Photo by John Wirt
Huey “Piano” Smith with Gerri Hall, a member of his group the Clowns in the 1950s and ‘60s. Smith and and Hall are the original voices on the song “Sea Cruise.” Hall, who lives in New Orleans, was visiting Smith at his Baton Rouge home in September 2001.
In 2000 John Wirt saw a story on the AP wire that Huey “Piano” Smith had been granted a Pioneer Award by the Rhythm & Blues Foundation in New York City. The foundation flew Smith and his family to New York, had him perform at the Hammerstein Ballroom, and gave him a check for $15,000.
It was long overdue recognition for Smith, one of the seminal figures in the early New Orleans R&B music of the 1950s. A pianist, singer, composer, arranger, and producer, he created songs that have become R&B classics. The best known are 1957’s “Rocking Pneumonia and the Boogie Woogie Flu;” 1958’s comic call-and-response “Don’t You Just Know It” and its flip side “High Blood Pressure;” and 1959’s infectious “Sea Cruise.”
Recorded with his band the Clowns, Smith’s hits were covered by dozens of major artists, from Jerry Lee Lewis to the Grateful Dead.
Wirt, who is entertainment writer for the Baton Rouge and New Orleans editions of The Advocate, contacted Smith through the foundation and asked to do a story about him. Smith agreed, and Wirt interviewed him and wrote an article for The Advocate. He learned that Smith, now 80, had dropped out of the music business and moved to Baton Rouge in 1980. He lived quietly with his wife Margrette and their granddaughter Tyra; his life mainly focused on his Jehovah’s Witness religion.
“After that story, I thought about doing a biography of him,” said Wirt. “I wrote him a letter suggesting that, and his wife called and said he’d like to do it.”
From January through September 2001, Wirt visited Smith weekly. Every Thursday morning at 10, he went to Smith’s house with his cassette recorder and interviewed him for a couple of hours. “We sat in his den, where he had a piano,” said Wirt. “There was no problem getting him to talk. It just burst forth.”
They talked about Smith’s early life in Depression-era New Orleans, his bands’ difficult tours of the segregated South, and unpaid royalties. But they also covered the good times when the Crescent City was a hotbed of musical activity.
Wirt learned that Smith was still writing songs, including one called “Tipitina’s Baby Sister,” a nod to Professor Longhair’s “Tipitina,” which he played for Wirt. Smith also expressed his creativity by recording funny messages for his answering machine.
Later Wirt contacted dozens of persons whose careers had intersected with Smith’s and interviewed them as well.
Then he went about the time-consuming task of transcribing the tapes. “I usually transcribe every word of the interview,” said Wirt. “I have a full-size Panasonic transcriber with a foot pedal, like the ones court reporters use. The foot pedal rewinds to where you stopped. I’ve owned a dozen over the years. I have one at home and one at work now.”
Despite the possibility of machine malfunction, Wirt prefers to record without taking notes. “I want to devote myself to the person I’m listening to,” he said.
That careful listening is evident in his biography, Huey “Piano” Smith and the Rocking Pneumonia Blues, in which he catches the vernacular speech of Smith and his fellow musicians. Wirt credits his ear for those voices to a childhood obsession with Mark Twain.
Growing up in Richmond, Virginia, he began studying classical guitar at eleven and also started writing short stories. He even tried his hand at filmmaking. “I would shoot Super-8 of my dog running around and even did some very primitive editing,” he said. “I’d make little six-minute films.”
Then he read a biography of Mark Twain, written for children, and was hooked. “I started reading volumes and volumes of Twain, down to obscure things like Pudd’nhead Wilson,” said Wirt. “I liked the way he talked about race. Twain is writing about black characters. Pudd’nhead Wilson is about race.
“Twain was a genius of dialogue and dialects. He influenced my wanting to be authentic in representing the voices. I wanted to go for that kind of reality. These voices [in the book] are so wonderful, so creative. It was important to me to get their voices, to hear the voices of these characters.”
Wirt became a writer in a roundabout fashion. When he enrolled at Virginia Commonwealth University, he was an art student; but after a year he switched majors. He has bachelor’s and master’s degrees in music.
“I was trying to be a classical guitarist, working in little joints. I’d make twenty dollars and get fed. I played at restaurants, weddings, churches. I could play well. But I got to the point where I said, ‘Why am I doing this?’”
He decided to find “a real job” and was hired as a copy boy at the Richmond Times-Dispatch in 1983.
“I was probably the oldest copy boy there,” he said wryly. “Their critic covered classical music exclusively. He asked me to write reviews as a freelancer. I didn’t know how to type, so I had to teach myself how.”
Wirt covered classical music for a while, then decided that he “wanted to be in the popular [music] world. I asked to cover rock shows. I started going to rock clubs and quickly shifted into doing popular music. I started to interview the artists, too.”
After seven years as a freelance contributor, Wirt had not been hired as a staff writer, so he cast about for a newspaper job and found one in Florida at the Daytona Beach News-Journal, writing about music, theater, and art.
“I did cover some popular music,” he said. “I wanted to get out of [covering] classical music.”
After two and a half years there, he saw an ad that The Advocate was looking for an entertainment writer. He got the job and moved to Baton Rouge in 1992. “A lot of my motivation was that New Orleans was a big music city. I knew about Dr. John and the Neville Brothers. When I got here I learned more about the locals. I heard Earl King from New Orleans, Johnny Adams, Charmaine Neville.” Wirt has covered events as big as the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival and as small as gigs at Tabby’s Blues Box and Raful Neal’s club in Baton Rouge.
While keeping up with his day job (which was sometimes a nights-and-weekends job), Wirt continued work on his biography of Smith.
As with many musicians, a huge part of Smith’s life revolved around the collection of royalties. He went to court several times, usually unsuccessfully, and eventually declared bankruptcy.
Part of Wirt’s research involved collecting and reading transcripts of trials in which Smith either sued or was sued over the rights to his work. For one trial that began in 1989, Wirt had to order transcripts stored in a warehouse in Texas. “I paid about twenty-five dollars for the shipping,” he said. “Then I’d sit and read them in the local courthouse.”
Although legalese can make for dry reading, and Wirt reports it even-handedly, one could easily feel anger at the way Smith was denied the fruits of his creative genius. “I worked hard to make it comprehensible,” said Wirt, who found that, in nearly every case, Smith lost his quest for the royalties due him. “It’s not a pretty lesson in the way the courts work. Lawyers work the law not necessarily to find the truth but to be victorious in court.”
By 2004, Wirt had a first draft of his manuscript. “I went through about twelve drafts,” he said. “There were times I’d be working on it and think, ‘Will it ever actually become a book?’ I worked a lot on weekends and vacations. It felt like quite a task. But since I had started it, I wanted to finish it.
“I had Rick Coleman [author of a biography of Smith’s contemporary Fats Domino] look at it, and I made some adjustments based on his suggestions.”
In 2014, the book was published by LSU Press. It has been well reviewed as “a rollicking read” based on “meticulous research,” but Wirt was most impressed by a blog that called the New Orleans music scene “beautiful and awful.”
“That’s exactly what Huey’s life story is,” Wirt said.
