Jim Smoak

James Benjamin Smoak was born on 7 July 1934 and grew up on a farm in Round O, South Carolina, learning music from his mother. At twelve he bought his first banjo from Sears, Roebuck with the money from a 4-H prize, and as soon as he finished high school he took to the road, aiming for the Grand Ole Opry.

By his own account Monroe hired him in 1952, and that was when he began playing on the Opry; he worked with the Blue Grass Boys on and off through 1953 and as a regular member in 1954. At Monroe’s Decca session in Nashville on 26 June 1954, with Edd Mayfield on guitar, three fiddlers and Ernie Newton on bass, he played banjo on “Close By,” “My Little Georgia Rose” and “Put My Little Shoes Away,” and on 4 September he was on the recording of “Blue Moon of Kentucky” that Decca paired with “Close By.” He also worked for Little Jimmy Dickens, and with Arthur Smith’s Cracker Jacks, taking the banjo place left by Don Reno.

On Earl Scruggs’s recommendation he joined Hylo Brown and the Timberliners, the second band Brown led for the Martha White Flour shows, playing with them from about 1957 to 1960. In August 1958 he recorded with Brown, Red Rector, Tater Tate and Jack Phillips at four Capitol sessions in Nashville that produced the album Hylo Brown (1959), with “Darling Nellie Across the Sea” and “Gathering Flowers from the Hillside,” and the single “I’ve Waited as Long as I Can.” In 1959 the Timberliners backed Scruggs at the first Newport Folk Festival.

Around 1960 he moved to Baton Rouge and formed his own band, the Louisiana Honeydrippers, whose album Bayou Bluegrass (Folk Lyric, 1961; reissued by Arhoolie in 1972) included songs he wrote and sang. He played both bluegrass and country through the 1960s, including with the folk group the Cumberlands and Arthur Smith’s shows on WAFB in Baton Rouge and WBT in Charlotte. In the 1970s he published three banjo instruction books, among the first to give the music in both standard notation and tablature, and recorded the solo album Moonshine Sonata (Blue River, 1979).

He stopped touring in the 1970s, when he married and settled in his wife’s hometown of Pekin, Indiana, where he has taught banjo and other instruments for more than fifty years. Later albums include Carolina Boy (Copper Creek, 2004), with the Honeydrippers, and Pocket Full of Change (Copper Creek, 2006), and he recorded with the Cumberlands again on Bridging the Gap (2002). The International Bluegrass Music Museum named him one of its Pioneers of Bluegrass in 2008, and Traditional Arts Indiana, for whose apprenticeship program he has been a master artist, named him an Indiana Heritage Fellow in 2022 and released Jim Smoak: At the Depot, recorded live in Salem, Indiana, that April. In 2023 he received an Indiana Governor’s Arts Award.