Willie "The Lion" Smith

Along with Fats Waller and James P. Johnson, Willie “The Lion” Smith was one of the great stride-style pianists of the golden age of jazz. Born William Henry Joseph Bonaparte Bertholf in 1893 to a Jewish father and an African-American mother, Smith (surname added later) grew up in Newark, New Jersey, and nurtured a passion for the piano from his early childhood. A tour of duty in World War I with the Harlem Hellfighters interrupted his early career, but he displayed courage at such a level that he was dubbed “The Lion,” a nickname that would follow him the rest of his life. Upon his return from the war, Smith resumed performing, and by the early 1920s was a focal point of the burgeoning stride piano style, in which a player’s left hand makes wide stretches, or strides, to hold down a song’s rhythmic foundation. Stride piano distinguished itself from other popular modes at the time, like ragtime, by encouraging improvisation as opposed to sticking to the charts. In 1920, singer Mamie Smith released the single “Crazy Blues”, often considered the first blues recording to be sold in stores. Willie Smith is commonly credited with performing on the song and appears in photos associated with its release, but the song’s author, Perry Bradford, disputed this. Either way, the success of “Crazy Blues” proved to the bean counters that recordings by black artists were viable on the marketplace. Smith continued to record and perform -- usually with a cigar and derby hat, sometimes with an ensemble called the Cubs -- in the New York City area and earned admiration from many up-and-coming jazz musicians, including a young Duke Ellington, who was always effusive in his praise for Smith. Ellington and Smith swapped homages over the years, as Ellington released “Portrait of the Lion” in 1939, and Smith returned the favor with “Portrait of the Duke”. Other disciples of Smith’s included musical juggernauts George Gershwin, the Dorsey brothers, Bix Biderbecke, and Artie Shaw. The Lion continued to innovate into the second half of the twentieth century, taking stages and showing the way it used to be done, until his death in 1973.

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