View From The Front Porch- August 29, 2012

Oh how I miss the sweet voice of Sammi Smith. In 1964, the year she moved to Nashville, and two years after I arrived, we became close friends and I would stop and pick her up at 3AM of a morning

 to take her to the tv station where I worked a daily tv show called Country Junction. I was two years away from having my own syndicated show, "The Stan Hitchcock Show", which would come in 1966. Ya'see, in those days we were all one big music family in Nashville, hanging out, learning the ropes, writing songs together, sitting around late at night with passing a guitar around and trying out new ideas. I'd had a couple of chart records already and one album was released on Epic Records, I had just returned from a tour of Germany with Johnny Seay and the Hank Williams, Jr show. Almost a month overseas, going non-stop as we always did in those years. The pickers were working recording sessions around the clock, staying awake with diet pills, and finally crashing to oblivion for 12 hours straight, then back at it. How the musicians did it, I will never know, it was unbelievable stress and creativity. People like Roger Miller were starting to inhabit a stratosphere that only they could reach, writing songs and making records that will never be topped. And in to this jungle, came the sweetest voice, Sammi Smith, fresh from Oklahoma and Kansas, with a unique voice and a personality that every picker loved. This was a few years before "Help Me Make It Through The Night", but everyone that knew her, knew it was just a matter of time. I got to sit with her, over my J45, and play along as she sang her songs to me, one last time....a short time later, she was gone. You touched me Sammi, and the touch will never go away.    -Stan