SAMMI SMITH, 1943-2005

Originally published in the Nashville Scene, February 17, 2005

For just a moment there, Sammi Smith—“Girl Hero,” is what some folks called her—was the most popular female country singer in the world. In 1971 Smith’s recording of “Help Me Make It through the Night,” penned by a then still little-known songwriter named Kris Kristofferson, topped the country charts for three weeks. It cracked the pop top ten, too, and was honored by the CMA as its Single of the Year.  Smith died this past Saturday, February 12^th, in Oklahoma City, of emphysema. She was only 61, and just a day shy of marking the 34^th anniversary of the day her career record hit number one on the Billboard country chart.

I saw Smith sing in person only once. Last July her son Waylon Payne was making his first appearance on the Grand Ol’ Opry, and a beaming Smith joined her bouncing-off–the-walls son on stage to celebrate. She was a slight little thing, with short hair and tight-fittin’ jeans, and she looked fabulous. If you hadn’t known who she was, you might’ve guessed she was forty instead of sixty. I knew she’d been having health problems for a while, though, so I wasn’t expecting her to sound like her records, wasn’t counting on hearing Sammi Smith, Girl Hero. But, to my ears, when she took the mike, her voice—husky and bracing and possessed of an intimacy more commonly associated with whispered secrets—sounded like it was that 1971 moment all over again. As she had done countless times before, everywhere from dive bars to big auditoriums, from Hee Haw to The Mike Douglas Show, the song she sang was “Help Me Make It through the Night.”

Well, of course it was. Most singers only dream of having a signature song so beloved. “Help Me” was for Sammi Smith what “Stand by Your Man” was for Tammy Wynette; it was for Smith what “I Hope You Dance” is going to be for Lee Ann Womack for the rest of her life. (And, truth is, “Help Me” had a more impressive chart run than both of those records.) “Help Me Make It through the Night” became so closely identified with Smith that for most casual listeners the song and the singer have long since melded into one event, the way rain just naturally goes with clouds or busted hearts come with tears.

And Smith sings the song with a rare vulnerability, imploring and desperate but very, very quiet and, just barely, controlled. Today’s singers, who so often confuse intensity with volume and emotion with attitude, could learn a great deal by listening to Sammi Smith sing “Help Me Make It through the Night.”  They could learn how to sing human-sized.

And not just “Help Me Make It,” but dozens of other sides very nearly as powerful. If all you know of Smith’s work is that one moment, you owe yourself the thrill of hearing more.  I’d recommend especially the first four albums she released in for Mega Records between 1970 and ‘74.  You’ll have to hunt for them, too—they’ve never been released on compact disc, an oversight that borders on the immoral—but it will be worth your effort. Help Me Make It through the Night (originally titled He’s Everywhere) and Lonesome, and Something Old, Something Blue, Something New, and The Toast of ’45 are stellar examples of country soul, as lasting in their way as Dusty Springfield’s Dusty in Memphis or Charlie Rich’s early albums on the Epic label.

Rich’s vocal style, especially, approximates what Smith was up to behind the mike.  She was at her best as an interpreter, in other words, and like the Silver Fox, she was an expert at tone, texture, and phrasing.  Merle Haggard once said that her version of his “Today I Started Loving You Again,” Smith’s third and last top ten in 1975, was his favorite reading of the song.  She could pack more, and more complex, meaning into a single pause than most singers convey over the course of entire album sides. On “Saunders Ferry Lane,” for example, from her Mega debut, her phrasing is so matter of fact, her delivery so quiet, and the string chart behind her is so melancholy and spare, that as Smith tells her story it’s as if we can see the leaves she describes tumbling and the clouds threatening, as if we can hear the dock in the song creaking.  In Smith’s voice we can feel the “awful cold in Saunders Ferry Lane,” and we understand she’s not just complaining about the temperature.

When the Outlaw bit exploded in the mid-seventies, Smith, her biggest hits behind her, became associated with that crowd because she sometimes played the same bills and because many in that group were her friends; it was Jennings, for instance, who dubbed her “Girl Hero.” But Smith‘s music wasn’t in the least Outlaw-ish, not in the sense that has become the Waylon & Willie stereotype.  She was never cocky or in-your-face-way; more like she was sitting across the table, speaking to you from some place deep down and nakedly human, or like she was sobbing quietly on your chest.

When Bill Friskics-Warren and I wrote Heartaches by the Number: Country Music’s 500 Greatest Singles, we made sure to place three Smith records in the roll call, including “Help Me Make It” at number one. There were several reasons we thought that made sense.  “Help Me” remains representative of a time when country music was in great flux: Smith herself was in the vanguard of appreciating the new Dylan-inspired country songwriters; her version of “Help Me” was an exemplar of the new countryplitan sound at its most soulful; and it was a record that heralded the higher profile women were about to enjoy on country radio, as well as the sexual themes they would often address.

But, really, it’s that voice that mattered most to us. Sammi Smith, Girl Hero, sang softly but tugged at our hearts, made us attend closely, like few singers ever. She was one of my heroes, and deserves to be one of yours too.