Celebrated jazz and blues singer Lois Smith of Cape May, who died Nov. 23 at age 95, was remembered by friends and relatives as well as hundreds on social media as a warm, highly talented artist, skilled seamstress and superb cook.
Smith could often be found singing in various lounges and churches and at events throughout Cape May County and beyond. She was remembered by Nate Kennedy on social media as a “talented and such a wonderful person. Very honored to have played music with you on many great occasions. You brought the house down every time! So talented and such a wonderful person. Thank you for sharing your gift with everyone.”
Bernadette Matthews, who first met Smith some 20 years ago when she was involved with the Cape May Jazz Festival, said she and Smith became “very close friends in the past seven to eight years. I would take her to her singing gigs and be in the audience. She loved singing around Cape May and Atlantic counties, and her passing is a real loss.”
A 2016 article published in The Denver Post about Cape May’s jazz scene said: “Today, [Smith] is one of Cape May’s top jazz and blues singers, and her photo hangs near that of jazz great Carmen McRae, her inspiration, in an exhibit on local African American jazz and blues musicians and the people who influenced them.”
According to her cousin, Maxine Grant, Smith had spent her last three weeks in a rehab center and had been released on Friday, Nov. 22, with a recommendation to move into an assisted-living facility.
“She didn’t want to do that,” Grant said, “so she had been set up with oxygen, a wheelchair, someone coming in to check on her. She was released because she was doing better, but when the ladies brought her breakfast Saturday, sadly they found her.”
She died just days before Thanksgiving, and Kim Ford, one those who remembered Smith on social media, recalled how she would “prepare Thanksgiving dinner from scratch, and an endless number of guests would stop in and see her throughout the day.”
Grant said, “I’ve been going in and out of her apartment this week, and her neighbors have all been telling me how they will miss her. One man said she made the best short ribs he’d ever had in his life. She was an excellent cook, and famous for her food.”
She said Smith, who was born in Cape May in 1929, had been a beautician, tailor, artist and “amazing” singer during her life. Grant’s father and Smith were first cousins, and Grant lived with Smith in Philadelphia during the late 1960s into the ’70s.
“She taught me the value of hard work,” Grant said. “She was a fashionista. She made me coats, and I often saw her make magic out of nothing.
“I remember watching a TV show with her in the 1960s, and there was a singer wearing a double-knit dress that we both liked. She made a pattern for the dress out of newspaper and re-created it to a T. She could do so much just from looking at something.”
Grant said Smith is the last of her generation in the family and was the daughter of parents who came north from Alabama as part of the Great Migration, when millions of African Americans moved out of the rural South and headed north and west for better opportunities. She had one brother who died when she was a teenager.
“She didn’t have children, but there were dozens of cousins who spent time with her,” Grant said. “She was so warm-hearted. One of the ladies in her apartment building told me that she was listening to the radio and they played her music as a tribute to her. I was so touched that the radio station would do that.”
Matthews said, “She loved her church,” referring to the Macedonia Baptist Church in Cape May. “She was a friend, a painter, seamstress and a singer extraordinaire. She was feisty with a great sense of humor … a grand dame, a legend, an icon. She was the Queen of Cape May, a gift to this world.”
In the 2016 Denver Post article, Smith recalled an incident that happened when she was a teenager. According to the article, “One day in her mother’s rooming house in Cape May, N.J., she was timidly singing gospel tunes when a visiting vocalist reprimanded her.”
“Open your damned mouth and sing!” the woman yelled, according to the article.
The rest, as they say, is history.
Funeral services for Smith will be held at 11 a.m. Saturday, Dec. 14, at the Macedonia Baptist Church, 630 Lafayette St., Cape May. The Spilker Funeral Home of Cape May is handling arrangements.
