Creativity Quote by Kate Smith

“I have been extremely lucky with reviewers and critics throughout my career” is the kind of modest sentence that carries an entire survival strategy inside it. Coming from a musician like Kate Smith, whose fame rose in an era when newspapers, radio gatekeepers, and a small handful of tastemakers could make or break an act, “lucky” isn’t just gratitude. It’s diplomacy.

The line does two jobs at once. On the surface, it’s gracious: she’s acknowledging the people who held the pen. Underneath, it refuses to pick a fight with a power structure that was famously thin-skinned. A singer could be adored by audiences and still be kneecapped by a hostile critic or a moralizing editor. Calling favorable coverage “luck” flatters critics without sounding like she’s courting them, and it avoids the more dangerous alternative: claiming she earned it, which can read as arrogance, or claiming critics were wrong, which can read as ingratitude.

There’s also a savvy deflection of the messy parts of celebrity. If you admit critics shaped your trajectory, you’ve already admitted vulnerability; if you credit luck, you can sidestep arguments about merit, taste, class, and the kinds of voices that were allowed to be “serious.” For a woman navigating early- to mid-century entertainment culture, that rhetorical softness is protective.

Smith’s phrasing lands because it’s both true and strategic: a performance can’t be controlled once it leaves the stage, and neither can the story told about it. “Lucky” is how you thank the gatekeepers while keeping your own agency intact.