Chris Smither, the towering figure in American acoustic blues, knows what he’s doing. He burst onto the singer/songwriter scene in the late 1960’s with a unique finger-picking style and a ragged world-weary voice. And then he just kept going. Along the way he amassed major fans, folks like the late founder of Little Feat, Lowell George, and Townes Van Zandt, who, amongst other things, always credited Smither with saving his life in a Florida swimming pool one hazy night, and Bonnie Raitt, whose recording of Smither’s “Love You Like A Man” entered the pantheon of stone-cold classics any number of years ago. Now, with eighteen albums under his belt and one of the most stellar reputations a living guitar god could hope to have, Smither returns to Vermont this September for the third Ray Massucco Concert Series show on Saturday, September 23, at the Bellows Falls Opera House.

Opening the show is Windham County’s favorite son, Matt Lorenz, aka The Suitcase Junket. “It is super exciting to see these two on the same bill,” enthuses Ezra Veitch of Ray’s the Roof Productions, organizers of the series. “Both Suitcase and Smither deconstruct the blues, rearrange it, and put it back together in a way that is purely their own.”