The Thunder Bay Blues Festival has lost one of its icons.
Bluesman Big Walter Smith, a mainstay Saturday afternoon staple at the annual event, has died at home at age 82, according Minnesota radio station WDIO.
The 300-pound gentle giant, who fronted Big Walter Smith and the Groove Merchants, was recently diagnosed with terminal cancer, but made one last appearance at the Thunder Bay Blues Festival earlier this month, where he received his traditional on-stage birthday cake.
Affectionately known as the Big Man of the Blues, Smith was a fixture on the Minneapolis scene for more than 40 years, where he wons just about every award imaginable, including 1989's Blues Society Male Vocalist. He was the first blues musician inducted into Minnesota's Music Hall of Fame, in 1998.
Born in Tulsa, Okla. in 1930, Smith moved to Kansas City, according to his own website, where he befriended blues guitarist Albert Collins, a relationship that would last until Collins's 1993 death. During his career he shared the stage with the likes of B.B. King and the Bobby Blue Bland, two acts he cited as his "chief early influences."
He recently told local blues historian Ken Wright he got his start in an unusual way.
"Back in the early ‘50s in Oklahoma City, a friend of mine was in a band and there were these people putting a female impersonator show together. They needed an emcee. I told them I’d do it. They paid me good money too: $35 a night.”
Rather than talk between shows, he sang.
“So, I tried a few numbers and that was the beginning of my career,” he told Wright, who provides the biographies for the Thunder Bay Blues Festival program each year.
Smith moved to the Twin Cities area in 1970, where he met his future wife Shirley shortly afterward.
He didn't release his first album until 1988, two years before forming the Groove Merchants. Seven years later his album, Brother to the Blues, was nominated for a Grammy.
He died early Tuesday morning.
A memorial concert with the surviving members of the Groove Merchants is being planned for next month's Bayfront Blues Festival scheduled from Aug. 10 to 12 in Duluth.
