Richard Smith played short concerts at Settlers Park, Meadowbrook Place and Brooklyn Primary School with Learn from the Masters Music Outreach. He also played two concerts at Churchill School with free admission, thanks to the sponsorship of Saint Alphonsus Medical Center-Baker City. (Lisa Britton/Baker City Herald)

I have an acoustic guitar and it has six strings, just like Richard Smith’s guitar has.

Which is the only thing — absolutely the only thing — that we have in common when it comes to the instrument.

I had the rare thrill Monday evening, June 9, at Churchill School in Baker City of watching a true virtuoso perform.

Smith, an Englishman who lives in Nashville (which sounds like it should be the title of a movie starring Hugh Grant), played the first of two free concerts sponsored by Saint Alphonsus Medical Center-Baker City.

His second show is Tuesday, June 10. Doors open at 6 p.m. at Churchill, 3451 Broadway St.

Smith has been playing guitar since he was 5.

I would have guessed 3 and a half.

He plays in the fingerpicking style. That means his right hand, rather than strumming the strings all together, flies across the frets, each finger plucking individual strings. His left hand is equally frenetic, making full use of the instrument and moving with a speed normally associated with magicians and the precise dexterity of a surgeon.

As I listened to Smith coax an array of melodies from the six strings that I would not have believed possible, I was plagued by a blizzard of analogies as my brain tried to attach context to what I was seeing.

Smith’s mastery so exceeds what I can accomplish with a guitar that for comparisons I thought of other world class practitioners.

I imagined playing golf with Tiger Woods.

Delivering a speech right after Winston Churchill has finished his.

Picking up a palette and setting my blank canvas next to Van Gogh’s.

As always when I watch a master perform, I pondered the thousands of hours of practice, the songs that Smith must have played that only he heard, to reach his rarified level.

But I also know that natural talent is equally necessary.

I’m certain I could practice incessantly for years and never replicate even a small fraction of the beautiful sounds that Smith produces.

He plays in a way so far beyond my experience and ability that I’m hardly qualified to say, but it seemed to my untrained ears that, in more than an hour, Smith didn’t hit a single sour note.

His repertoire is eclectic.

Smith plays songs associated with acoustic guitar — John Denver’s “Take Me Home, Country Roads,” for instance, and America’s “Lonely People.”

But he also transformed a tune that in its original version had no guitar — the Beatles’ “Eleanor Rigby” — into a tour de force in which he managed somehow to equal, if not exceed, the four violins, two cellos and two violas that accompanied the Beatles in their song on the unrivalled 1966 album “Revolver.”

Smith even had a go at a Sousa march, “The Stars and Stripes Forever,” another piece of music that stands a considerable distance from the usual acoustic guitar fare.

But when your talent is as prodigious as Smith’s, you can make any song sound as though it were written just to be performed on a solo acoustic guitar.

Smith’s performances, as stirring as they are, go beyond music.

He came to Baker City under the auspices of Learn from the Masters Music Outreach, a foundation started by Dr. Larry Birger in 2018. Birger, who accompanied Smith on a couple of songs, extolls the “healing power of music.”

In addition to the two concerts at Churchill, Smith also entertained students at Brooklyn Primary School, at Settler’s Park and at Meadowbrook Place assisted living facilities.

I recommend anyone who likes music attend Tuesday’s concert at Churchill.

But the guitarists in the audience — even the most rudimentary player, like me — will I suspect have a particular appreciation for what they hear.

If they can believe their ears.