E9564 - Chris Smither: From Anthropology Dropout to Acoustic Blues Elder Statesman

Chris Smither's life shatters the expected bluesman origin story. Born in Miami in November 1944 to a father who was a professor of Spanish and Mexican culture and an uncle who was an award-winning musicologist, he lived in Ecuador, the Rio Grande Valley, New Orleans, and Paris, where his father brought him his first guitar from Spain. He won a New Orleans folk battle of the bands in 1960 and enrolled at the University of the Americas in Mexico City to study anthropology, until a friend played him Lightnin' Hopkins' Blues in My Bottle. After transferring to Tulane and discovering Mississippi...