Gig - Richard Smith

Richard Smith wasn’t born with a guitar in his hand, but he learnt to play his first tune - a Chet Atkins finger-style number - at the age of five, and was quickly recognised as a child prodigy. By the age of eleven he was sharing a stage with Atkins himself, in front of a thousand-strong audience at Her Majesty’s Theatre in London. “I was very nervous, but it was a great experience,” he tells me, over the phone, in a mid-Atlantic accent (he now lives in Tennessee). “Chet wasn’t just my hero, he was the most influential musician in my life. I learnt to play the guitar working out his tunes.” One of Richard’s proudest possession is a guitar signed by Atkins ‘to my hero, Richard Smith’.

So what is the finger picking style? “There’s a bass going, there’s a rhythm going, and there’s the lead over the top,” explains Richard, who played a gig in front of a packed house in the Royal Oak last September. “There’s a ragtime swing to it, a constant groove. Your thumb is your band, basically. It is a style which suits solo playing.” In September Richard played along with his cellist wife, Julie Adams. This time he will be playing alone. “I’m looking forward to it. The last gig was great; the audience was very knowledgeable and appreciative.” And where’s he playing after Lewes? “Let me see, Lewes is the last date on my UK tour. After that it’s a gig back home in Nashville Tennessee.” DL