Arthur Smith was a genuine Carolina country music star

North Carolina country music legend Arthur “Guitar Boogie” Smith is an alumnus of Charlotte’s WBT radio station “Briarhoppers” string band. Program manager Charles Crutchfield brought in Smith in 1943 to join the group as a guitarist and vocalist.

(Smith’s nickname became essential to avoid confusion with central Tennessee’s “Fiddlin’” Arthur Smith and the eastern Tennessee songwriter Arthur Q. Smith.)

 

WBT’s Arthur Smith was born in 1921 in Clinton, S.C., and grew up in Kershaw, S.C. A good student, he was his high school valedictorian. Smith declined an offer to attend the U.S. Naval Academy because he wanted to become a musician more than a naval officer, noted Stephen Fletcher, photographic archivist with the University of North Carolina Library system in Chapel Hill.

Smith and his brothers, Ralph and Sonny, along with their friend Luke Tucker formed a Dixieland jazz band called The Arthur Smith Quartet. In the early 1940s, they were playing their tunes on the radio at WSPA in Spartanburg, S.C.

“We nearly starved to death until one day we changed our style,” Arthur Smith said in a later interview. “One Friday morning we threw down our trumpet, clarinet and trombone and picked up the fiddle, accordion and guitar. The next Monday we came back on the radio program as ‘Arthur Smith and the Carolina Crackerjacks.’”

 

Now labeled as a country music band, the Crackerjacks found a following at WBTV in Charlotte. The group’s ascent was interrupted, however, with the U.S. involvement in World War II, beginning in December 1941.

The three Smith brothers enlisted for military service. Arthur Smith joined the Navy and was assigned to the band. While on active duty, he wrote and recorded his instrumental hit “Guitar Boogie.”

The song was fondly referred to as ‘‘the record that launched a million guitar lessons,’’ and national radio host Arthur Godfrey played it 10 consecutive times on his show.

After the war, Smith returned to Charlotte and revived the Crackerjacks. Crutchfield gave the band top billing on WBT’s popular “Carolina Hayride” show in 1945. Soon thereafter, WBT added a “Top of the Morning” show, featuring Arthur Smith. It ran for 29 years as a syndicated radio program.

When WBTV was formed in 1951, introducing the Carolinas market to television, Arthur Smith was there to help emcee the station’s first live broadcast. His own “The Arthur Smith Show” at WBTV was the first country music television show to be syndicated nationally; it ran for 32 years in 90 markets coast to coast.

Arthur Smith was an enormously talented musician, but his personality is what made him a star in the Carolinas, said Dr. Tom Hanchett, a noted Charlotte historian.

“He was a good neighbor on radio and TV to so many people,” Dr. Hanchett said. “He was somebody who came to you every day in your living room or kitchen and felt like a member of the family in a way hard to imagine today. He was from the same mold as Doc Watson and Andy Griffith. He enjoyed the genial tradition of being a Southern gentleman. He relished that.”

A key chapter from the unwritten Arthur Smith biography deals with his association for 35 years with the “Singing on the Mountain” event in MacRae Meadows at Grandfather Mountain near Linville. Beginning in 1950, Smith was designated as the annual music festival’s “music master.” He responded by inviting outstanding musical groups to perform, Fletcher wrote.

 

There’s more to this story, revolving around one of Smith’s most famous country songs, “Feudin’ Banjos” from 1955.