Sammi Smith: A Love Letter in 16 Songs

David on a few favorite tracks from an artist we love

Sammi Smith passed away twenty-years-ago last week. She was just 61. Smith is one of my very favorite artists. Her catalog wasn’t deep, totaling just 15 studio albums before she stepped away from recording altogether in 1992. But she was a peerless ballad singer. Like most country vocalists, she regularly sang about love and desire, and about the loss of both, but her greatest gift was for exploring a loneliness that reaches beyond anyone’s current relationship status. Her second album was simply titled Lonesome.

Smith was best known, of course, for her hit 1970 recording of Kris Kristofferson’s “Help Me Make It through the Night.” That major crossover hit, as well as most of the rest of her finest work, was in the comparatively lush, rhythmically soulful, and pop-inclined countrypolitan style that the Outlaw movement soon would be positioned against. But she was a key early Outlaw country act herself. She cited proto-Outlaw Merle Haggard as among her most important vocal influences. She and Kristofferson had been her dear friends since before either of them became stars. (I nominate her as his greatest interpreter; he wrote back-cover liner notes for her first album.) She toured with Waylon Jennings early in her career, too, back in the late 1960s, and he dubbed her a “girl hero,” not a “girl singer” as country women were then commonly known. (The most obvious antecedents for the hushed arrangement and barely moving pace of Waylon’s “Dreaming My Dreams” are spread across Sammi’s first four albums.) In 1973, Smith relocated from Nashville to Dallas, the better to be near that burgeoning Texas scene. She appeared with running buddy Willie Nelson for his first Fourth of July Picnic in 1973 and sang on stage with him often in those years. She was, without any contradiction, an exemplary artist for both countrypolitan and Outlaw country.

My appreciation of her music and of her historical importance is deserving in itself of this addition to NFR’s “A Love Letter in 16 Songs” series. But I want to note an additional debt. Smith’s catalog goes on the short list of music I’ve used to figure out what I guess you’d call my critical aesthetic, and championing her work in print has boosted what I guess we can call my writing career.

By the early 1990s, Smith’s entire catalog had fallen out of print, and like a lot of folks then, I didn’t know a note of it beyond her famous signature hit. Then, in 1996, Varese Sarabande released The Best of Sammi Smith. I played the hell out of that disc which soon set me to tracking down and devouring used copies of her early albums on Mega Records. Smith’s music didn’t just help me reject the tin-eared countrypolitan caricatures that were so pervasive back in that alternative country moment. It helped me to nail down how that music worked and why I liked it. When I wrote about that Smith set for No Depression #7 (Jan/Feb 1997), I felt like an apostle.

I wrote about Smith regularly over the next several years. First came “Help Me Make It through the Night: The Anatomy of a Record,” a 9,000-word deep dive (different times people!) about the making of Smith’s hit for The Journal of Country Music (Fall/Winter, 2001). I was fortunate to interview Smith a few times for the piece and to speak with her producer Jim Malloy, session leader Chip Young, arranger Bill Walker and others involved. (It was later chosen for the 2002 edition of Da Capo Best Music Writing.) For our book Heartaches by the Number: Country Music’s 500 Greatest Singles (2003), Bill Friskics-Warren and I placed “Help Me…” at #1 because it’s an unassailable single, of course, but also because we knew Sammi’s record would help us start the critical, sonic, and gender arguments we hoped the book would inspire. I later wrote about Smith for Oxford American and Pitchfork (pieces I will shamelessly quote from below), and when Smith died in 2005, I was honored to write an appreciation for The Nashville Scene.

Though Smith remains far less recognized than she deserves, I’m at least glad that, twenty years on, her profile is on the rise. Most of her catalog is back “in print,” AKA available for streaming—as is that career-spanning (if, as I now know, too-brief) The Best of Sammi Smith collection where I came in. In 2022, Ace Records released a fantastic introduction to her early Mega years, Sammi Smith: Looks Like Stormy Weather, 1969-1975. Just last year, Rolling Stone named Smith’s “Help Me Make It through the Night” as the 71^st greatest country song of all time. (About 70 spots too low, but still…)

Smith has even acquired some acolytes. Amy Boone, of the Delines, sounds uncannily like Smith, especially on the slow ones. Shelby Lynne is obviously a Smith fan as well. When I asked Sammi years ago if she thought there were any current singers she’d influenced, she immediately said “no,” but then asked me if I knew of any. “Shelby Lynne?” I replied, and she laughed: “My son’s singing back up for her!” That son is singer-songwriter Waylon Payne who backed Lynne on her I Am Shelby Lynne tour and who is Sammi’s greatest acolyte of all. (After you check out the picks below, give his “7:28” a listen, about the moment he learned his mom was gone.)

So… Here are 16 of my favorite Sammi Smith cuts. (Why 16? Because if I didn’t cut myself off, I’d wind up with four times that many.). Not definitive, definitely not comprehensive, and not really even a decent career overview. But these are my favorite Smith cuts among so many others and, I hope, they’ll serve as a worthy introduction or reminder to a still overlooked artist.

1. “Turn Around” (from The World of Sammi Smith, 1971)

In 1967, Marshall Grant, Johnny Cash’s bass player, somehow heard Sammi’s demo tape and shared it with his boss and producer Frank Jones. Soon Smith was signed to Columbia where, over the next couple of years and usually with the Tennessee Three serving as her rhythm section, she cut several sides and charted three singles—though none of them even climbed as high as No. 50 on the country charts. Perhaps that was because her material wasn’t so good and also because, this early on in her career, she was more or less mimicking the styles and sounds of other artists. Her first Columbia single, for example, the unencouragingly titled “So Long, Charlie Brown, Don’t Look for Me Around,” featured horns that can’t decide if they’re playing the lick from Cash’s “Ring of Fire” or the solo from Roger Miller’s “Kansas City Star.” The B-side of that single, though, a version of Carl Perkins’ “Turn Around,” is a keeper. The fiddle-driven Sun-era original is hardcore honky tonk, and Perkins’ delivery is both haunting and hangdog. Sammi’s take is something else altogether. Though she would become known for her whisper-not-a-scream vocals, here she proves she can belt if needed—and in a style that sounds like a brassy Patsy Cline. In effect duetting with her pedal steel guitarist, she declaims eternal devotion to a lover who’s gotten away. But be careful: Sammi also makes her commitment sound like a warning: “I’ll be following you.” (Smith never released an album for Columbia, but after she became a star for Mega Records, her former label rushed out her early sides on a budget Harmony Records set, The World of Sammi Smith.)

2. “Help Me Make It through the Night” (from He’s Everywhere, 1970)

At Mega, Smith was paired with producer Jim Malloy. Their first single together was the haunted title track of their first LP together, “He’s Everywhere,” which opens quietly then explodes into perhaps the most gloriously noisy crescendo of her career. It went to No. 25, her biggest success to date. Malloy had been an L.A. engineer for years, and his work with Julie London made him think a more intimate approach, singing quietly and close to the mic, would take better advantage of Smith’s vocal strengths. He also put together a state-of-the-art country-soul rhythm section for her, including drummer Jerry Carrigan, guitarist Chip Young, and pianist Daivd Briggs (all of whom would work on Elvis Country a month later). For her part, Sammi had brought in a demo of Kristofferson songs Kris had helped her prepare. For his “Help Me Make It through the Night,” Sammi’s hushed and husky vocal presence, and her gender flip of the opening line, proved revelatory. Kris’s “Take the ribbon from your hair,” sounded a little suspicious, a little lap-dancey and pushy, coming from a guy who otherwise claimed to be struggling just to make it through the night. Sammi’s “Take the ribbon from my hair” made her both vulnerable and in charge. The single went to No. 1 country, No. 8 pop, and No 3 Easy Listening. The record was such a phenomenon that the He’s Everywhere album was re-released and retitled: Help Me Make It through the Night.

3. “Saunders Ferry Lane” (from Help Me Make It through the Night, 1970)

Smith’s debut LP is a masterpiece. Besides its twin title-track singles, it features the best versions I’ve ever heard of the country standards “With Pen in Hand,” “Sunday Morning Comin’ Down” (you heard me), and “Lonely Street.” “Saunders Ferry Lane,” co-written by Janette Tooley (a songwriter no one seems to know anything about), creates an entire gloomy world. A woman ventures to the waterfront spot where she and a dead lover used to visit. The arrangement is borderline spooky, the lyric dreary. The sky spits rain or snow, and depression hangs over the place, maybe even hints at suicide: “Summer drowned in the frozen lake… The gentle arms that held me and made me want tomorrow now are gone.” “I know nothing’s worse than a day alone at Saunders Ferry Lane,” Sammi repeats to herself as night closes in. It speaks volumes to Sammi’s particular aesthetic that this doomed, wee-small-hours vibe is her debut’s opening cut.

4. “This Room for Rent” (from Help Me Make It through the Night, 1970)

Smith’s debut ends with another great song by the mysterious Janette Tooley, “This Room for Rent.” From Oxford American: The Music Issue (Summer 2005): “In contrast to most of her finest sides, this rhythm track is on the fast side of mid-tempo and seems to hurtle her about the apartment that her landlady character is showing to a prospective tenant. Her words come in a rush, but there’s a depressed flatness to them all the same. She speaks of the previous occupants, a young couple in love who left the room a mess, but it becomes plain from the agonized way she’s telling the tale that she’s singing about her own time there and her own departed lover. With each new detail of this grand tour—'There’s the kitchen table where she sat and tried to dry her eyes on the corner of a scratchy paper towel / She cried to God and asked Him if that man had ever loved her anyhow’—her misery mounts, until finally she’s drifted away from us entirely, and there is no one there now to whom she can plead for help. ‘She’s heard no word from God,’ she admits, ‘and nothing seems to matter anymore.’ The record just stops then, Smith’s unvarnished voice trailing off, the music suddenly dead.”

5. “Then You Walk In” (from Lonesome, 1971)

Her follow-up to “Help Me,” “Then You Walk In” was a Top 10 hit. It’s a wonder of a record, a slow-burn build as Smith confesses to wanting to leave a lover behind for… Well, for everything! That’s a lot! And then her overwhelming desire to stay put. The way Sammi purrs and moans with distracted longing in the verses, the way she swoons and soars through the chorus as she accepts that she’s not going anywhere—this is maybe the sexiest vocal of her career and maybe her best, period. For sure, Lonesome has the greatest album cover of her career.

6. “Fire and Rain” (from Lonesome, 1971)

As I like to remind folks, one of the valuable and charming requirements for country singers back in the 60s and 70s was that you had to be a great interpreter. And one way you were expected to demonstrate your distinctive style was by singing the hell out of other people’s hits. Let’s call Exhibit No. 2,346 for that case: Smith’s reading of James Taylor’s “Fire and Rain,” a song I’ve heard countless times and that Sammi makes her own. “One more time, one more time…”

7. “Kentucky” (from Something Old, Something New, Something Blue, 1972)

Smith is too rarely included in Outlaw country discussions. Partly that’s because of her countrypolitan connections. But as I wrote in a 2018 Pitchfork guide to the Outlaw country genre, “Also not helping her cause… She was a woman in a good-ol’-boys club that fetishized not being tied down and that included so few women, you could count them on your cowboy boots.” A great example of this is a country-soul masterpiece she wrote herself, “Kentucky.” Free and alone on the road again, she hears a man called Kentucky sing, and the two soon fall in love. From Pitchfork: “In real life, this was Kentucky-born Jody Payne, her husband [at the time] and guitarist for Willie Nelson’s Family Band. In the raucous second verse, which abandons countrypolitan for glorious outlaw-predicting rock and includes more cymbal crashes than any other country record could handle, she and Payne roam from gig to gig together, Sammi singing lead.”

8. “I’ve Got to Have You” (from Something Old, Something New, Something Blue, 1972)

Beyond Help Me Make It Through the Night, the Smith album that I’d most strongly is her fourth for Mega, Something Old, Something New, Something Blue. It’s packed with fantastic versions of standards, such as “Just Out of Reach,” “Bridge Over Troubled Water,” and “Where Grass Won’t Grow,” and with great originals, like her own “Kentucky,” Kristofferson’s “Jody and the Kid,” and another great Sammi reading of yet another great Kristofferson song, “I’ve Got to Have You.” Once again her choices pay off here. The moan she adds after “my hair was blowing softer than the whisper on your cheek” is exquisitely erotic. When Kris sang the song with Rita Coolidge in 1974, they made the line “I don’t know if it’s love but it’s enough” sound like they were into and all, but also like they were crossing their fingers, making no commitments. When Sammi sings the same words, it sounds like a risk, like she’s letting go of expectations, grabbing onto freedom.

9. “Isn’t It Sad” (from Something Old, Something New, Something Blue, 1972)

Such a simple song, but what a record. Chip Young and Jerry Shook’s gently intertwining folkie guitars, drummer Jerry Carrigan’s rolling country-soul groove, a hint of Bergen White’s strings blending with wordless backing vocals on the chorus. The bass pulls us forward, the harmonica weeps behind Sammi’s scratchy, rueful alto. She wrote this one, and it was a savvy choice to do it in third person instead of first. It elevates a small sad story into a huge and universal one, a part of the all-too-human condition we’ve observed as well as she has: a woman giving everything she has just to be with a man who doesn’t love her back, the toys and children she’ll never have—an entire world of plans and needs destroyed. I’ve been listening to it a lot lately.

10. “Toast of ‘45” (from The Toast of ’45, 1973)

Smith once described this Vincent Matthews and Jim Casey-written song enthusiastically as “hellacious.” From Oxford American: The Music Issue (Summer 2005): “Among Smith’s most remarkable performances was her recording of ‘Toast of ’45,’ a Mega single that barely charted in the winter of 1972. It’s the sort of song that only the bravest of singers would even attempt, one half of a conversation in which Smith plays the part of a former Hollywood star and current barfly, a woman with some good stories she’ll share if you ask her and maybe buy her a drink. ‘My favorite role? she smiles with a sigh of momentary contentment. “I’m fond of Beth, with Flynn, in Days of December. A salesman, ‘in town for the day,’ recognizes her, buys her a couple of drinks, lights her cigarette, and encourages her to reminisce, though it’s not as though she needs prodding. Smith chooses to deliver her lines more like she’s speaking than singing yet every syllable is musical, and she’s working in a higher key than usual, which invests her voice with a sense of controlled but nervous excitement. Smith is using her voice and her phrasing to fill all of the emotional details that the song’s lyrics leave undecided. The effect of Smith’s performance is to create for us a woman eager for this unexpected close-up and a woman who has long since grown weary of such unsolicited interviews. She is now struggling not to let either emotion show. This is a tough (and necessary) trick for any actor—revealing emotions when the character being portrayed does not want emotions revealed—but it’s especially hard when the actor is a singer on a record with no props, set, or costume to work with, no facial expressions or gestures, just her voice and some music. When the lyrics suggest that remembering her golden years has brought a tear, Smith makes it sound as if her lower lip has begun ever so slightly to tremble. She makes her character’s voice fluttery and fragile and a little embarrassed to be seen like this though she also sounds pleased still to be recognized after all this time. Smith plays her character like a musical Blanche DuBois, except that Smith makes this woman genuinely elegant, never pathetic. Eventually, the man to whom the old actress is speaking excuses himself, he maybe got more than he bargained for, and the one-time Toast of ’45 sips her drink and hums wistfully alone. And…scene.”

11. “Georgia on a Fast Train” (from Opry House TV show, 1974)

Sammi has a reputation on record, not undeserved, for being awfully serious in song choices and sound. But on stage she could be something else. I love how loose she is here on this Billy Joe Shaver song, how playful and goofy, funny and just having fun she seems while singing with Willie Nelson and fronting his Family Band at KERA studios in 1974. (Also: Her breath control!) If you want to see more of Sammi and Willie together, check out this slow, sweaty and, uh, ragged duet performance from about the same time, on Tom Paxton’s “Last Thing on My Mind.” (Sammi enters at about the 3:00 mark.)

12. “Cover Me” (from Sunshine, 1975)

The title track, a Sammi original, seems like it’s trending against type but of course it turns out it’s the lack of sunshine in her lover’s eyes that inspires this look back to better days. The whole album’s very good, including a haunted “Long Black Veil” and a slew of solid-enough songs from legitimately great line-up of songwriters (Donnie Fritts, Eddie Rabbit, Mickey Newbury, Bob McDill), all of it winningly cut in a, uh, sunny mid-70s’ crossover style, a little more country pop for once than country soul. Her version of Wayne Thompson’s similarly sunny “Cover Me” would’ve fit perfectly in a 1975 country radio mix alongside Oliva Newton John, Glen Campbell or Elvis Presley—and did, albeit climbing only to No. 33. Thompson’s seductive song lets Sammi whisper, and then shout, the instructions for helping her make it through the night. “I’ve been naked for so long… Take your love and cover me.”

13. “Today I Started Loving You Again” (from Today I Started Loving You Again, 1975)

Smith’s seventh and final album for Mega is as close as she ever came to going full Outlaw in the studio. Her live sounding “My Window Faces the South” here, for example, sprints breathlessly through a verse, three good-natured choruses and three spirited instrumental breaks in barely two minutes, with Sammi laughing and delighted all the way and calling out the solos: “Wade Raye!” “Hal Rugg!” “Jimmy Capps!” On a version of Leon Payne’s “There’ll Never Take His Love from Me,” meanwhile, she sounds like she’s gone night-terrors stiff while disproving the song’s title with her every labored breath. But I what I want to recommend is the album’s title track, her version of maybe my man Merel Haggard’s greatest song. (Merle was a big Sammi Smith: He written the album notes to Lonesome half a decade earlier and called her take on “Today I Started…” his favorite. She sounds in her cups, maybe hunched over a bar, nursing a bourbon, closing in on crying time and talking to herself: “What a fool I was...” People are starting to stare, but she’s blind to everything but this pain. (Bonus: If you have a copy of Heartaches by the Number: Country Music’s 500 Greatest Singles laying around handy, check out entries #147 and #148, my co-writer Bill Friskics-Warren’s inspired pairing of George Jones’ “He Stopped Loving Her Today” with Sammi’s “Today I Started Loving You Again.”)

14. “A Reason to Go Home” (from As Long as There’s Sunday, 1976)

After Mega, Smith released one album (Her Way) for Zodiac, then signed to Elektra for three records. The first of those, As Long as There’s Sunday, concludes with “A Reason to Go Home,” a quintessential Smith original that splits the lonely difference between her signature hit and “Toast of ’45.” The bar’s about to close and not only doesn’t she have anyone to help her make it until dawn; she doesn’t even have someone to buy her a drink. So she orders a coffee to pass the time until they kick her out. “Maybe I’ll see someone I know,” she figures, her voice cracking. She prays she had a reason, just one little reason, to go home. But her lover’s long gone, the house is empty, and what’s the point? She orders another cup.

15. “What a Lie” (from Girl Hero, 1979)

A Top 20 pop-country number from that slim country radio window between peak Outlaw and the rise of Urban Cowboy, “What a Lie” rolls along easily, its twang showing through only intermittently in bursts of pedal steel and Smith’s scratchy, low-key embittered vocal. That string pad says violins but is probably a synthesizer—just like her old lover promised forever on his way out the door: “What a lie!” It only went as high as No. 16, another disappointing showing for Sammi but also a pretty good one considering that “What a Lie,” like the rest of her self-referentially titled Girl Hero album, was on the tiny Cyclone label. (Hear also: Her disco-country version of Wayne Thompson’s “The Letter.”)

16. “Cheatin’s a Two Way Street” (single, 1981)

Smith would continue to record, now and then, for another decade or so, but this was basically the end of her radio road. She was keeping up with new sounds, making good records and singing the hell out of them. But her moment had passed—because she was a woman in an industry that had moved on from the co-ed golden years she’d help to make possible, coupled with working for increasingly smaller record companies. Another No. 16 hit, and her final Top 20, “Cheatin’s a Two Way Street” was a single-only cut for little Nashville indie Sound Factory (co-produced by Buddy Emmons). Sounds fantastic, though, like it could be a Don Williams or Eddie Rabbit track from that time, all shimmering synthy beats and acoustic guitars. It’s a romantic cautionary tale, cynical in the extreme: “Lovin’ another woman’s man don’t seem so bad when there’s nothin’ left at home” or, in a throwback to “Help Me Make It through the Night,” “It’s not that she don’t know what’s right or wrong / She just don’t care when you get down to it.” As almost always on a Sammi Smith record, every street leads to another lonely night. To make it through the night this time, she’s only got herself.

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