, Arthur “Guitar” Kelley, and Moses “Whispering” Smith. “They’d all put out records, but they were just regular folks,” Hunt said. At first glance, Huey Smith was a regular guy, too. “If Huey hadn’t told me who he was, I’d never have known,” Hunt said. “He was just a quiet, mild mannered fellow. Pleasant to chat with and he always waved if I rode by.”

[Read John Wirt's story about Professor Longhair's "second chance at stardom," here.]

After Smith left New Orleans, his eldest child, Acquelyn Smith Donseroux, enjoyed visits with him in Baton Rouge. “My ex-husband is my best friend,” the recently retired nurse said. “He jokes and says, ‘You’re your daddy’s biggest fan.’ So, I started calling myself that.”

Donseroux recalled that about thirty years ago, her father refused to autograph his records for one of her hospital operating room colleagues. “My daddy loved me,” she recalled. “He would do anything for me—unless it violated his religion. Daddy said, ‘Ackie, I don’t sign autographs.’ ‘Well, Daddy, why?’ So, he explained his religious reasoning. He didn’t want to be an idol. In his interpretation of the Bible, as a Jehovah’s Witness, signing autographs would mean he thinks he is beyond Jehovah. So, I had to bring the records back (unsigned)—but I’m never embarrassed about what my daddy does or doesn’t do. I love him and I respect his religion.”

In December 2022, Donseroux brought the newly-published Japanese edition of Smith’s biography (originally published by LSU Press in 2014) to her father in Baton Rouge. The Japanese-language edition of the book had been a longtime dream for Masahiro Sumori, its Tokyo-based translator. “Huey, despite his great influence, isn’t properly appreciated for what he’s done,” Sumori writes in his translation’s afterward. “It is true that some of the stories in the book are, contrary to the happy tone of Huey’s music, painful to read. But I want you readers to acknowledge the tough things Huey faced in his life, and then empty your head and enjoy his music once again. Ha, ha, ha, ha! Hey-ey, Oh! The time passes, but the party by the Clowns continues.”

On February 13, 2023, a few weeks after his eighty-ninth birthday, Huey “Piano” Smith died peacefully in his sleep. “He just slept away,” his daughter said. “Daddy was the most positive person I know. He was easy going and funny, and a comedian until the last hours.”

Major obituaries appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Philadelphia Inquirer, Rolling Stone, Variety, Billboard, and Living Blues. National Public Radio’s "Morning Edition" aired a feature, too. And community radio programs devoted to New Orleans music and classic American roots music paid tribute. Nine months later, Smith and Fats Domino were the honorees for Tipitina’s annual Thanksgiving eve tribute concert to classic New Orleans artists. Billed as “A Tribute to the Instigators of Funk and Rock and Roll,” the show featured a huge cast of local all-stars.

Donseroux, like Dr. John, a New Orleans music star for whom Smith was a beloved mentor, has no regrets that her father abandoned his musician’s lifestyle. “I had my daddy a long time,” she explained. “That’s priceless. He wasn’t angry at the music world. He wasn’t unhappy. He didn’t care about superficial things.”

“We illustrate a person like me as being this caterpillar crawling,” Smith said in an interview in 2000 at his Beauregard Town home. “Well, that was Huey Smith, the musician. So, now I’m studying the Bible with the Jehovah’s Witnesses and—what have you? A beautiful butterfly.” 

John Wirt is the author of the biography Huey “Piano” Smith and the Rocking Pneumonia Blues, published in 2014 by LSU Press.