The Press Room celebrates Jay Smith

It’s been 10 years since Jay Smith, original owner of The Press Room, secret benefactor of The Music Hall, and the connective tissue of the Portsmouth arts community, passed away. Smith’s legacy is still keenly felt in Portsmouth, and on Wednesday, Sept. 5, The Press Room is hosting an evening of music and stories to celebrate his legacy.

“Jay was an extremely important individual in the arts community,” said Bruce Pingree, general manager of The Press Room. “We just want to honor him.”

Smith was many things: a musician, a business owner, a storyteller, a city councilor, a philanthropist. In keeping with Smith’s diverse range of talents and pursuits, the gathering will be a sort of free-form open mike, open to anyone who wants to share a song, a story, or memories of Smith. During the evening, donations will be collected to benefit the non-profit 3S Artspace. The gathering starts at 6 p.m. upstairs at The Press Room.

“I know some musicians are going to come by and will be playing music in his honor, and I know folks have got some stories to tell,” Pingree said. Photos of Smith will be on display, and Pingree said he has a few recordings of Smith (who had an “amazing Irish tenor voice”) singing that will also play during the show.

Smith opened The Press Room on Daniel Street in 1976 and the bar quickly became a fixture in Portsmouth life. A musician himself, Smith made The Press Room into a starting point for new musicians and a second home for established artists.

“That was a big part of the idea behind this place, to create a pub where music and arts were part of the focus and to try to make that a place a comfortable spot for folks to meet and talk,” Pingree said.

Smith was also instrumental in saving The Music Hall. In the 1980s, he was part of the original Friends of The Music Hall that worked to preserve the building as an arts venue and later personally backed the loan used to buy back The Music Hall’s mortgage. He also made numerous large financial contributions to The Music Hall over the years. However, Smith’s donations were always anonymous, and it wasn’t until after his death that the extent of his involvement in sparing The Music Hall from redevelopment became known.

“He didn’t want people to know about a lot of the stuff he was doing,” Pingree said. “I’m sure he’d be amused and a bit annoyed that his picture is part of the collage in the new lounge area.”

Smith was also an instigator who loved connecting people in the community with each other and getting everyone involved. Pingree often found himself being nudged by Smith into joining different organizations.

When community meetings began for Portsmouth Community Radio, Pingree got a nudge. “Jay saw it in the papers. The first job he had out of college was working as a morning DJ at an AM station in Goshen, Indiana. He and I both shared this thing of doing radio, and he came up to me and said, ‘You’re going with me to this meeting tomorrow night.’ I said, ‘What meeting?’ He explained to me what it was and said, ‘You have to go to this meeting with me.’” Pingree ended up serving on the WSCA board for 10 years.

Bob Halperin, a regular performer at The Press Room, met Smith in 1978. “I had just moved to the Cambridge area and I heard The Press Room was the place to play, and I came up to try and get a gig,” he said.

Halperin remembers one particular gig he played at The Press Room at Smith’s behest. While living in Cambridge, Halperin worked at Sandy’s, a music store, with his friend Stanley Longstaff. Longstaff’s band, Strings Attached, had played at The Press Room before and was popular in the area, but had broken up.

“It’s a Thursday night, and Jay calls up,” Halperin said. “(He) basically tells Stanley that ... he needed a band for Friday and Saturday night, and why doesn’t Stanley bring up his band. Stan said, ‘But I don’t have a band.’ Jay said, ‘I have faith in you.’ So the next day, we loaded a bunch of the various musicians who we could get in touch with and who had the weekend free (into) Stanley’s van, and on the way up, compared songs we could put together. We got to The Press Room, where we saw we were booked as Sandy’s Cambridge All Stars.”

The Press Room and The Music Hall are tangible reminders of Smith’s legacy, Halperin said, as is the Friday night traditional session at The Press Room. But more than that, it’s the sense of community that Smith created that is his true legacy.

“Basically, (Jay) was just family here,” Halperin said. “The Press Room was really, almost from the moment it was there, a place for people to meet and be a community, and it’s one of the last vestiges of that kind of community spirit.”