The Blues

[Feraud]

This is kicking off in a couple of days near me!

Excellent. Enjoy it. I'd travel to Alabama to attend if I had available time.

 

[Feraud]

Saluting Lonnie Johnson, Original Guitar Hero

Give Lonnie a listen if you have not done so.
An amazing guitarist with a sweet voice.

All Things Considered, March 28, 2008 - The guitar solo holds a cherished place in American culture. There's even a popular video game that allows non-musicians to "play" along with their idols.

But the man credited with playing some of the first recorded guitar solos has largely been forgotten. Lonnie Johnson was one of the few musicians to successfully straddle the worlds of blues, jazz and pop.

Now, nearly 40 years after his death, a new tribute album is trying to restore Johnson's place as the original guitar hero. Called Rediscovering Lonnie Johnson, the name applies as much to the people playing the music as it does to the listeners.

Jef Lee Johnson, a guitar hero in his own right, has backed up the likes of Aretha Franklin and McCoy Tyner. He isn't related to Lonnie Johnson — in fact, until he was invited to play on the tribute album, he had never really listened to Lonnie Johnson.

"He was insane," Jef Lee Johnson says. "And I mean that in a good way. ... Every track, every take, he's trying to play, like, everything that he can. And he can play everything. It was almost avant-garde, as much stuff as he was playing."

A Life in Music

It's not surprising that even a pro like Jef Lee Johnson was caught off guard. Lonnie Johnson was a private man. In 1967, he explained to Moe Asch of Folkways Records why no one ever wrote his biography.

"Some have started," Johnson said. "They quit for some reason, I don't know. My life hasn't been that bad that I shouldn't tell it. But some parts of a man's life, he keeps it for himself. He don't tell it to the public. "

Alonzo "Lonnie" Johnson was born in New Orleans just before the turn of the 20th century. He got his start playing violin with his father.

"I just bought an instrument, and in six months I was holding a good job," Johnson said. "I was playing with my father's band — he had a string band."

Johnson's father and nine other members of his family died in the influenza epidemic of 1918. So Johnson headed north. He played on riverboats and wound up in St. Louis.

By that time, he was playing guitar. In 1925, he entered a blues contest. He won, and landed a deal with Okeh Records.

Soon, Johnson was soloing on records by Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington. These recordings built his reputation as the first jazz guitarist to base his style on single-note melodies, like a horn player — a decade before Charlie Christian or Django Reinhardt. It's an approach he perfected on his duo recordings with white guitarist Eddie Lang, who worked with Johnson under a pseudonym at a time when the music industry was segregated.

Lonnie Johnson's first recording contract ran out in the early 1930s, and he spent much of the Great Depression working other jobs to pay the bills.

"I went back to the steel mill, and start working again," he said. "Cause I didn't know the nightclub work, and I didn't take any chance. So went back to the steel mill in East St. Louis, and working five years. Started as a sander, and end up as a molder. Molding big box car wheels, that's what I was molding."

At the end of the 30s, Johnson went back into the recording studio — first as a blues singer, and later as a ballad singer. At the end of the 1940s, he actually scored a pop hit called "Tomorrow Night."

Rediscovery

A decade later, Lonnie Johnson was all but forgotten. But in 1959, a jazz radio DJ in Philadelphia played a Lonnie Johnson cut, and then mused on what had happened to the guitarist.

"And then I got a call from somebody at the Benjamin Franklin Hotel, someone who worked there," says Chris Albertson, now a music journalist in New York. "Who said, I work with somebody named Lonnie Johnson. He's a janitor, he never talks about music. But he's very careful with his hands. So maybe he is the Lonnie Johnson!"

Albertson had Johnson on his show many times in the early '60s, and helped engineer his comeback on the folk revival scene in New York. Albertson also produced a handful of Lonnie Johnson records.

Johnson was able to quit his job as a janitor at the hotel, and toured extensively. But he kept his home in Philadelphia, where he'd met Susie Smalls a few years earlier.

Smalls still lives in the North Philadelphia row house she bought with Lonnie Johnson in 1960, and where she raised their daughter.

"He was just plain," Smalls says. "He never did brag. At all. He just kept his guitar, played his guitar."

Johnson's self-deprecating humor and modesty are part of the reason he's not more famous, says Aaron Levinson, who produced the new tribute CD.

"People tend to minimize the contribution of folks that don't have roman candles associated with his life," Levinson says. "He had the roman candles, but they were all coming out of his guitar."

If Johnson was bitter about the ups and downs of his career, he never let on.

"These 68 years has been beautiful, hard," Johnson said. "I can go to sleep, and sleep at night. I won't have to worry about I told someone the wrong direction to go, rather than the right direction. It don't hurt to do a favor."

Johnson spent his last years in Toronto, where he died in 1970. Nearly four decades after his death, his guitar solos sound as crazy as ever.

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=89186801

 

[Bassman]

Here is his hit Goodnight Irene from Youtube.
http://youtube.com/watch?v=fLOualK5GP0

Just today I heard Ry Cooder's version of this from his album "Chicken Skin Music", an old favorite. Sort of a Tex-Mex version with button accordeon accompaniment.
OOh! Just found a live version on YT.
http://youtube.com/watch?v=B5kLaLe1yzw
Check it out.

 

[Feraud]

Just today I heard Ry Cooder's version of this from his album "Chicken Skin Music", an old favorite. Sort of a Tex-Mex version with button accordeon accompaniment.
OOh! Just found a live version on YT.
http://youtube.com/watch?v=B5kLaLe1yzw
Check it out.

This is a new favorite.
Thanks for the great clip!

 

[Beowulf67]

Excellent. Enjoy it. I'd travel to Alabama to attend if I had available time.

My daughter told me yesterday that one of her friends uncles runs what she called a "20's jazz club". Hopefully I'll get to check this out sometime soon and see what it's like.

 

[Real Swell Gal]

I like George Thurougood, Clapton, Stevie Ray and if you listen to some of George Harrison's solo stuff you can deffinately hear the influence in his music.

 

[Feraud]

Here is a site with scanned record lables.
http://www.nugrape.net/pw.htm

 

[Miles Borocky]

Bessie Smith, people. Bessie Smith.
Or Jimmy Rushing singing with the Count Basie Orchestra.

And every blues and jazz lover in the world needs to read Albert Murray's book, STOMPING THE BLUES, as well as his novel, TRAIN WHISTLE GUITAR.

 

[Cricket]

They recently opened a BB King musuem about an hour from me in a little town, his birthplace, Indianola, Miss.

http://www.bbkingmuseum.org/

Blues fans might really enjoy taking a tour of the Blues highway in Mississippi. Very interesting stuff. Bentonia is an excellent place to stop and have a beer and listen to the old timer belt the tunes out. The BlueFront Cafe is a great place for any blues fan.

http://www.msbluestrail.org/

 

[Feraud]

They recently opened a BB King musuem about an hour from me in a little town, his birthplace, Indianola, Miss.

http://www.bbkingmuseum.org/

Thanks for the link. I would like to visit the museum.

I have to mention that BB King is a cousin to the equally amazing performer Booker (a.k.a. Bukka) T. Washington White.

 

[LuketheLurker]

Bessie Smith, people. Bessie Smith.

I'll second that! :eusa_clap I have quite a few of her records and they will be worn out by the time I get done with them! I would also add in a mention of the "Yas Yas Girl" Merline Johnson, she is another favorite of mine. There is something really interesting about the female perspective of the blues that really gets my attention. Yes, Yes, old school blues is wonderful music!

 

[Feraud]

Any Tampa Red fans out there?
This looks like a good recording to get.
http://www.pristineclassical.com/LargeWorks/Jazz/PABL003.php

Notes on the restoration: Tampa Red is the second blues artist to receive the 'XR' treatment, following our issue of the complete Robert Johnson recordings a month ago. Once again, great care was taken to find suitable recordings with which to construct tonal references and reshape the sound profiles of these mainly late-1930's recordings, the process at the heart of the XR remastering system.

Clearly some sides have survived the intervening years better than others, and it's interesting to find better overall sound quality lurking in the earliest of these recordings, 1934's Grievin' and Worryin' Blues than in some of the records from later in that same decade. It's easy to speculate on why this might be the case - I've noted similar declines in surface quality in UK pressed discs during the 1930's - but one should perhaps avoid jumping to conclusions.

I've avoided running these tracks in order of recording dates, and have instead compiled them to create a perhaps more musical flow for the listener. I am aware in doing this that each listener would probably make a different choice.

The two recordings from 1942 include one of Tampa Red's biggest hits, the innuendo-laden I Want To Play With Your Poodle, and what seemed to me its natural partner in crime, She Wants To Sell My Monkey. I will leave it to the listener to decide how best to interpret the lyrics here - what I find most musically interesting is how the addition of drums to the piano, guitar and kazoo instrumentation already common in earlier recordings, coupled with the ongoing development of his musical style, looks forward with astonishing foresight to the major revolution in popular music which was to arrive a decade or more later. Indeed, one can even hear in the off-beat kazoo playing, coupled with the jaunty rhythms, the origins of 1960's Jamaican ska music, which grew out of the copying and adapting of blues-based music to be heard on American radio stations picked up in Jamaica at the time, and would of course later slow down and evolve into reggae - by which time Tampa Red was destitute and largely forgotten...

 

[mike]

Any Tampa Red fans out there?
This looks like a good recording to get.
http://www.pristineclassical.com/LargeWorks/Jazz/PABL003.php

Very cool! I'd love to know more about the processes they used to clean up the source materials!

Speaking of which, I'm curious about the varying audio quality of different releases. Especially the big (and big bucks) Charley Patton box set by Revenant Records versus the virtually budget versions put out by JSP Records.

Screamin' and Hollerin' the Blues: The Worlds of Charley Patton [BOX SET]...

compared to Complete Recordings 1929-34 [ORIGINAL RECORDING REMASTERED] ...

I have the Sonny Boy Williamson 4 disc JSP collection. It's got decent quality, tons of content and priced at under $25!
I wonder if you get what you pay for in audio clarity in these cases or is it mainly fancier packaging... Anyone know?

 

[Sertsa]

As a kind of public service announcement, Blind Pig Records--a long-time independent blues label--puts free downloads on its site:

http://www.blindpigrecords.com/index.cfm?section=downloads

The samples rotate, so it's a great way to check out some current artists. I don't know if other labels do this, at least so regularly.

 

[Feraud]

Speaking of which, I'm curious about the varying audio quality of different releases. Especially the big (and big bucks) Charley Patton box set by Revenant Records versus the virtually budget versions put out by JSP Records.

Good question. The answer could be a subjective and financial one. I've read some people who like the Revenant set and others who prefer the JSP.
I don't have either yet but am leaning towards the JSP. You cannot go wrong with that price. Although Revenant is supposed to have the most up to date biographical info on Patton....

 

[HoosierDaddy]

Here's a couple different takes on the same "blues" song that I enjoy...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1JYLDcYWtdI

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kAM-NJZ1azg&feature=related

...and another bluesy guitar...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lWp-Mazmf88

HD

 

[MEDIUMMYND]

Take listen to Mighty Mo Rodgers Blues are my wail"in wall album takes some beating for a modern day offering.

 

[Feraud]

Screamin' and Hollerin' the Blues: The Worlds of Charley Patton [BOX SET]...

After seeing this set in person yesterday thanks to Mike, all I can say is WOW! Revenant did an amazing job on the presentation of this set!

 

[funneman]

I love:

Robert Johnson
Muddy Waters
Howlin' Wolf

One of my greatest joys was turning some of my African-American
friends on to The Wolf and Johnson.

 

[PapaSimone]

Blind Willie Johnson

Here is a site with scanned record lables.
http://www.nugrape.net/pw.htm

Here is a blog posting I wrote on Blind Willie Johnson! http://blogs.bayviewnow.com/life_at...4/dark-was-the-night-cold-was-the-ground.aspx