Jo Smith

In addition to playing weekend shows and finishing her album, Jo is a co-host and entertainment correspondent for Coffee, Country & Cody alongside Country Music Disk Jockey Hall-of-Famer Bill Cody.  The morning show airs live every morning Monday-Friday 7am-10am CST on WSM 650 AM (www.wsmradio.com) and on the new Circle television network (www.circleallaccess.com).  In her free time, she enjoys cooking, reading, and hanging out with her nephew Punky and her golden retriever puppy Festus.  She is engaged to the love of her life, JD, who she worked alongside in Somalia.

Jo moved to Nashville at just nineteen years old to pursue her music career. She says, “my Nashville experience was typical, yet also unorthodox.” She signed publishing deals, played for tips downtown at Tootsie’s, had a few  breaks, wrote a lot of songs, got her first songwriter cut (“Flyin’ By”, Billy Ray Cyrus), got a record deal with RCA, made music videos, toured with Miranda Lambert, Blake Shelton, Dierks Bentley and Chris Young, played the Opry, signed a deal with Shane McAnally’s (of NBC’s Songland fame) company, put out a single that became a Highway Find on Sirius XM (“Old School Groove”), and was inducted into CMT’s Next Women of Country class of 2018.

Outside of her experiences in the music business, Jo spent time volunteering with a Somali refugee family and went to Vanderbilt University to finish her B.A. in International Politics.  Not long after, a job offer to work in Somalia presented itself to Jo.  She lived in a shipping container for a year in a compound in Mogadishu, travel outside the wire in the most dangerous city in the world, and wrote reports for the U.S. Department of State Counterterrorism Bureau about the progress of Somali police and army training programs. She says, “my time in Somalia was beautiful and sad and meaningful and inspiring.”  It also enabled her to realize an unfulfilled dream: to make a full-length record and inspired her move to Music City.