Born Louise Smith in Philadelphia, where she attended the Curtis Institute of Music and trained as an operatic soprano. Louise Smith, who as a young woman was a singing comedienne and jazz vocalist, starting in the mid-1940s, she worked for many years under the stage name Donna Brooks. She performed with a U.S.O. troupe that entertained military personnel in Panama and on the Borscht Belt circuit of Jewish clubs and resorts. One specialty of her act was rendering pop standards with Yiddish lyrics.

She began a career as a jazz singer by the early 1950s and joined her future husband, pianist Alex Smith, on a tour of nightclubs in the Northeast. They married in 1956 and settled in the Washington area in 1959 after he joined the U.S. Army Band. Her recorded output was largely confined to some late-'50s sessions on Bethlehem featuring Chuck Wayne, Bobby Scott and Milt Hinton and on Dawn Records. Both sessions have been reissued as part of the Fresh Sound Records' Best Voices Time Forgot CD series, in a volume titled: "Soft and Slow + I'll Take Romance."

Through the early 1970s, she continued to perform with him in small jazz groups at military clubs in the area. She died at 83 on June 16, 2009 at Inova Fairfax Hospital of respiratory failure. She was a Springfield [Virginia] resident. A daughter, Susan Smith, died in 1978.

—The Washington Post (July 17, 2009)