Hi All,
My name is Steven Smith and I am a Guitar Player from Baton Rouge. I have been playing guitar since circa 1967. The way I came about playing the guitar is that one summer I was walking through my neighborhood in Glen Oaks and overheard someone playing “The House of the Rising Sun” on guitar. The sound was coming from the backyard of a house about 5 down from mine. There in the backyard I saw someone who I had never met, yet we had lived so close to each other for a number of years. His name was Randy Borne who later went on to play in several very successful bands in the Baton Rouge area. Some of the bands are ‘Charlie Pappy’ ‘Opus’ ‘The Clique” and really too many others to mention at this time.
Any way from this chance meeting I was influenced to start playing guitar. I actually had an old plastic ‘Gene Autry” style guitar when I was 5 but it wasn’t in the stars yet for me to seriously start playing at this time. At that time I was learning to play the Harmonica after hearing my Grandfather play a few tunes for me at my aunt’s house in Cottonport, La.
So after I walked into the backyard of my soon to be new friend I asked Randy where he learned to play that song and if he could teach me also to play the guitar. Well he was all too eager to help me saying that he was taking lessons from someone at Baton Rouge Music Studio. From that day on Randy and I started playing almost everyday. He would attend class and then he would come home and show me the lesson that he was learning. Soon we were playing all kinds of music together and we also sometimes practiced with a drummer from time to time eventually starting our First Band together. Our little band, which I honestly don’t know the name of, went on to win Second Place in the Glen Oaks High School Talent Contest back in I think it was 1968. We also played at the End of the Year dance at Glen Oaks Junior High that same year. We were playing music by a lot of popular groups at the time, The Rolling Stones, The Beatles, The Monkees, etal.
In the last 20 years or so I have played in a number of bands either sitting in or as a fulltime member. Some of the bands are The Levee Band, The Jam Brothers Band, Duffield and Company, Three Blind Mice , Rusty Yates , The Randy Davis Group, The Lynn Freeman Band and many others.
I have many stories to tell of my experiences of the gigs I have played and the people I have met in the process. There are so many talented musicians in the Baton Rouge area, it is almost unbelievable how many great musicians have come out of this area. I have been fortunate enough to meet a good many of them.
Please bear with me as I continue my quest to start a place where guitarists and other musicians in the Baton Rouge area can get together and tell thier own stories of how they came about playing music here in the Baton Rouge, Louisiana.
Laissez les temp bon rouler (let the good times roll).
Steven Smith (Scratch)