Born October 15, 1926, Betty Nance Smith grew up in High Point, North Carolina. It was there that she met and married her husband, Bill (William Doyt) Smith. Betty Smith attended the Women’s College of Greensboro (now the University of North Carolina at Greensboro), where she studied Sociology. She worked in this field after her marriage, before Bill Smith’s career took the couple to Georgia.
Betty Smith was raised in a home where her father and grandmother sang traditional ballads, and her grandmother rocked babies to the song, "Barbara Allen." Betty’s own decades-long career in music began when her family gave her a guitar as a Christmas present. She soon began to perform, playing not only guitar, but also fiddle, mountain dulcimer, autoharp, and psaltry. Her family visited Western North Carolina on vacations, and Betty Smith joined in the region’s traditional music scene. Bascom Lamar Lunsford invited her to perform at the Mountain Dance and Folk Festival, after hearing a tape of her singing. Betty Smith’s first performance at that festival was in 1963 or 1964. She performed at that festival for over five decades.
Over the years, Betty Smith’s music career expanded from performance to teaching to scholarship. She taught numerous workshops at the John C. Campbell Folk School, some in partnership with her husband, Bill Smith, who was a skilled dulcimer maker. She also taught at Berea College, Mars Hill College, and many other schools and festivals. Betty Smith was an expert in teaching music to children. After receiving a Master’s degree in Early Childhood Education from Georgia State University, she wrote music curriculum books for teachers of young children. She taught students from pre-school through high school in artist residencies in both Georgia and North Carolina.
In the late 1980s, Betty and Bill Smith moved back to North Carolina, to a log cabin they built on Bluff Mountain, near the town of Hot Springs. Betty Smith developed a fascination with Jane Hicks Gentry, a Hot Springs resident who gave the most songs to English music collector Cecil Sharp on his visits to the region in 1916 and 1917. She wrote articles and conference papers about Mrs. Gentry, her music, and her family, and in 1998 published the book, Jane Hicks Gentry: A Singer Among Singers. This book went on to win the Willie Parker Peace History Book Award from the North Carolina Society of Historians, and the Society bestowed the Paul Green Multi-Media Award on the one-woman play Betty Smith wrote about Jane Gentry, “A Mountain Riddle.”
Betty and Bill Smith became involved in the fight to save Bluff Mountain from logging by the United States Forest Service. In addition to their advocacy, Betty Smith helped found the Bluff Mountain Festival in 1996 to generate awareness and raise funds for the legal fight to protect these lands. That festival continues today.
Throughout her long life and career, Betty Smith won many awards. Among these were the Brown-Hudson Award from the North Carolina Folklore Society and the Minstrel of Appalachia Award from Mars Hill College “for a lifetime of performing and preserving mountain music.” She received an honorary doctorate from Mars Hill College in 2008, and the highest award bestowed to a North Carolinian, the Order of the Long Leaf Pine, in 2017. Betty Nance Smith passed away on December 1, 2023.