Whispering Jack Smith - Life

Life

Smith was born John Schmidt.

Smith began his professional career in 1915, when he sang with a quartet at a theater in the Bronx. After service in World War I, he got a job in 1918 as a "song plugger" for the Irving Berlin Music Publishing Company. He was a pianist at a radio station when he got his singing break substituting for a singer who failed to show up. Smith was exclusively on the radio, but beginning in 1925, he began making records. He also started performing on-stage on the vaudeville circuit. In 1927, Smith toured England, performing with the Blue Skies Theater Company singing tunes such as "Manhattan" by Rogers and Hart and songs by Gershwin, when he was suddenly replaced by a new all-girl singing trio, the Hamilton Sisters & Fordyce. Smith returned to New York and eventually went to work for NBC Radio.

He died of a heart attack at the age of 51 and is buried next to his mother Anna Schmidt at St. Raymond's Cemetery in the Bronx, New York City. His grave is unmarked. He was survived by his wife, Marie.

He had a very distinctive style which was a combination of singing and talking in a very "intimate" way using the microphone very effectively as opposed to "belting" the song out. His "whispering" style of singing was a result of a World War I injury from poison gas that kept him from singing at full volume. He made the "whispering" style popular, and there were a number of imitators. Smith took to the relatively newly invented microphone, and it was singers like "Whispering" Jack Smith and the early "crooners" who developed the use of this "modern" technology.