Billy Smiley, Sr.

By Thomas Howard - Delta Democrat Times - March 15, 2018

Billy Smiley Sr., a beloved local blues musician who was killed in 2017, will be honored with a special headstone today.

The Mount Zion Memorial Foundation, a nonprofit that since 1989 has worked to memorialize the contributions of musicians, will dedicate Smiley's headstone at 4 p.m. today in the Legends section of the Greenlawn Memorial Gardens.

T. DeWayne Moore, executive director of the Memorial Fund, said Smiley is being honored for his contributions to the community and the music of the blues and jazz.

"He's played festivals all over the Delta and worked in multiple Delta schools as the music director. We want to honor Mr. Smiley for his contributions."

The dedication, Moore said, will be lead by Woodrow Wilkins, a Greenville journalist and author, who knew Smiley and followed his music.

"He covered some of the events Mr. Smiley had done," Moore said.

Also present at the dedication will be one of Smiley's sons, local musicians, including Rob Mortimer, and other community members who want to pay tribute to the Greenville musician.

"It's up in the air as to who all will be participating," Moore said, adding he expects many more people to come than those who responded to the invitations. 

Anyone who attends will be given an opportunity to share thoughts or memories of Smiley, Moore said.

After the graveside headstone dedication, folks will be invited to the Walnut Street Blues Bar, 128 S Walnut St., where Smiley's name will be added to the Greenville Blues Walk.

"That's the sidewalk around Walnut Street," said Wilkins, who helped organize the event.

"They get their name and likeness added. It's modeled after the Hollywood Walk of Fame but for local artists."

Wilkins said Allen Orlieck, who carves the memorial stones for the Blues Walk, will be on hand to display Smiley's stone and install it in the sidewalk.

Since 1989, the Mount Zion Memorial Fund has memorialized and honored musicians in rural communities, where they may not have a marked grave.

Since the founding, the organization has raised the funds to build memorials for 22 blues artists and continues to raise money to expand that list.

However, Moore said, the memorial for Smiley is somewhat different.

"The family paid for it," he said. "This is not one of the ones we paid for. His family contacted us about doing a memorial."

Brief bio about Billy Smiley Sr.

Smiley, a Delta bluesman who loved to put on a show for his audience, succumbed to injuries sustained in a late night stabbing in February 2017. He was 59 years of age.

Hours before the stabbing, several local musicians, including Smiley, Leonard Stevenson Jr., Mortimer and John Horton, were jamming at Walnut Street Blues Bar with a German blues band who was in town filming a German blues documentary.

Stevenson was later charged with two counts of capital murder in the stabbing deaths of Smiley, 59, and Ronnie Tubbs, 59. All three were involved, at one time or another, in Smiley & The Young Guns.

Smiley, who performed for about a decade with various bands, including The Billy Smiley Band, also taught music in the Greenville Public School District and was the band director at Greenville High School until 2013.

Smiley is survived by his sons, Billy Frank Smiley Jr., of Greenville, Dexter Lee Smiley, of Jackson, Billy Frank Lee Smiley, of Augusta, Georgia, and Elic Bankhead, of Madison, Wisconsin; his daughters, Dorian Weatherspoon, of Dallas, and Ronena Turner, of Oaklawn, Illinois; his brothers, James Alvin Smiley and Dornell Smiley, both of Greenville, and Robert Earl Smiley, of Shelby; his sisters, Lucy Solomon, of Milwaukee, and Barbara Wright, of Greenville; and five grandchildren. 

Smiley played keyboards for Jerry Fair's Cultural Blues Band in the mid-2000s, during
which time he was the band director for Coleman Junior High School in Greenville

Robert Charles: "Let no man on God's earth threaten to take the life God provided for you alone"

After hearing that hundreds of racists had joined in the lynching and mutilation of a black man in Georgia, one man called on his black brothers and sisters to take up arms in self-defense.  "Let no man on God's earth threaten to take the life God provided for you alone, and if someone does, pick up a gun and left them know, we will shoot back."  His name was Robert Charles and he was born in Copiah County, Mississippi. 

A drawing in the newspaper of Robert Charles

On 23 April 1899 Sam Hose, a black farm laborer, was lynched in Palmetto, Georgia, after killing his employer in self-defense. An excursion train was run from Atlanta carrying over a thousand people to watch the spectacle with the guard famously calling, “All aboard for the burning.” Even by the standards of the time (more than 80 black men and women were lynched in the US in 1899), Hose’s lynching was a brutal affair. His ears, fingers, face and genitalia were cut off in front of a jeering crowd of men, women and children. After this mutilation he was burned alive and his charred body cut up for souvenirs. Slices of his heart and liver were offered for sale at 25c a slice.

The killing outraged black America. W E B Du Bois, a successful black academic, was out walking in Atlanta when he was told that Hose’s knuckle bones were on display in a shop down the road. The episode convinced him to leave the safety of the ivory tower and launched him on a career of political activism. Ida B Wells, the great campaigner against lynching, raised the funds to hire a private detective to investigate the killing and went on to write her classic work, Lynch Law in Georgia. And in New Orleans Robert Charles, a black laborer involved in the Back to Africa movement, began urging his friends to arm, both to protect themselves and to prevent further lynching's. 

These were dangerous times. In Louisiana there was a campaign under way to strip black people of the vote. The number of registered black voters fell from 130,444 in 1896 to 5,320 in 1898. In New Orleans the newspapers were warning of a coming race war, with one paper arguing that the “extermination” of the black population would be necessary unless they accepted rule by “an iron hand”, and another advocating either deportation or sterilization. There was a routine, everyday brutalization of black people.

Robert Charles had had enough. On 23 July 1900 Charles and his friend Lennard Pierce were waiting for two women friends when they were approached by three policemen who accused them of loitering. One of the policemen began clubbing Charles, who broke away. The policeman drew his gun and shot and wounded Charles. Charles by now always went armed and he fired back, wounding his attacker, and escaped. Pierce was arrested. Later that day a squad of six policemen went to arrest Charles at the room he rented. Armed with a Winchester rifle, he once again made his escape, killing two of the policemen. He hid out with friends at 1208 Saratoga Street.

The hunt for this “black fiend” was joined by hundreds of armed vigilantes who unleashed a pogrom on the streets of New Orleans. A 75 year old black man, Baptiste Philo, was shot dead, as were two other people unfortunate enough to be caught by the vigilantes. A white sailor who objected to the lynchings had to be rescued by the police to save him from being strung up, but was fined $25 for “incendiary remarks”. According to William Ivy Hair, the historian of this episode, white hatred made an outbreak inevitable at this time and if it had not been Charles then some other pretext would have sparked off an attack on the black community.

By 26 July an informer had told the police where Charles was hiding out. The police laid siege to the house, reinforced by hundreds of armed vigilantes, watched by a crowd estimated at 20,000. Charles shot it out with a thousand hate-filled gunmen. Between 3pm and 5pm he fired some 50 times, killing five of his attackers and seriously wounding another seven. 1208 Saratoga Street was riddled with over 5,000 bullet holes. Unable to finish him off, the building was fired to smoke him out. Charles came out, gun in hand, and was shot dead. He was shot over 30 times and then the crowd rushed forward to stamp and trample his corpse until he was unrecognisable.

Any expression of sympathy with Charles placed the speaker in danger. The day after the final shootout a black man in Houston, Texas, who spoke up for him, was shot dead in the street. And attacks continued throughout the rest of the year. The black population had to be terrorised to ensure that Charles did not set an example. Nevertheless there was widespread admiration and support for him. The man who informed on him was shot dead by one of Charles’s friends later in the year. And his exploits inspired a blues song, the Robert Charles Blues, that became too dangerous to perform and has been lost.

In the Philippines, where US troops were fighting Filipino rebels, the rebels put up placards asking black troops why they were fighting for the people who had killed Sam Hose and Robert Charles. Ida Wells, herself an advocate of armed self-defence, memorialized Charles in her Mob Rule in New Orleans. She wrote, “The white people of this country may charge that he was a desperado, but to people of his own race Robert Charles will always be regarded as the hero of New Orleans.”

For more read William Ivy Hair’s Carnival of Fury: Robert Charles and the New Orleans Race Riot of 1900 (Louisiana State UP, 2008)

Houston Stackhouse

Houston Stackhouse circa 1960s (Photo: George Mitchell)

THIS WEEK on BLUES UNLIMITED!

THIS WEEK on BLUES UNLIMITED!
It Must've Been The Devil Goin' Up The Country:
The Big Road Blues of David Evans
Join us as we aim the spotlight on the legendary field recordings of David Evans. An intrepid researcher, most of what he captured in the mid 60s and early 70s are fascinating documents of a time and place that otherwise
might’ve been lost to history.
Don’t miss this special episode of Blues Unlimited!

Pictured: Napoleon Strickland playing the fife while Othar Turner dances. Near Senatobia, Mississippi, 1970. Photo by David Evans.