C HRIS S MITHER IS A BIG MAN WITH A BIG SOUND, an acknowledged master of finger-picking and irony for three decades. From teenage bands and woodshedding in his native New Orleans, Smither hit Boston in the mid-60s and fell in with the likes of Bonnie Raitt, Eric von Schmidt and Jim Rooney. As with those artists, the sound in his head was acoustic — the blues à la Lightnin’ Hopkins, in Chris’s case. He released his first albums in the early 1970s. Smither’s reputation as performer and composer grew over the years, then burst worldwide with albums, airplay and tours in the 90s, as well as soundtracks and compositions in a number of films.

Smither says that when he was just learning to play, “Uncle Howard showed me how that if you knew two chords, you could play a lot of the songs you heard on the radio. And if you knew three chords, you could pretty much rule the world.” When Chris played the Me&Thee two years ago, he was in command of even more than three chords, and he was positively dazzling. With his brilliant, wry lyrics and fantastic chops, the man will rule again. You don’t want to miss him.