Smith made her stage debut during her senior year of high school at a local square dance, where she earned $3 for performing a cover of the pop standard “My Happiness.” A few years later, in August 1963, she entered a talent contest at Frontier Ranch, a bygone country music park near Columbus, Ohio, and won with a spirited rendition of Jean Shepard’s “I Thought of You.” She was awarded five silver dollars and a slot at the Grand Ole Opry opening for the singer and songwriter Bill Anderson. The family would tune its battery-powered radio to broadcasts from the Grand Ole Opry, and Smith became enamored with the music of Kitty Wells and the Louvin Brothers. “I tried to sing with them but he’d run me out because I was messing it up when I was trying to learn harmony,” she said. The album’s tender piano chords, steel guitars and lush analog quality recall Smith’s ’60s era recordings, a template known as the “Connie Smith Sound.” But “The Cry of the Heart” takes a different path, where resurgence doesn’t mean reinvention: It’s produced by the country musician Marty Stuart, 63, whom Smith married in 1997. While country music is no stranger to a comeback, since the 1990s many of the genre’s figureheads have been resuscitated by studio wizards and the enthusiasm of younger generations. On Friday, Smith will release album 54, “The Cry of the Heart,” her debut for the independent label Fat Possum and first secular recording in about a decade, after intermittent forays into gospel. “She’s always sounded like she could kick your ass.” “She might sing a sad song but she’s never sounded like a victim,” the country singer Lee Ann Womack, a longtime fan, said in an interview. Smith similarly conveys a distinct sense that vulnerability does not equate to weakness. Partly because of a period of semiretirement in the 1980s, she’s not necessarily a household name, but her contralto singing is regularly compared to Patsy Cline’s for its might and emotional resonance. Since Smith’s breakthrough hit “Once a Day” topped the Billboard country chart for eight weeks in 1964, she’s navigated four marriages, five children, 53 studio albums and numerous record labels. I lived enough to know the heartache and the joy.” Framed by black walls and purple tufted furniture, she explained, “It’s not necessarily that I’ve lived the song, but that I understand living it. “I’ve always believed it’s the cry of the heart,” the 80-year-old singer and songwriter Connie Smith said on a recent video call from her Nashville office, decorated in the distinctive palette she wears onstage.
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