Arnold Lee Bidet was born at Our Lady Of The Rocks hospital in Halifax Nova Scotia on October 30, 1964. His mother Esmerelda Bidet, died in child birth. His father, Rocky Bidet (a French expatriate) made a living running a fishing boat between Halifax and George's Island.     

Arnold was given the nickname Smokey after his father caught him dancing around to Smokey Robinson and the Miracles.  Little Smokey began to learn to play guitar when he was six.  He soon found that quick money could be made playing on the docks for the dock workers that were changing shifts. When he was 11 he wrote his first original composition, a song called "Nearer My Dog To Thee". It was a song dedicated to his puppy, Tuffer, that Smokey had bought with the money he made singing on the docks.  His father paid for a pressing of a one sided single of the song . Less than 20 were printed and sent to friends and family for Christmas.

  Smokey began skipping school to play on the docks. By the age of 14, Smokey was spending his days playing for change on the docks and his nights doing sets in the dingy dock bars of Halifax. By this time he had written a wealth of material and was predominantly performing his own compositions.  He used a portion of his money to cut an independent album simply titled Smokey. The album contained 5 songs, all original. One song, "Smokehouse Man", gained him nationwide recognition when it was adopted as the anthem of the Canadian Smokers Association. Another song, "Pants Full Of Blues" got Smokey some local radio airplay.

His bar shows were selling out and it got too crowded to perform on the streets. Smokey yearned to see what lay beyond Halifax. On his 17^th birthday he hopped a cargo ship carrying salmon south to the U.S. and young, naïve Smokey Bidet left Halifax for the first time.


Young Bidet expected the ship to stop in New York but the ship went on instead to Virginia. Getting off in Virginia, Smokey had no money and no idea where to go. He spent his first two nights walking around Virginia Beach with his napsack and guitar in hand. He decided he would hock his guitar in order to get money for food. He walked into a nearby music store, threw his guitar up on the counter and was prepared to sell it. The transaction was stopped by a musician named Daniel Esteeny. He was a local bass player who thought Smokey's guitar was beautiful and wondered why Smokey would part with it. When Bidet explained his situation, Esteeny took him in. Friendship was instantaneous.

Esteeny was enthralled with Bidet's songs. Esteeny and Bidet began practicing a huge set of music and within 2 weeks of meeting the two hit the coffee house scene. By early 1982, Bidet was touring all of Virginia and most of West Virginia. But the interest seemed to stop there. The two couldn't get bookings outside of those states. The two seemed to hit a wall. The shows ranged in attendance from 20 people up to over a hundred and they played at least every other night. They decided to ditch the blues by taking an extended vacation in Barbados.

The two gigged for three months in order to save the money for the trip. They chartered a small plane and headed to Barbados. There they rented a small villa on the beach and relaxed. After 10 solid months of gigging in Virginia, the rest was well needed. Smokey started writing song after song. One night, unable to sleep, Smokey sat on the beach with his guitar. His mind drifted back to Halifax and a friend of his father's who had died during Smokey's dock period. In a matter of ten minutes Smokey wrote one of his greatest songs ever, "The Last Night Of Howard Delancy."

The following night Smokey and Danny talked the owner of a local club into letting them play a short set. During the performance Smokey debuted Howard Delancy for Danny and the crowd. Esteeny spoke of the moment in a 1988 interview with Pre-Empt Magazine;

" This was (the part of the set) where I went and got a drink and Smokey would play Dylan's Lay Lady Lay. So I'm standing at the bar, just about to throw back this dark rum and I hear Smokey announce that he'd written this song the night before. I turn around in time to see the first strum of the guitar. The place melted. The crowd had been rowdy and into our stuff up until then but they literally got weak in the knees hearing this song. Suffice it to say I never drank the rum. That was when I knew I wanted to play with Smokey the rest of my life."

Smokey and Danny decided to stay in Barbados for a while. They tour clubs all over the island and as the buzz about them grew, they started touring some of the other islands in the Caribbean. Over the next year they played nearly every night and were making a decent living. Jesse Auldenchas, president of Southview Records, caught the act one night and came to Smokey the next night with a contract. Smokey and Danny soon found themselves in Key West in Southview studios laying down tracks for what would eventually become The Redemption Blister.

Southview promoted Smokey's first album all over there world, except the U.S., Britain and Japan. Auldenchas explained the bypassing of these nations in a 1992 interview with Record Exec Home Journal:

"People ask me all the time why we never pushed Smokey in the "Big 3". One of the problems with them is that it's so easy to go bust in those countries. It takes so much to break new artists in those countries and we're a fairly small company. We have 2 or three individuals in nearly every nation on earth who act as distributors for those countries. It's very independent. It's not easy to do that in the "Big 3". It make much more financial sense to push our acts in all the other countries in the world and let importers buy and distribute our CD's in those countries. The import market in those countries is huge. HUGE!"

Smokey, never one to sit still with a sound, built a full band around him and Danny. He brought in Steven Proctor on second guitar, Carlton Braidwood on horns, Coatcheck Charlie on Drums and Freddy Testeba on keyboards. Together the group, unoffically called the Second Miracles, recorded three more albums and toured the world nearly non-stop.

In 1984 Smokey played his most controversial concert. It was a solo acoustic set at an all black club called The Tempest in Cape Town South Africa. The performance was recorded as Acoustic Streams. Smokey was harrassed during his entire stay in Cape Town by the whites in power. The trip was an incredible drain on Smokey and he refused to tour after the release of his next album, Movie Lighting. During his hiatus from the road Smokey received word from Halifax that his father, Rocky, was dying. Smokey made the trip from Barbados to Halifax just in time to be at his father's side when he passed.

Smokey was devistated. He stayed in Halifax for 3 months and over saw the sale of his father's business and home. While staying in the house he grew up in Smokey wrote the 2 songs that would become the center pieces of his most critically acclaimed album, Riddles & Spheres. The songs Workingman's Sunshine and Pass Through Tired Soldier were examinations of his father's life. This examination of life and Smokey's search for meaning expanded to being the focus of the whole album.  The album touched a nerve and became a worldwide success. The single for Workingman's Sunshine even charted in the US Top 200 briefly. The group had recorded the album in Halifax and this made it eligible for a Canadian Juno nomination in 1985. The album didn't win but Smokey couldn't have been happier that he was able to do all of this to honor his father.

Smokey and the band toured the Spheres album for 7 months. After they returned to Barbados, Smokey finally fulfilled his lifelong dream and built his own studio. Here they recorded Bidet 7.  The album, though not as commercially successful as Spheres, was followed by a huge tour. The last show of the tour was a gigantic show in Halifax. Recorded for a double live CD, the show included the Halifax City Orchestra accompanying Smokey on Howard Delancy and a surprise appearance by Smokey Robinson.