Big Smo likes to tell this story. It’s funny and a little embarrassing, but it also sums up where he is in life (and music) in 2025.
After a recent concert (in this case, “recent” means with the last few years), he went out to sign autographs for fans. One man stood across from him and asked, “When’s he coming out?”
“And I’m like, ‘Bro, I’m right here.’ And they’re like ‘You’re not you!'” Smo recalls.
“I’m like, ‘First of all, calm down, because I’m on a microdose of mushrooms. Don’t tell me that I’m not me, please. Like, you’re freaking me out.'”
The problem is, Big Smo ain’t big no mo, and the amount of media attention he’s gotten for making life-saving changes pales in comparison to the attention he received for being young, obese and reckless. Honestly, “pales” isn’t even the right word.
If attention to “Big Smo” was Travis Kelce, Skinny Smo is the tight end on your son’s high school football team. A few diehards know what’s up, but the national press and music-making machine moved on — but this is not a sad story.
No, Smo’s story is a strange sort of salvation and inspiration that ends with a twist nobody who watched Big Smo on A&E would have seen coming. In fact, that’s a good place to start.
What Happened to Big Smo?
2014 was peak Smo. I remember walking along Lower Broadway in Nashville and turning to see a Big Smo pop-up bar during CMA Fest. At one point I ducked inside a hotel to see fans mobbing him like he was Blake Shelton.
“This dude’s coming,” I thought.
It never happened, and I just sort of figured he was too much, too soon. We’re famously five years behind in country music, after all. Ideas that work in other genres — streaming, for example — work five years later in country.
That’s not the truth of it. No, the truth is that on March 12, 2015, Big Smo underwent open-heart surgery at age 39. Doctors told him he needed to get sober or die, and — to his credit — he listened.
“I instantly lost, like, half my fanbase just because of my heart surgery,” he says with a surprising lack of resentment.
“Imagine this, first time I’m back out onstage, like, everybody expects me to walk out and twist the lid off the half gallon and turn it up,” he adds. “Like, that was my show … pass it up. I’m shooting, I’m smoking. We’re kicking it. That’s what it’s about.”
“And then now all of a sudden I’m onstage and … it’s like, sorry, guys, I can no longer drink. And everybody’s like, ‘Boo!’ And I’m like — I opened my shirt, I’m like — well, here’s the thing. I have this 13-inch scar. I just had my heart removed.”
His record label was really put off by the long recovery, and his band members were forced to find other jobs after Smo canceled his tour. Over time, his management moved on, too, so that by 2017, he was surrounded by very few of the people who’d helped build him.
“It was ghost town, boom, gone,” he tells Taste of Country. It was also the best thing that could have happened to him.
At the time of his surgery, Smo had spent very few days sober since age 12. TWELVE! He blames Southern living and cognitive dissonance, but really doesn’t spend a lot of time searching to blame at all. All of the details of his story — the drinking, the drugs, the mini-heart attacks he’d experience on stage — they all work to focus on today.
And today is a gift.
What Is Big Smo Doing Today?
A massive diet overhaul and a focus on physical fitness has helped Big Smo lose over 200 lbs. Within five years he was able to kick medicines for blood pressure, cholesterol and chronic pain. Psoriasis, eczema … gone.
“I was about to have my hips replaced, gone,” he says. “That was from removing gluten and oil because of inflammation.”
Then he went plant-based, and within three days, he quit experiencing acid reflux.
“If you suffer from acid reflux and all of a sudden you’ve been given, like, a get out of jail free acid reflux card, you never want to let that go,” he says. “So I’ll never go back to my old ways just because of acid reflux alone.”
Predictably, fans now seek him out in autograph lines for advice on how to handle their health battles. Big Smo (real name John Smith) went from a 400 lb. alcoholic to a guy who wakes up every morning to run five miles in 30 minutes — a champion’s pace for anyone pushing 50.
Here comes that twist: He’s not so focused on music anymore. He is in the sense that he’ll drop a song here or there, and he is very invested in helping new artists like Hugh Glass along, but he also recognizes he’s not able to cut through the clutter, for one reason or another. When he drops songs, the algorithm doesn’t seem to work in his favor, so diehards never hear about tracks like “Small Town”, “So Muddy” and “Somethin’ Bout Love.”
“People are like, ‘Man, why don’t you put out some new music?'” Smo says. “And I’m like, ‘What’s the last song you heard?’ And they’re like, ‘Working’ And I’m like, ‘That was 2012, bro. I put out nine albums since then.'”
Healthy living is what Smo is driving around town now, literally. In 2024, he and his wife opened the Smoliciuos food truck in Shelbyville, Tenn., and it was a hit.
“Instead of singing songs to you, I’m making you a salad, I’m making you a smoothie,” he says with a broad grin across his thin, bespectacled face. “I still get to face-to-face with the fans and come out and sit down. We pop up the tent and have the tables out and put the swag out.”
It’s all a bonus for Smo. Every day, every song, every show since 2015 … “Like, right now, this is a bonus interview, because I’m not even supposed to be here,” he says.
“And had I not done these things that did tear down my fanbase and did jeopardize my branding and all that, had I not made these sacrifices and really tapped into the self discipline that I never knew I had, like, we wouldn’t be having this conversation.”
In some ways, his goal is the same as it was 10 years ago: Fine fans who connect with this story. It’s just that in 2025, Big Smo is telling a very different story.
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Gallery Credit: Billy Dukes
