New Orleans of a hundred years ago teemed with a host of pianists playing blues and boogie in establishments both legal and recreational. Then came the guitarists. Here’s one: ‘You ought to have heard Smiley Lewis in person – he made the walls rattle!’ said drummer Earl Palmer.
Lewis was born in July 1913 in DeQuincy, LA. His mother may have died while he was young – a sister-in-law recalled the family moving to West Lake, LA, where he was raised by a stepmother. Somewhere in his teens, he took up the guitar. Then he ran across trumpeter Thomas Jefferson’s band which he joined. ‘(He) always was a good entertainer,’ Tuts Washington remembered. ‘He sang the blues and all of them sentimental numbers. He would walk off the bandstand and sing to the people in the audience. See, Lewis had a voice so strong he could sing over the band, and that was before we had microphones.’ During WW2, Lewis found work where he could – ending up in a band with Tuts. At the end of the war, the band split up but Smiley and Tuts recruited drummer Herman Seale to form a blues trio. ‘We had the hottest trio in town,’ Washington boasted. They also hung around J&M Records. The following year, the New York label DeLuxe came to record local talent, using J&M as a source. When DeLuxe returned in September 1947, Lewis’ trio was one of the acts he decided to record. No copy has ever turned up. Although popular around New Orleans, Smiley’s record failed on the national market. He was dropped by DeLuxe. Nevertheless, his status as a recording artist ensured that Smiley’s trio was in demand around Louisiana and for some months they had a residency at the Cinq Sou Hall, next door to the Dew Drop Inn. Occasionally, he would drop into the Dew Drop to make guest appearances with Dave Bartholomew’s orchestra, billing himself as ‘the drifting blues singer’. As with most of the other artists here, Lewis had a life of ups and downs (his ‘One Night’ was cut by Presley). He died in 1966.
