Musician makes it without major label

Corey Smith is almost a decade removed from the days he spent using a piece of white chalk as an instrument of education as a teacher at North Gwinnett High School in Suwanee, Ga.

The graduate from the University of Georgia chased his dreams of becoming a teacher out of college, but it wasn't long after that the Jefferson, Ga. native decided to exchange his piece of chalk for a more close-to-home instrument: a guitar.

It was a decision that, now in 2010, has made him one of the most popular independent artists, having sold more than 100,000 copies of his albums without signing with a major label and with no radio play. At first, the thought of giving up teaching was a frightening scenario for Smith.

"It was certainly scary on a practical level knowing I had been to school and had planned on being a teacher and retiring as a teacher," the 32-year-old Smith said.

Smith, who performed in front of a packed crowd at the House of Blues in Lake Buena Vista last Wednesday, is on tour promoting his new album, Keeping up with the Joneses, and has come a long way from the raw, country-style acoustic music he made his fame on.

Raised by his grandparents in the rural town of Jefferson, Smith was surrounded by family and was well educed in music. His grandmother was a fan of country while his father was in a rock band. He was a huge fan of the acoustic growing up and, ironically, didn't care for country music.

"I didn't like the country," he said. "It seemed simple, stupid and disingenuous. It wasn't until much later that I came to appreciate what country music was."

That country tone began to develop once Smith began recording. His first album, Undertones, which released in 2003, expressed his youth, relating to high school and college students with hit singles like "I'm Not Gonna Cry" and "Twenty-one". From there, Smith's appeal with college-aged crowds was born.

"The songs that have become popular with college kids were songs I wrote at the end of my college career or shortly after when I was still very nostalgic and I had access to the kind of experiences that seemed to resonate with people very young," he said. "When I think back to when I wrote songs like "Twenty-one" or "If I Could Do It Again", I was just learning how to express myself and I was writing about things I knew."

His second album, In the Mood, debuted in 2004 and was again a hit with popular songs like "Drinking Again", which became one of the great sing-along songs at live shows. As Smith's popularity continued to grow, so did the venues he played at. He went from performing in college bars in Athens, Ga. to venues like the House of Blues in Orlando.

"When we play at places like the House of Blues, it's more about the concert experience," Smith said. "It's a place where people come and they focus on the music. Yeah, they have a good time. Yeah, they drink and forget about their troubles, but it's not just about the social scene and that certainly was the case early on when we were starting playing in college clubs."

As he's grown, Smith's music has continued to transform as well. The birth of his boys, Aden Ryan and Noah Guthrie, helped the singer/songwriter mature. As he produced albums like The Good Life in 2005 and Hard-headed Fool in 2008, his song meaning began to revolutionize.

"Early on, I wrote songs that were pulled largely to my experience and I wrote about things very closely to how they happened," Smith said. "Now, I try to use images that have more universal appeal, maybe. My songs are still written about the same things, they are still essentially about our struggle to be better and our struggle to overcome adversity … I am just trying to get better at communicating that message."

Smith's newest album, Keeping Up with the Joneses, which released on Nov. 17, takes a different approach to his albums of the past. With a lot more instrumentation and less acoustic-style tone, songs like "Keeping Up with the Joneses" and "$8 Bottle of Wine" deal with a lot of the same issues from past albums, but he continues to try to transform his message from more of a metaphorical message to one that's figurative and leaves room for multiple meanings.

"I wanted to work with [my band] in establishing a much more rhythmic foundation to the record than some of my earlier records," Smith said. "I have known that some people were going to be nostalgic and want to hear the old Corey and the old acoustic songs, but I just didn't feel compelled to do that. These songs, the way they sound now, they are close to the complete vision that I had for them that I could create with the resources that I had available."

With his successes, including grossing approximately $4 million in 2008, Smith has still resisted the urge of signing with a major record label. He did admit that, "you can't argue with the fact that most of the timeless musicians of the 20th century have been associated with major labels", but he continues to stress that it hasn't made any sense for him to go down the path of signing with a major label, despite their attempt to continually contact him.

"A lot of people think that I am just anti-label, I'm fiercely independent and I'm all against commercial music, and that's not necessarily the case," Smith said. "For the practical purposes of my career, it hasn't made sense to go down that path of mass marketing. I think that a lot of the things that have made my career possible and have endeared me to the fan base that I have are the things that made me undesirable to the mass media. My music is unprocessed and unrefined."

Smith continues to be humbly reminded that his fan base has continued to grow through word of mouth rather than radio or mass marketing. It's been pretty impressive for a young high school teacher out of rural Jefferson that's now touching lives outside of the classroom.