George Smallwood (left). Photo courtesy of Andrew Morgan

“The element of surprise is a wonderful thing.” Local treasure George Smallwood, who will be performing at the Anacostia Neighborhood Library next week, told us this during a visit to his Hyattsville home. To paraphrase one of his best songs, “surprise is his thing,” in music and in conversation.

Smallwood released his first single, “Touching is My Thing,” in 1974 on his own Smallwood label. He released a few more singles, and the 1980 album Just 4 You, but his self-released records didn’t seem to get heard outside the D.C. area, but in the past decade his records have been licensed for reissue on the London-based Jazzman label and on D.C.’s own People’s Potential Unlimited. PPU’s Andrew Morgan arranged for my wife and I to visit and interview Smallwood last weekend.

I didn’t get much of a chance to ask questions. Smallwood did what he does whenever he has visitors interested in his music: He played for us.

Musician, cookie monster, former closet painter; George Smallwood is an entertainer. He lost his sight over forty years ago, and now, at 73, walks with a limp. But his voice is remarkably well preserved. He launched into a sultry version of “Come Together.” Smallwood has hundreds of songs in his repertoire, but we’re never sure if we‘ re getting an original or a cover.

“This is one of my originals,” he says, right before he plays “How Sweet It Is.” Because whatever he plays becomes original, so thoroughly does Smallwood give his own voice to anything he plays.

“I’m in love with life/ Now ain’t that nice/ For me it’s just a cuppa tea.”

“You like Country and Western?”
“We do!
“This one is by the Carter Family—remember them?”

He works out a tempo on his Yamaha drum machine, then forgets about the Carter Family entirely and starts to play “50 Ways to Leave Your Lover”—with a twang. He segues this into “What’s the Reason I’m Not Pleasing You,” a hit for Fats Domino.

The phone rings in the middle of this. “Today’s Valentine’s Day? So where’s my candy?”

Now that he knows it’s Valentine’s Day, he offers cookies to us and Andrew’s four-year-old son Hank, who must be witness to all sorts of things he can’t fully appreciate right now.

“I am the cookie monster,” Smallwood tells us, accompanied by a preset Yamaha rhythm in a samba vein. Then he sings it.

Smallwood’s 1980 album JUST 4 YOU (label courtesy DC Soul Recordings)

Andrew requests “Touching,” and Smallwood starts to play it, but soon he giggles and falls apart, hugging himself and stomping on the floor. I requested “I Love My Father,” a tender ballad that was one of the few songs he played through, though he ended it with a few whoops. “My father was bad, my mother was a pistol, right. You can see why he used to like to go huntin’.”

Smallwood came from a musical family, and let us see a brochure that laid out his complicated family tree (which may explain the tree used on his label artwork). His grandfather played fiddle and his father played guitar in a band that worked honky tonks in rural Maryland. Before I could ask him about his father’s music, he started to play for us again, singing “Off the Wall” with the horror movie chords of “Thriller,” adding, “He’s gonna grab you/ And take candy and cookie from little kids.”

Smallwood gave us a wonderful house concert for over an hour, but I left with a lot of unanswered questions. What’s with the rooster that serves as his logo? How did he start out playing music? What about his father’s band? How did he lose his sight?

I called Smallwood last night to try to get some answers. Maybe if I had him on the phone he wouldn’t get caught up in performing. He answered the phone like a showman: “I say, I say HELLO!” When I told him who it was, he told me how happy he was to meet my wife this weekend, and “wait, let me try out this song on you right now!”

George eventually talked to me about his school sports career at St. Gabriel’s in Petworth, where his classmates included John Thompson Sr. Kind of a coincidence, because his son was my classmate at Gonzaga. Smallwood had a decidedly different career trajectory, called up to try out for the minor leagues as a teenager, but turning down the opportunity for reasons he didn’t get into.

Not only did Smallwood’s father play guitar, he worked two jobs, at the Pentagon and as an elevator operator at the Warner Theater. He told me his grandfather was a short man—“he would come to where your knees are.” When he played the fiddle, “he could make a doggone bear sit down and cry! And his grandmother? “She was tall! She was damn near seven feet tall.”

I never did get answers to the questions I had, but he answered better questions. When he played baseball for St. Gabriel’s, Smallwood was the only black member of the team, which was sponsored by old Tenleytown pizza joint Maggie’s. That’s where George had his first taste of pizza.

George Smallwood performs on Wednesday, February 25 at 6:30 pm at the Anacostia Branch Library, 1800 Good Hope Road SE. The performance is part of the Capital Fringe Music in the Library series.

Watch George perform “Touching is My Thing” on DC Public Acccess TV in the ’90s