MAURICE SMITH: L.A. MUSICAL OUTLAW
When the spaghetti-western guitar and booming drums begin, you’re in new territory, pardner: A fusion of pop, funk and Southern hard rock, heavily tinged with country sounds and gospel-style vocals.
Welcome to the world of Maurice Smith and the Magnolia Outlaws.
The group’s new song, “Hollywood,” is an autobiographical tale from Smith, the group’s leader. A veteran club and session singer in Los Angeles, he honors his native Mississippi and the western cowboy spirit, following the path of Shaboozey and the many others showing that country-influenced music is for everyone — with roots in Black music from the beginning.
The new single from Smith and his group, released this summer, follows the song “Outlaw on the Run” from the spring. The band is now working on its first album, honing a sound more in common with Marcus King and Gary Clark Jr. than blues or classic R&B.
With few singing gigs available in L.A. during the COVID-19 pandemic, Smith’s interest in a country-leaning persona began when he took up horse riding at Lakeview Terrace — returning to a hobby from his boyhood in Mississippi, where he’d ride horses with his grandfather, listening to Johnnie Taylor more than Johnny Cash.
“During the pandemic I got back into the horseback riding and just being out in nature on the trails and everything. It led me to wanting to get back get back to that to the regional music of Mississippi. You know, country, Southern rock, blues,” Smith said.
“In Mississippi, when we would go out on the trail, and when we were riding, like in our culture, we weren’t necessarily listening to country music. We were listening to Southern soul,” he said. “So, that was cowboy music in Mississippi to me.”
When the pandemic waned, Smith began to hang out at the Desert 5 Spot in Hollywood and was eventually invited to sing with the band, tearing up Chris Stapleton’s “Tennessee Whiskey” and becoming a club favorite.
Smith’s singing resume is substantial and growing, having backed Beyoncé on stage and LeAnn Rimes in the studio. He’s also a co-lead singer of Dazz Band, a popular 1980s group that still performs at soul music festivals. The group recently joined classic acts like Kool & the Gang and Morris Day and The Time on a music cruise to Ensenada, Mexico.
On the Magnolia Outlaws new single, Smith sings of home. Before he moved to California, he’d never been farther west than San Antonio, Texas.
“Mississippi is known as the as the Magnolia State, so it’s just a homage to home,” he said.
Out from Mississippi
Just to make my name…
California rain can’t wash away this pain…
Hollywood, just don’t leave me here
Far away from where I’ve been…
I’m in the hollow… nothing but sorrow…
Far away from where I’ve been…
The Magnolia Outlaws, though, come from all over. Lead guitarist Ash Janga hails from Miami. Carnell Harrell, the organist, is from Los Angeles and has played with Teena Marie, the Jacksons, and Jennifer Lopez. “We’ve been playing together about 15 years,” Smith said of Harrell.
Bassist David McKenize hails from Memphis and brings that “deep muddy” sound to the band, Smith said. North Carolina native Iajhi Hampden handles the drums, featured loud in the mix on “Hollywood” even though he’s mainly a jazz player.
“It's just flawless,” Smith said of Hampden. “He always knows what I need when we’re playing. It just leads me to where we need to go.”
The band has developed a following, hosting the monthly “juke-joint night” at the Desert 5 Spot.
A musical path
Smith was born and raised in Jackson, Mississippi, more of musical city than many people know. “It’s really a hotbed for blues and Southern soul,” he said.
“Growing up, I come from a very strict Christian Pentecostal household, so the only thing the only thing I got to hear growing up was gospel. So, the Williams Brothers, the Winans, Commissioned, and stuff like that, you know, the Mississippi Mass Choir, so that was the first music that I was hearing.”
Smith’s uncle, a college student at the time, would invite him over to listen to his cassette tapes of bluesman T-Bone Walker, soul legend Al Green, artists from the emerging hip-hop scene, and Milli Vanilli, too.
“I would just close the door, put the headphones on, and I got a hold to his collections. Like, oh my God, like this is out there?”
Smith learned breath control and how to perform before an audience in the Jim Hill High School choir in Jackson, studying with music teacher James Hawkins who took students to perform all over, even to Vienna, Austria.
“The whole area of West Jackson was one of the most poverty-stricken, crime-ridden areas in the state at that point,” Smith said. “Not everybody, but a lot of people were affiliated with gangs, just trying to grow up and survive, right? And so, you had the people in this choir doing one thing together and just getting lost in the music. You know, you put aside your differences just to be in this choir.”
“One of his things that he told us: ‘Look out into the crowd, you know, connect with them. The people want to feel like that you’re singing directly to them.’”
“We had a group, a quartet group, and we would go out and sing one of our songs, ‘In the Still of the Night.’ And so once I got to Jim Hill, I started leading and learning that song, and that was it,” he said. “So you know, I’m this freshman high school student, like we were sitting there singing to these grown women — and then you would have them going crazy. It was just a magical experience.”
He finished his degree at Jackson State University, right down the street from his home.
“Once I got to college and I started going out to the to the juke joints and the holes-in-the-wall out there, you hear the blues, like Johnnie Taylor and Johnny ‘Guitar’ Watson and all that stuff,” he said. “That’s what we were listening to in college. It’s like you go anywhere else, college students are listening to the hip-hop thing. That's what my mind was conditioned to like, always listening to that deep soul regional music.”
He would often travel to the Mississippi Delta to visit his grandparents in the town of Mound Bayou. “My mother’s family is from the Mississippi Delta, and just that that whole side of her family, they’re all musical,” Smith said. “It’s like you fall into one of about three categories on that side of family: You’re either basketball players, doctors, or musicians and teachers. So, I fell into the music, you know. We would go up there (and) my grandfather, he would sit us down and teach us the harmony parts. He was a DJ at the radio station back in the ‘50s out there, and so just that musical influence was huge in my upbringing.”
“If you go to the Delta, there it’s like Black people listening to the blues, and in some places that just you don't always see that,” he said.
““My grandmother, she always pushed me. She always pushed me as a singer, you know. She wanted me to learn piano, but I never really got around to learning,” he said. “My great aunt, she had a piano in her house, and one of my older cousins, he loved to sing and play.
“My cousins and uncles, they all pretty much play drums, and so they would just be in there talking noisily with each other about who could play drums the best and who’s the best drummer in the family. And so, we would end up at my uncle’s church. He had a small storefront church out there. We would end up at his church, and they’re all in there playing and just trying to show each other up.”
In college, Smith would take his grandmother and aunt to the casinos in Tunica, then leave them and drive into Memphis. “We’d drop them off and could walk around, and you know, hearing all that Memphis blues coming around here, and then getting all the Al Green stuff, oh God,” Smith recalled. “Like, you don't know the significance of what you're hearing until you actually leave.”
“A lot of people don’t know this, but it’s amazing that back then, a lot of people were categorizing a lot of Al Green stuff as country,” he noted. “Oh my gosh, his voice is unbelievable. Unbelievable.”
Memories of his young years in Mississippi came to mind as Smith watched Ryan Coogler’s Sinners, the Oscar-winning film that creatively deals with race and the history of American music through an allegory of vampires and evil spirits. Some of the soundtrack was recorded at Memphis’ Royal Studios.
“In the movie Sinners, they make reference to Mound Bayou, one of the first towns in America founded by former slaves. It was a protection city, so if you needed to escape, you’d make your way to Mound Bayou first,” Smith said. “I loved the soundtrack (to Sinners). Just the scenery of it all, the opening scenes where they’re driving through the cotton field. That just reminded me of when we were driving up to our grandparents’, with cotton fields on the right side and left side of the highway. Growing up, you didn’t realize the significance of being able to see that.”
Finding his way
At first, he didn’t consider a full-time career in music.
“I interviewed for a job in Mississippi with Dyson vacuum cleaners after I graduated,” Smith said. He didn’t get the job, but the hiring manager told him, “If you ever think about going out to California, the position there is yours.”
He decided it was time to leave home.
“I have family, my mom’s side of the family out here in L.A., I had five cousins that we knew, we would see probably once every five or six years. We didn't really get to grow up with them, so I'm like, I might as well come out here and hang out with the family, get to know them a little bit better, and so I made my way out here for that position.”
He held that job for four years, then got laid off.
By then, he’d already begun singing around town and made the decision to stay with music as a professional.
“A friend of mine had moved out here with me. He came out here to be a producer and musician, so I would go out to the jam sessions with him, and you know sing a couple songs.”
He began to sing in bands at corporate events, weddings, and parties, then small clubs around town. “Just being out on that scene, you meet people who are writing for other artists or who need who need a demo singer. A lot of stuff just happened from me doing demo work.”
“One guy who helped me out a lot, his name was Mike Eyia. He was a saxophone player, and he introduced me to a lot of different session guys, so that’s where a lot of that work came from.”
Then he got a call to back LeAnn Rimes during her performance at the MTV Movie Awards.
He also met Sy Smith, a local singer known as the Queen of Underground Soul, at one of her performances. “I just walked up to her and told her how much I enjoyed her show. Like, she put on an amazing show,” Smith said.
“We stayed in touch, and I would see her every now and then at other shows. Then she just asked me, ‘Hey, I have this show coming up in L.A.,’ and she liked to sing with background singers. I told her that I’m not necessarily a background singer. I don’t really know that world, you know? She said, ‘I’ll teach you. Just come, you know. Get the music, learn it,’ and you know, that just took off from there.”
Between his experience performing in L.A. and his foundation in music from Jim Hill High School, “It's like OK, you do know how to do this. You have to let the fear go and just do it,” he said.
Back to the country
He began to hang out at the Desert 5 Spot just to dance and enjoy the music. “I wasn’t really going there to perform, but the band there, they kept urging me like, ‘Oh come on, come up and sing.’”
The bar’s patrons were swept away when Smith would bring his soulful vocals to country and rock songs. “Every time, they had me come up singing (Chris Stapleton’s) ‘Tennessee Whiskey.’” Then eventually, I told them I know a lot more songs,” he said.
The Magnolias then formed and began playing at the club regularly, often playing extended jams so the crowd can dance.
“Because you know, out here in L.A., they’re still pretty heavy on the Bakersfield sound. So, it’s like just a different Southern rock element to it. It’s like just Southern rock and has funk elements to it,” Smith said. “Everybody was like, ‘Oh my God. Your voice, it’s a different voice than what we’re used to hearing, and but it’s powerful.’ I was encouraged to be who I am and not to adapt to the sound that was already there. Just bring your own style here. Like, just be you.”
One of Smith’s favorite singers is Vince Gill, the veteran country singer whose smooth, powerful voice is matched by his guitar talent, which he now uses as a touring member of the Eagles. “He’s got soul in there,” Smith said.
“I remember we were playing the show, and a guy came up to me. He was like, ‘Oh my God, I’ve never danced so hard to music I didn’t know like this in my life.’ Yeah, that’s called soul music. Like, it just gets in you, and you can’t be still.”
“They really how we add a soul aspect and R&B, soul,” Smith said, “going back to the 80s country.”
Finding funk
Those gigs led to other gigs. He met Raymond Calhoun, the drummer and singer with the Gap Band — who’d brought hard funk into their 1980s pop-and-R&B songs like “Early in the Morning” and “You Dropped a Bomb on Me,” sometimes wearing cowboy hats in their music videos.
“He was doing a Gap Band tribute, and so I got the call to do that,” Smith said. “Raymond is a very cool guy. You know, he talks a lot of noise, and I love good dancers. It turned out to be something that was an amazing experience.”
Along the way, he also met singer T.J. Wilkins, star of 44 — The Musical, a stage show about President Barack Obama and First Lady Michelle Obama. “It was just like, ‘OK we’re singing with the guy who wrote ‘Outstanding,’ you know.”
Along the way, Smith continued to draw on his Mississippi musical roots. I asked him about the legacy of Malaco Records, a record label founded in the 1960s that became a home for many soul-blues artists like Bobby “Blue” Bland, Dorothy Moore, Little Milton, Denise LaSalle and many more. Hits like Anita Ward’s disco smash “Ring My Bell” and Jean Knight’s “Mr. Big Stuff” were recorded in their studios.
“Malaco was like royalty in Jackson. Yeah, any artist that grows up in Jackson or just Mississippi, they were trying to get signed to Malaco. You have all these great records from the Mississippi Mass Choir, and you had Johnnie Taylor,” Smith said. “You had all this great music.”
Another break came his way.
“About five or six years ago, I was doing a ship gig (on a music cruise) with Tito Jackson. I was singing background with him,” Smith recalled. During the trip, a friend mentioned that the Dazz Band was looking for a young lead singer who could help with the aging group’s vocals.
“Nothing ever came about from that conversation, but fast forward to about two years ago, I get a call from Romeo Johnson, the great vocal coach,” who’s worked with the likes of Janet Jackson and Queen Latifah, Smith said.
Johnson told him the Dazz Band’s leader Bobby Harris was once again looking for a lead singer. This time, he got the job. “That wasn't something that I was that I was even expecting,” Smith said.
He now performs with Dazz Band a couple of shows each month in different parts of the country. He shares lead vocals with the Atlanta-based singer SNCR.
“We play a lot of the old-school festivals, so you get to play with Lakeside, the Ohio Players,” he said. “In that moment, you’re trying not to get starstruck, but it’s like man, you guys are legends. Like, it’s the soundtrack to my childhood.”
Smith loves playing with such R&B veterans and loves hearing their stories from over the years. “They’re really known for their ballads,” he said of Dazz Band. “A lot of people don’t know that. In Ohio, their ballads are what is demanded most. So, one of my favorite songs that I that I get to lead is called ‘Gamble with My Love,’ and it has just a smooth vocal approach to it.”
The original version of “Gamble” was never released as a single by the Dazz Band, but its album hit No. 1 on the R&B/hip-hop charts, largely from the single “Let It Whip,” a massive, funky hit that went to No. 1 on the R&B charts and No. 5 on the pop chart.
The biggest stages
Back in 2015, Smith got the call of his dreams: Beyoncé needed additional singers for her performance at the Grammys.
“This is when she did “Precious Lord (Take My hand)” at the Grammys,” Smith said. “My phone was just blowing up that day. They’re like, ‘Can you get down here right now?’,” he said.
“So, I get to the rehearsal studio. Nobody’s telling us anything. They’re getting us to sign NDAs. We still don’t know who it’s for. You walk into the actual rehearsal room, and you see Beyoncé standing there.”
“She’s just the perfectionist. The rehearsal is like the actual show, you know, playing, lighting, to hair and make-up. Everything is exactly how she’s going to do it on the night of the show.”
Smith and the other background singers walked on stage at the Grammys.
Then they walked on stage at the Grammys. “You stand on that stage with the biggest entertainer in the world, looking out into the crowd and all the other biggest entertainers in the world just looking up at you. I thought, ‘Oh my God, this is something that I’ve never even dreamed about.’”
In the 1990s, Smith also became the voice on some Chicago house music hits. “A buddy of mine that I was playing with, he’s from Chicago, and so he grew up with (house music pioneer) Roy Davis Jr., and so he called me and he was telling me that another buddy of his was looking a soul singer to demo some songs.”
“I didn’t really grow up with house music, so I was equating the house music to disco, and so I was immersing myself into a lot of this stuff, just to figure out how to approach their records,” Smith said.
More recently, Smith appeared as a backing singer with West Coast rapper Too $hort on his NPR Tiny Desk performance, filmed during the pandemic shutdown.
“Growing up on the west side of Mississippi, like Too $hort was basically the whole local hero because a lot of his family was from the west side of Mississippi. If you would go to a backyard barbecue, he was on the radio. Like, they were playing Too Short. He’s an artist that I grew up with,” Smith said.
“So, getting to be on stage with him and not just singing background, but being featured as the lead singer,” he continued. “The kid in me just came alive, like man.”
How’d he meet Too $hort? “I had a residency in L.A. and my drummer at the time, he was Too $hort’s music director. So, he invited Too $hort to (Smith’s) show, and he didn’t tell me that he was inviting him. So I like I’m looking out in crowd. I like to keep the lights dark when I do my shows,” Smith said. “I’m just seeing this short, baldheaded guy and… he’s really enjoying it. I'm like oh man, it looks like Too $hort.”
“After the show is over, he walks up, like ‘Man, you guys rock. You guys sounds so good.’ I'm like, ‘Bro, you’re Too $hort.’”
Smith also sang at a couple of Soho House pop-up performances with the rapper, known for his streetwise songs about survival.
“I’ve sung with so many different artists and different genres, it’s like, you have that love for all of that different type of music, and you just like trying to figure out how you can just merge it all together — like now, we’re just going back and being true to that Mississippi sound,” Smith said. “Now you can like take all those different sounds and just combine them into what you’re doing now.”
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