Born:
July 5, 1913
DeQuincy, LA
Died:
October 7, 1966
New Orleans, LA
In this month’s installment of offBeat’s “Masters of Louisiana Music” Series, writer Jeff Hannusch tells the story of Overton Amos Lemons, better known as “Smiley Lewis.” Although both Smiley and Fats Domino recorded with the same great New Orleans band, Fats found fame while Smiley languished in obscurity, his biggest hit “covered” by a white pop star, Gale Storm.
Few people would argue that the greatest New Orleans rhythm and blues singer of all time was the late Smiley Lewis. Depending on the situation, Lewis had a voice that could lullaby an infant to sleep or shake a bottle of Jax beer off the Dew Drop’s bar. A prolific artist, between 1947 and 1965, Lewis recorded some of the most exciting and consistent New Orleans rhythm and blues ever put on wax.
“Smiley sang from the heart,” recalled the late Milton Batiste, who played trumpet with Lewis during the 1950s. “When he grabbed the microphone, everybody stopped what they were doing and listened.” “Smiley had one of the best voices we had around,” said Dave Bartholomew, who wrote and produced Lewis’s Imperial recordings. “But it didn’t pay off.” Bartholomew is referring to Lewis’s unfortunate lack of commercial success.
Despite recording the original and superior versions of such classics as “Tee Nah Nah,” “Blue Monday,” “I Hear You Knocking” and “One Night,” as well as leaving a fabulous body of recorded work, the times and quirks of the record business held him back. “When Smiley would get a hit, it would do 100,000,” pointed out Bartholomew. “After that he leveled off. We [Imperial] serviced 4,000 disc jockeys. Everywhere Fats Domino records went, Smiley’s went, but we just couldn’t break him nationally like Fats. It was hard for me to believe because he made some great records.”
“He should have gotten an award for being the most covered artist,” continued Cosimo Matassa, who engineered nearly every side Lewis recorded. “He was victimized by the fact that other people would cover his material.”
Lewis’s given name was Overton Amos Lemons and he was born July 5, 1913 in DeQuincy, Louisiana, a rural hamlet near Lake Charles, Louisiana, the second of three sons born to Jeffrey and Lillie Mae Lemons. Although she died when he was a child, Lewis was especially close to his mother and named a song and several automobiles after her.
According to Lewis’s late second wife, Dorothy Ester Lemons, when Lewis was a teenager he jumped a freight train in DeQuincy with some friends. Lewis’s pals jumped off the train when it began to build steam but Lewis didn’t. The freight train eventually stopped in New Orleans and that’s how Lewis got to the Crescent City.
Lewis’s first wife, Leona Kelly Robinson, recalled that when he got to the city, he was taken in by a white family in the Irish Channel whose last name was Lewis. Whatever the case, by the time he was 20, Lewis was an all-around singer, comic and guitarist. In the mid-1930s, he joined Thomas Jefferson’s Dixieland band, which included Isidore “Tuts” Washington on piano and “Noon” Johnson on bazooka horn (an instrument made from a brass bed post). Lewis played guitar and sang with the group in several French Quarter clubs, as well as “Tan” bars in the 7th Ward.
“Lewis was always a great entertainer,” stated the late Tuts Washington. “He sang the blues and all those sentimental numbers. He had a voice so strong he could sing over the band, and that was before they had microphones.”
After Jefferson’s band dissolved, Smiley freelanced, going from club to club singing for tips. Leona Robinson, who married Lewis in 1938, recalled her husband often came home with “a guitar full of change.” She also revealed that he was given the “Smiley” moniker because Lewis had no front teeth. However, once his records started to sell he bought a bridge. The couple lived with Robinson’s mother but eventually set up housekeeping on South Tonti Street when they began having children.
Lewis worked a variety of manual labor day jobs in addition to singing at night to support his growing family. He renewed his friendship with Tuts Washington around the time World War II broke out as the pianist recalled Lewis was shoeing horses at the time. Neither Lewis or Washington was drafted but they found it difficult finding work in New Orleans as several clubs were closed because of the war. Eventually they joined Kid Ernest Mollier’s band, entertaining soldiers stationed at Fort Polk near Bunkie, Louisiana. For two years Mollier’s group was the house band at the Boogie Woogie Club.
After the war ended, Lewis and Washington picked up drummer Herman Seals and trio rapidly built up a local following. In August of 1947, the Louisiana Weekly ran the headline, “Smiling Lewis To Headline New Dew Drop Floor Show.” According to the story the audience was in a dither over such renditions as “Piney Brown Blues” and “My Gal’s A Jockey.” “Nobody could touch us,” bragged Washington. “We played all through the French Quarter and down Bourbon Street.
“Lewis could do something with a guitar that I never saw before. When it came time for him to solo, he would put a pick under the strings and lay the guitar down next to his amplifier and it would keep playing. Then he’d get off the bandstand and grab some gal and start dancing. Some nights he’d do that for 15 minutes before he came back and start playing again.” Washington also recalled that Lewis could imitate Amos and Andy so well that “You had to look twice to make sure it was him and not the radio playing.”
In 1947, David Braun invited the trio to record for his DeLuxe label. The first label to tap into New Orleans’ wealth of rhythm and blues talent, DeLuxe had already been successful with other New Orleans recordings, in particularly Annie Laurie and Paul Gayten’s “Since I Fell For You” and Roy Brown’s “Good Rockin’ Tonight.”
With Seals out of the session, Papa John French was invited to play bass on “Here Comes Smiley,” and the double-entendre “Turn On Your Volume” which became a local jukebox favorite. Two other sides were recorded but never released and DeLuxe requested no more material.
Lewis and his trio were back in the studio in March 1950 at the invitation of Dave Bartholomew who was beginning to produce records for the Hollywood-based Imperial label. “I grew up in the same neighborhood as Smiley,” said Bartholomew. “I used to see him sing and play the guitar on his front porch. I used to say to myself, ‘If I can ever help him I will.’ I got in the position to record Smiley with Imperial and I did. He was a real good blues singer.”
Lewis’s initial Imperial effort was “Tee Nah Nah” with the trio being augmented by Bartholomew’s horn section. “That’s a song the boys used to sing in the penitentiary,” said Washington. “But Lewis was the first one to put it out. We traveled all over on that record. Everywhere we went it was on the box.”
“Tee Nah Nah” made Lewis an instant sensation in New Orleans. A May 1950 issue of the Louisiana Weekly reported: “That ‘Te-Na-Na Man,’ Smiley Lewis, whose recent recording of ‘Te-Na-Na’ has caused a fervor on local jukeboxes, returns from a three week run of Texas and Mississippi niteries.” “Te Nah Nah” likely would have charted had it not been covered on Atlantic by Van Walls whose version stole sales from Lewis’s record in the North and East coast. Atlantic producer Jerry Wexler was so impressed by the song, that four years later he instructed Professor Longhair to borrow the melody during the session which produced “Tipitina.”
Anxious to cut a follow-up, Lewis was back in the studio in May of 1950 waxing the low-down “Dirty People” which sold moderately well around town. He only recorded once in 1951, cutting “Bea’s Boogie” which didn’t do much. The following year, Bartholomew and Lewis’s expectations were realized when the torrid “The Bells Are Ringing” snuck into the national R&B charts for two weeks in August. “The Bells Are Ringing” is a good idea of the pattern Bartholomew used on Lewis’s sessions.
“On Smiley I wanted to get a different sound so I used Seals,” pointed out Bartholomew. “He wasn’t a great drummer but he had a big old bass drum. I loved that big drum, that’s how I got that sound.” With “The Bells Are Ringing” selling briskly, Lewis was back in the studio to cut the New Orleans tribute “Gumbo Blues” and the Bartholomew warhorse “Ain’t Gonna Do It.” Between 1952 and 1954, Lewis had an astounding sequence of releases: “Lillie Mae,” “Big Mamou,” “Caledonia’s Party,” “Lost Weekend,” “Nervous Fellow,” “Down The Road,” “You’re Not the One” and “Blue Monday.” A working man’s lament, “Blue Monday”—later covered by Fats Domino—was especially memorable. In fact its prolific author, Dave Bartholomew, considers it the best song he ever wrote.
As Bartholomew pointed out, Lewis’s records followed a frustrating pattern. Unlike label mate Fats Domino, just when it looked like Lewis was going to break nationally, sales would level off and then disappear. Lewis’s luck did change briefly in 1955, with the release of the unforgettable “I Hear You Knocking.” A Bartholomew composition inspired by a vaudeville skit, it was written in the back seat of Fats Domino’s Cadillac when they were crossing the Golden Gate Bridge.
At the time, R&B records were beginning to infiltrate the pop charts. White teenagers all over America were tuning in black radio stations and buying R&B records, R&B artists like Domino, Chuck Berry and Bo Diddley were “crossing over” into the pop charts and selling records in previously unheard of quantities. With the No. 2 R&B record in the country Lewis seemed the perfect candidate to join their ranks. Unfortunately, it wasn’t to be.
“The late Smiley Lewis had ‘I Hear You Knocking’ and Gale Storm covered it,” said Bartholomew referring to Storm’s No. 2 pop hit. “Because I wrote the song, I wasn’t too disappointed because I did fine money-wise. But I could see that Smiley wasn’t going to make it because a white girl cut him out completely.”
Lewis did see some return for “I Hear You Knocking” and with his first royalty check he put a down payment on a 1955 Cadillac. Smiley named the car “Lillie Mae” in tribute to his mother and painted the names of several of his songs on the Cadillac’s body. Around New Orleans, it was general knowledge that Lewis was a “car man” and no one could smoke, drink or eat once inside his prized vehicle.
Despite the disappointment surrounding “I Hear You Knocking” his bookings outside of the city increased and he and Bartholomew kept plugging in the studio. Before the end of 1955, Lewis waxed “Queen of Hearts,” “Hook Line and Sinker,” “Bumpity Bump” and “One Night,” the latter a particularly significant song.
Another Bartholomew classic, “One Night” hinted at an adulterous evening resulting in Lewis losing his “helping hand.” At the time, Lewis had abandoned his first wife and moved in with Dorothy Ester, who would ten years later become his second wife. Throughout the performance, Lewis sounds guilty as sin and on the verge of tears.
“One Night” typified Lewis’s luck according to Bartholomew: “‘One Night’ was on the shelf when Elvis Presley picked it up. He just changed the break. Instead of saying ‘One night of sin,’ he said ‘One night with you.’ I think that had something to do with the times—to make it appreciated in the pop field.” Presley’s version of “One Night” soared to No. 4 in the pop charts but Lewis’s original was forgotten. “Smiley had a few harsh words about people taking his numbers,” said Milton Batiste. “He wasn’t too happy about that.”
“We just couldn’t get Smiley started,” claimed Bartholomew. “He always had the best material. His records would always sell around New Orleans, but we just couldn’t break him nationally. It was a frustrating situation.”
Many fans have wondered why Lewis didn’t enjoy nearly the same amount of success as his label mate Fats Domino, especially considering they worked with basically the same resources. Perhaps the answer is song content. Domino records were more palatable and addressed a larger audience, as he sang of falling in love on Monday, finding his trill on Blueberry Hill and riding on a rocking bicycle. Lewis, on the other hand, sang about staying drunk all weekend, dirty people and going to jail for beating his woman—hardly subjects white teenage record buyers were interested in at the time.
Lewis and Bartholomew kept at it and in 1957, his blistering version of “Shame, Shame, Shame” was included in the Tennessee Williams film Baby Doll. In one of the most memorable pieces of B cinema history, Lewis and Bartholomew’s band wail as Eli Wallach rides a toy rocking horse and then chases Carol Baker, wearing the prototypical “baby doll” nightgown, around a deteriorating Southern mansion.
It was also during 1957 that at the insistence of Imperial Records president Lew Chudd, Bartholomew began recording Lewis singing pop standards and hillbilly fare in order to attract new record buyers. Not surprisingly, the ploy failed. There were some great songs recorded by Lewis in the late 1950s including “Go On Fool,” “Bad Luck Blues” and “Going To Jump and Shout,” but Lewis’s record sales continued to slide. Out-of-town dates became infrequent, but he was still a big name in New Orleans on the strength of his past glories. Lewis didn’t record in 1959, but Imperial assembled an album, I Hear You Knocking, that included his best known titles. Bartholomew recorded Lewis twice in 1960. Once again, the tracks were splendid but the resulting singles didn’t sell. After a decade of giving Imperial some of the greatest R&B recordings of all time, he was released by the label.
Many people recall that Lewis was pretty much down on his luck in the 1960s. He no longer carried a band and most of his work consisted of spot jobs opening for up-and-comers like Lee Dorsey, Irma Thomas and Ernie K-Doe. “Lillie Mae” was gone too and Lewis had to ride the city bus to his infrequent gigs. Isolated singles appeared on Okeh, Dot and Loma, but they lacked the power of his Imperial recordings. Now in his 50s, the decades of hard work and hard living began to catch up with Lewis. In 1965, he was a very sick man.
“He started losing weight and he stayed hoarse all the time,” recalled Dorothy Ester Lemons. “I put him in the hospital and they said he had an ulcer. When they operated they found out he had cancer.”
“They had a benefit for him up at [Charity] hospital so they could get some blood for him,” recalled Washington. “Smiley asked me to play a party so people could donate blood the day before the operation. I hadn’t seen him in a long time, but I could see the cancer was eating him up. He tried to play the guitar with us but he could barely hold the guitar.”
The Louisiana Weekly revealed Lewis’s plight and invited his friends to visit and, “drop by some of that green stuff.” A benefit was organized by Dave Bartholomew at La Ray’s on Dryades Street, but Lewis succumbed to stomach cancer October 7, 1966, three days before it was to take place. Lewis died in the arms of his second wife whom he had married six months before.
A well-attended funeral was held at the Denis Mortuary on Louisiana Avenue and Lewis’s body was buried in his wife’s family vault located in a cemetery behind the St. James A. M. E. Church in Convent, Louisiana. Today, New Orleans greatest blues shouter still lies in an unmarked grave, a stone’s throw from a sugar cane field.
In terms of quality of material and quality, Lewis is incomparable. It’s baffling that he didn’t enjoy the same success as Domino, Roy Brown and Joe Turner. For a proud man like Lewis, surely his disappointment was as painful as the cancer which eventually felled him.
“Smiley’s situation was just one of those great cosmic mysteries we’ll never know about,” lamented Earl King, who played many dates with Lewis. “He just didn’t get the breaks. But if he were alive today, he’d still be out there even if there wasn’t a dime in it for him. That’s the kind of guy Smiley was.”
Rick Coleman’s research was invaluable in preparing this article.
Selected CDs
Smiley Lewis: Shame, Shame, Shame (Bear Family) This deluxe boxed set includes Smiley Lewis’ entire recorded output and a massive album of facts, figures and vintage photographs annotated by Jeff Hannusch and Rick Coleman.
The Best of Smiley Lewis: I Hear You Knocking, (Collectables Records)
Selected Books
I Hear You Knockin’ by Jeff Hannusch
Rhythm & Blues In New Orleans by John Broven
