Much like many Southern, small-town natives, Corey Smith grew up dying to scratch the itch of escape from his personal prison of Jefferson, Ga. Jefferson is a suburb about an hour away from Atlanta and, in Smith’s eyes, exactly where he did not want to be.
Going to a small Georgia high school proved to be a challenge for Smith. He was not the star quarterback of the football team, the redneck with the loudest pipes on his mud-caked truck, the mathlete champion, or gangster with sagging pants and tricked-out rims.  His lack of one of those stereotypical pegs made it hard for Smith to find his identity until close to the end of his high school career.
“It wasn’t until my senior year that I began to find one (identity). Equipped with my acoustic guitar and a genetic predisposition for boozing it up, I became the human jukebox, singing and partying with almost everyone in town,” Smith said.
After the personal epiphany in high school and thanks to student loans, scholarship money and a college summer break, he broke free of Mayberry and fled an ocean away to study abroad in the “city of lights,” hoping to immerse himself in a new culture fueled by the Parisian atmosphere. To his dismay, a short few weeks later, homesickness overcame the young Corey Smith leaving him with only the music of his CD collection compiled of the Allman Brothers and Lynyrd Skynyrd to subside his loneliness for the remainder of the summer.
“The sounds of the Allman Brothers and Lynyrd Skynyrd made my lonely dorm room in the 15th Arrondissement feel like my bedroom at Grandma’s house,” Smith said.
Graduation from the University of Georgia came and went, and the former desire to escape from Jefferson, Ga., evolved into a more nostalgic desire to move back to that little town he had once so deeply loathed. Life seems to have moved in true Hollywood “chick-flick” fashion for Smith as he married his long-time college girlfriend, moved back to his hometown of Jefferson, Ga., and began his teaching career at the local high school.
Oddly enough, Smith says the same hometown he tried to escape and had detested for so long has become the most influential part of his songwriting and performing career. The strings of his past and the connections to the memories made are clearly woven together by his music.
When looking back on his career, from quitting his day job as a high school teacher to performing in local bars, from recording records, to having sold hundreds of thousands of tickets to hundreds of shows, he has bypassed most people’s expectations of him, even his own.
“To say my music career has exceeded my expectations is an understatement.  In the past five years I’ve played 650 shows from Georgia to Texas to Colorado to Vermont, sold over 600,000 tickets, and grossed $7.5 million in revenue,” Smith said.
Smith’s music has always been known for the elaborate stories and stylings of his lyrical ballads expressing dismay toward a police district, acceptance toward a random girl from Tennessee on a senior beach trip or just the yearning of a 20-year-old to finally turn 21.  
He recently released a new album in June 2011, “The Broken Record,” which he said was just that: a broken record. The music split his emotion toward music and the industry currently encompassing it. Half of the record is his raw music stripped of everything but the music. The second half is the more polished side of Smith’s music, in hopes of going main stream and expanding his musical career.
Corey Smith will be returning to Starkville tomorrow at Rick’s Cafe starting at 8 p.m. Tickets will be sold at the door or can be ordered online at rickscafe.net.