Once upon a time, families sang.
Take a trip back to circa 1860, say, somewhere in a house out in the hinterlands. There is no television, no radio, even, and most certainly no World Wide Web. Walk into the parlor, and what you might find are people, telling stories, singing songs, entertaining each other.
As time marched on, entertainment ceased to be home-made. It became a commodity, something purchased rather than created. But in music, some vestiges of that earlier time remained, even as music became an industry. From the Carter Family to Stanley Brothers, from the Beach Boys to the Everly Brothers, and even right on up to the Avett Brothers: families sing, and when they do, they do it in a way nobody else does.
Jay and Lou Smart started singing together almost as soon as they started talking. They are from a large family – seven kids – and grew up, without television, in the small mountain town of Julian, California.
“We are a very big group and we grew up in the country and didn’t have TV or anything,” Jay Smart said in an interview this week. “So in a way we were like that pastoral family out in the country. We didn’t have video games. We either read or played music.”
Jay picked up his grandfather’s ukulele when he was 9. The brothers wrote their first song when Jay was 10 and Lou 8. It was a culinary love song of a sort.
“Our first song was called ‘Meatloaf, Corn, and Potatoes’,” recalled Jay, who is now 26 years old. “It was our favorite dish, and it was in harmony, believe it or not.”
When Jay was 16 the brothers started recording. Their recording studio was an underground coal shed in their backyard. At that point, they were more hell-bent on making noise than anything, and so they were decidedly anti-pastoral – they plugged in, drummed, and made the neighbors foundations shake.
“Our first recordings were just awful tone-deaf songs about how much we hated not having a television set, astronomy, and surfing…oh yeah, and girls,” Lou said in a recent interview.
Jay headed off for college shortly thereafter and started living on the beach in Carlsbad, a move that required a move back to the more acoustic side of things, given the proximity of so many neighbors. A couple years later, Lou and longtime family friend and “half-brother” Mickey joined him. College didn’t suit the Smart Brothers, and so they started taking their songs to the streets.
“Bands that haven’t done that, they are seriously missing something, that kind of tough hide that comes from being on the street,” Jay said. “It’s a different kind of showmanship….More along the lines of a juggler or something like that than like a musician.”
They learned assorted tricks of the trade on the streets – throwing in barbershop harmonies, doo wops, anything that might further grab passersby – and eventually started playing open mikes, coffee shops, and bar gigs. It was all one big musical adventure: wherever they went, more instruments seemed to appear – banjos, soprano guitars, whistles, castanets and concertinas – and they allowed themselves to drift to exactly to what felt most natural, a sort of dapper 1930s gentlemen-of-the-road musicality.
They were not alone. A music revival of a sort – variously categorized as country, Americana or freak folk – was occurring both nationally and internationally. They were embraced in Ireland, England, and the Deep South. They dressed to the nines and sang high and beautiful. Theirs were simple songs simply sung.
“I think there is kind of a resurgence in kind of acoustic, folky, bluegrassy, Americana and roots music,” Jay said. “There is a huge revival taking place, even at a global level….And family singing is right there with it, alongside playing the banjo or mandolin or wearing suspenders. These things, I think they are all hand in hand.”
“It is almost like what you do in parlor together in 1860 in Nebraska or wherever,” he added. “Back then, there wasn’t a lot of entertainment, wasn’t a nation of TV’s, iPods, video games, all this stuff we have now. There wasn’t as much convenience, either, so I think people spent a lot more time at home because it was a different story getting around. So brothers and sisters who had somewhat of a musical ear and they had a couple guitars and a banjo lying around, and there you go….”
As the miles have accumulated, the brother’s songs have subtly shifted, and deepened.
“If you ask a ten year old kid what is on his mind, what is imperative to him at that moment, and then you ask the same question of a 55-year-old – at different times in your life you learn and know different things,” Smart said. “It’s interesting because a child can sometimes be very enlightened and a old person sometimes very ignorant – it doesn’t matter how long you have lived – but you do tend to pick up things to answer that question. When you play music, you are always answering that question every time you open your mouth.”
They started out singing almost strictly about love. It happened back in their street singing days: one day Lou fell in love and the songs seemed to descend from the skies. The brothers, with their beautiful, joyous harmonies and effervescent sense of melody, were suddenly equipped with a music that suited their natural gifts.
“My brother had met a girl that he ended up marrying, and there was a week-long process when they were sort of falling in love and he wrote ten songs,” Jay said. “Every morning he’d wake up with one or two new songs, and that kind of gave us the foundation for our first shows. And we have gone from there, but they were love songs, all very close to the heart. So in his way he was able to answer that question very immediately and very passionately.”
Their newest record is called “Making It Last” and it finds the brothers still singing about love, but not always of the romantic sort. The brothers have moved on from coffee houses and bars into clubs and concert halls, acquiring a devoted and fast-increasing fan base, and with it, a certain realization that they have the opportunity to say a little something.
“Music is powerful,” Jay said. “People you haven’t even met hear you singing and something happens, you know, a door opens and there is this instant connection you have to them and they to you. And in that moment you have a chance to really say something.”
The brothers have at least two important gifts. Their music, first of all, is light on its feet – they can get away with saying stuff, somehow, that has a sneaky sort of profundity. The new record, and particularly its title track, is a meditation on love and the fleeting nature of life and the imminence of death:
“Why take life so seriously/when in a few short years/you are going to be dead and buried in the ground/with no warm bodies around/no beating hearts to be found/like the one standing right in front of you now/oh don’t you know life goes by to quickly for you to not stick with me/come on let’s make it last….”
But maybe even more to the point is that they sing like angels. Harmony is a powerful thing, and brotherly harmony even more so. There is a naturalness and purity to their blended voices that could only happen within a family-sung song. They are probably more directly descended from the Everly Brothers than any singers since, but they are also part of that old time lineage that reaches back to all those famous country brothers such as the Louvins and the Stanleys, yet there’s also rock n’ roll bang right at the forefront of their sound.
“The formula is pretty much the same – you have two or three brothers, or sisters, and you have lots of close singing, where the harmonies are very close together,” Jay said. “All these brothers acts, they have that characteristic sort of blend that I think is a familial thing. And there is also a characteristic sound, like something like Van Halen even, where you have, on a musicianship level, a sort of instinctual tightness that even if you played with someone else you couldn’t have. It’s just a different sort of thing that is special and I think reserved only for families playing together.”
“I think people have a spot in their hearts for that because they like to see a family out there doing it, working together, having fun together, singing together. It’s a very iconic sort of thing, especially in America, and especially in this genre of music, and related genres like country and older folk. We are in 2010 and 2011, and here we are in that long chronology. That’s how it seems, anyway.”
The Smart Brothers are on a bill Sunday night at Saint Rocke that also features Maxim Ludwig and the Sante Fe Seven. See thesmartbrothers.com for more info. ER
