By Russ Layne
When Duke Ellington proclaimed that a fellow musician – a fellow jazz pianist, in fact – was “beyond category,” the arts community paid attention. Ellington, the Maestro, was speaking of a man born in Goshen with the name William Henry Joseph Bonaparte Bertholoff Smith but who has always been known to jazz aficionados as Willie “the Lion” Smith.

Goshen is widely noted for many things – the historic race track, the seat of Orange County government – but not as an express stop on the jazz train. It should be because, as Ellington pointed out, Smith was no ordinary player but one of the most influential pianists in American jazz history. Born in 1897, two years before Ellington himself, Smith would go on to create a style of play called stride piano, a form that eventually became a hallmark of the Harlem Renaissance. Listen to stride piano and you hear an unrelenting rhythm from the player’s left hand with both left and right hands playing slowly or often at lightning speed. It’s no accident that Smith named one of his more celebrated stride songs “Fingerbuster.”

Here, he plays “Ain’t Misbehavin” and “St. Louis Blues.” http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4F0rd-ZbAiY

As a child, Willie Smith could be found playing in the hallways of the Hitchcock House, as it is still known today, one of Goshen’s more striking historic homes, which sits almost directly across from the government center. Willie’s mother, Ida Oliver, was a domestic worker for the wealthy Hitchcock family.

Ida was a woman of African American and Mohawk lineage. Smith’s father was William Bertholoff, a Jewish playboy who spent a good deal of time gambling and womanizing at the Goshen track, just a stone’s throw from the Hitchcock estate. Ida knew this was not a healthy formula for raising a child, and eventually told William to hit the road. Then, in 1901, Willie, 4, and his mother were uprooted from Goshen and moved to Newark, N.J. with his stepfather and Ida’s second husband, John Smith.

In Newark, Willie was raised in a black community adjacent to a Jewish neighborhood – the perfect setting for a Jewish black kid who would be a bar mitzvah boy in 1910. In his autobiography, “Music on My Mind,” Smith said, “A lot of people are unable to understand my wanting to be Jewish. They told me that I stepped up to the plate with one strike against me being born a Negro and now I take another strike right down the middle. They can’t seem to understand I have a Jewish soul and belong in that faith.” As if to prove the point, Smith eventually became a cantor in a Harlem synagogue.

In his teenage years, Smith was influenced by the rich traditions of two cultures: the invigorating gospel music of the black Baptist church and the incantations of the Jewish tradition. He was fluent in Yiddish, which proved quite handy: He was hired at Hausman’s Footwear in downtown Newark to communicate with monolingual Jewish customers. Young Willie must have done quite well because he was able to buy a second-hand piano with his earnings.

Primarily self-taught, Smith had amazing dexterity especially with his left hand. Most people might think that this special talent gave rise to his nickname, but in fact “Lion” had nothing to do with his musical prowess. As an soldier during World War I he handled heavy artillery with tenacious energy and his buddies began referring to him as “The Lion.”

Upon his return stateside, Smith lost no time re-familiarizing himself with the keyboard and developed the hot new stride style. His reputation in both Newark and Harlem burgeoned. Stride piano, not to be confused with ragtime, requires tremendous speed in the left hand while stretching and playing octaves – a style few practitioners could execute as clearly and meticulously as Smith. In fact, at the time there were just a few other pianists who could even approximate his skill, most notably Fats Waller, James P. Johnson and Donald Lambert. During the Roaring 20’s, some of these practitioners would convene and create what was known as “cutting sessions” to see who could outplay whom. Smith usually won these after-hours competitions.

Ellington, Count Basie, Thelonious Monk and the recently departed Billy Taylor all recognized the significant impact on their professional careers made by Willie “The Lion” Smith – a kid from Goshen.
Russ can be reached at guestwriter@zestoforange.com

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Russ Layne is founder and executive director of the Sugar Loaf music series and chairman of the cultural committee of the Paterson N.J. school district’s Council on Equity and Diversity. He is also former host of the “Gumbo Shop” jazz program on WJFF-Radio Catskill.

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