Council Spur Blues - Robert Curtis Smith
Robert Curtis Smith is a hard working farm laborer in upper Mississippi. He supports a wife and eight children by driving a tractor ($3 a day top) during the farming season, by hunting rabbits in the winter. He has a borrowed guitar with which he sings of women he has loved, lost, discarded, or found worthy of erotic praise. Unlike most of the young men of his generation, he reflects the softer style — if not always the songs — of the older blues. It is a style that bends the voice to the subtle punch of rhythmic shading of the round-hole acoustical box, and a tradition that stands in a 1:1 relationship with the facts of country life, though not revealing those facts so much as assuming they are common experience between the singer and his audience. The songs are mostly women blues but they leave the listener aware of broader discontent. Smith is a dismally underprivileged working man who was born, raised and helplessly lives yet in the Yazoo basin country of Mississippi. Only 31 yea...