Joe Smyth is an accomplished educator, performer, and recording artist.

For the past 30 years, he has been a founding and continuing member of the group Sawyer Brown, recording 24 albums on Capitol and Curb Records. Four of these are certified 'Gold' with total sales in excess of 6 million copies. Traveling 12 months a year with Sawyer Brown, Smyth has performed 4000-plus concerts throughout the 50 states, Canada, Germany, Japan, South Korea, Hong Kong, and the PDR of China.

In 2005, Smyth co-founded the Matrix Percussion Trio which has presented over 75 educational programs in the Nashville area for more than 30,000 school children and master classes and concerts for the Tennessee Arts Academy, Belmont University, and the Blair School of Music at Vanderbilt University.

Smyth has also performed with the Portland (ME) Symphony, the Maine Summer Opera Orchestra, the Brookline (MA) Symphony, the Florida Philharmonic, the Miami Pops Orchestra, and the Nashville Symphony.

With the group Sawyer Brown, Smyth’s awards include six consecutive Nashville Network/Music City News “Group of the Year” Awards, the Country Music Association Horizon Award, the Academy of Country Music “Group of the Year” Award, three Country Music Television “Video Group of the Year” Awards, and American Music Award and Grammy Award nominations.

Smyth holds the Master of Music degree in Applied Percussion and Music Composition, summa cum laude, from the University of Miami, where he studied with Fred Wickstrom and taught as a percussion graduate assistant. His Bachelor of Music degree in Music Composition is from the Berklee College of Music, where his principal teachers were Dean Anderson, Ed Saindon, and Alan Dawson.

Smyth is in his tenth year on the faculty of Brentwood Academy (Nashville, Tennessee), where he teaches percussion, drumset, and conducts percussion ensembles. He is founder and director of “The Preemptors” Junior Fife and Drum Corps, dedicated to the performance of the military music of the American Revolution. He is a Pearl Drum artist, and endorses Zildjian cymbals, Innovative Percussion, Evans drumheads, and RhythmTech products.