The cause was complications of cancer, his longtime bandmate, Jeff “Stick” Davis, said.
Smith’s smoky, coarse-timbered baritone was heard on the Amazing Rhythm Aces’ biggest hits, including 1975’s gospel-themed “Amazing Grace (Used to Be Her Favorite Song),” the group’s sole Top 10 country hit. “The End Is Not in Sight (The Cowboy Tune),” a soulful number written by Smith, earned the band a Grammy Award for Best Country Vocal Performance by a Duo or Group the following year.
His most enduring original was “Third Rate Romance,” a droll yet tender song about a one-night stand that has been recorded by artists ranging from Elvis Costello and Rosanne Cash to proto-new wave band the Fabulous Poodles.
“I called my mama when I first wrote that song and I played a little of it on the telephone to her,” Smith recalled in an interview published on classicbands.com. “I called her and said, ‘Mama, I think I’ve written a hit song.’
“She listened to it,” he went on, chuckling about the song’s suggestive content, “and said, ‘You might ought to think about going back to school next year.’”
Originally recorded by singer-songwriter Jesse Winchester, the song, which evinces empathy and wit akin to that of Randy Newman or John Prine, became a Top 20 pop and country hit in a lilting Caribbean-style arrangement recorded by the Amazing Rhythm Aces in 1975.
Smith’s singing and songwriting drew on the broad array of Southern roots music, from blues and honky-tonk to bluegrass and rock ’n’ roll. His work with the Aces, who toured with the likes of Jimmy Buffett and the Eagles and released seven studio albums before disbanding in 1981, was a harbinger of the Americana and alternative-country movements of the 1990s and beyond.
Howard Russell Smith was born to Howard and Rosa (Russell) Smith, on June 17, 1949, in Nashville, Tennessee. He was one of two children. His father was an insurance agent and an amateur bluegrass musician, his mother a homemaker.
Raised in Lafayette, Tennessee, a small town 60 miles northeast of Nashville, Russell worked as a disc jockey as a teenager. After graduating from high school, he moved to Knoxville, where, in the late ’60s, he formed the band Fatback with several future members of the Amazing Rhythm Aces.
In the early ’70s, the group relocated to Memphis, where they rebranded themselves the Amazing Rhythm Aces and released their acclaimed debut album, “Stacked Deck,” in 1975.
Working as a solo artist after the group split up, Smith had just one Top 40 country hit, a remake of Boyce and Hart’s 1968 Top 10 pop single “I Wonder What She’s Doing Tonight.” He had much greater success as a songwriter for others during this period, composing chart-topping country hits for Ricky Van Shelton, T. Graham Brown and Randy Travis.
Before getting the Amazing Rhythm Aces back together in the mid-90s, Smith was the lead singer of Run C & W, a novelty band that recorded a pair of albums consisting mainly of bluegrass-style covers of soul hits from the ’60s. The name of the group, which also featured the former Eagle Bernie Leadon and Nashville musicians Vince Melamed and Jim Photoglo, was a tongue-in-cheek mashup of the acronym for country & western music and the name of the hip-hop trio Run DMC.
Smith is survived by his sons, Matthew and Jesse; a sister, Cathy Smith Kemp; and two grandchildren.
“Russell Smith showed me the real beauty of country music,” said Davis, the Aces’ original bassist, speaking from his home in Florida for this obituary.
“I hadn’t been around anybody like him before,” he went on. “Russell Smith was a real artist. He wrote songs that told stories, and his songs brought those stories to life.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.