Big Walter Smith<\/p>\n
(1930-2012)<\/p>\n
Inducted 1998<\/p>\n
Vocalist Big Walter Smith personified the blues in Minneapolis and St. Paul for over 25 years. His music career began long before he landed in Minnesota. Born in Oklahoma, he got his start in show business in the 1950s in a vaudeville show. In the 1960s he shared stages with B.B. King and Bobby \u201cBlue\u201d Band. While in the Twin Cities, he formed the band The Groove Merchants. He was a mainstay of the popular Bayfront Blues Festival in Duluth since its inaugural year in 1989. Smith was also featured at other regional festivals, including the Fargo Blues Fest, Minnesota Blues Fest in New Ulm, and Blues on the Range in Chisholm, Minnesota. Smiths\u2019 philosophy was this: \u201c\u2026 you don\u2019t have to be great musician. Just working with great musicians, you\u2019ll come up to their standards. It\u2019ll gel.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Big Walter Smith (1930-2012) Inducted 1998 Vocalist Big Walter Smith personified the blues in Minneapolis and St. Paul for over 25 years. His music career began long before he landed […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":516,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[7,6],"tags":[179,183,185,184,65,68,57,45],"class_list":["post-515","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-7","category-inductee","tag-179","tag-big-walter-smith","tag-blues","tag-groove-merchants","tag-inductee","tag-minneapolis","tag-minnesota","tag-minnesota-music-hall-of-fame"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mnmusichalloffame.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/515","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mnmusichalloffame.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mnmusichalloffame.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mnmusichalloffame.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mnmusichalloffame.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=515"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mnmusichalloffame.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/515\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mnmusichalloffame.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/516"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mnmusichalloffame.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=515"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mnmusichalloffame.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=515"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mnmusichalloffame.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=515"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}