 |
| Thank you, Lonnie Johnson. |
Like country and jazz, the blues evolved into its modern form just before the 1920s. Rather than attempt a declarative, “the blues are _________,” I’ll just flag a couple key ideas and refer interested parties to Wikipedia’s entry on a great American genre. They go further back, for one, kicking around possible connections to “blue devils” seen by drunks in the grips of alcohol withdrawal (but…pink elephants?), or even a related phenomenon like blue laws banning the sale of alcohol, which would also keep those blue devils at bay.
The form of the blues relevant to this post evolved in southern Black communities, mostly after the American Civil War and during the decades after the abolition of slavery. In the same way that good and healthy things grow out of manure, the roots of the genre extended into the slavery era in musical forms like spirituals, work songs, field hollers and old ballads. A 1997 Georgia public television documentary on Blind Willie McTell, one of the subjects of this post, gives a short, but more compelling take on how communal music like work songs evolved into the classic blues format of a lone singer and his guitar. In that telling, Black Americans moving around in search of both livelihoods and lost family members often wound up as solitary farmers (often sharecroppers), and they held those same songs in their collective memory. The second part involved Sears catalogs ubiquitous across the American south, a lot of which sold guitars, a fairly new instrument at that time; the guitar eventually evolved into the “response” in the “call-and-response” structure of old work songs - i.e., the singer sings the lines (or the story) and the guitar "calls back" in an alternating pattern.
A whole bunch of threads cross here - e.g., country music (with the banjo borrowed from African Americans), music from the popular minstrel shows - but (riffing a bit here) blues seemed to develop within Black communities, i.e., in isolation from the other two. Minstrelsy, in particular, held onto the slave days. Black amateur musicians moved the genre forward playing “juke joints” and making the songs more lyrically complex - e.g., from repeating the same three lines to the AAB pattern (line, line, concluding line) - and richer and more varied musically, until, by the beginning of the 20th century, blues started to sound like a stripped-down version of the popular songs of the 1920s and 1930s.
A man named Hart Wand published the first blues composition in 1912, with “Dallas Blues”; the same year saw W. C. Handy publish “St. Louis Blues” and “Memphis Blues” - none of which will register as "blues" to a modern audience; the mash-up of blues and jazz quickly differentiated (while ragtime became parody before it died before the 1920s). Conveniently, the place names of those titles map a loose boundary around where the genre took root and grew. For reference, Wikipedia had this to say about Handy’s work: “his compositions can be described as a fusion of blues with ragtime and jazz, a merger facilitated using the Cuban habanera rhythm that had long been a part of ragtime.” The blues took a detour in the early 1920s, when female singers - e.g., Lucille Bogan, Ma Rainey and Bessie Smith (both covered in this series) - dominated what was popularly called the blues. That was one version of what became known as “the Urban blues”; the one man and his guitar model formed the other branch. By the end of the 1920s, that became what comes to mind for most people when someone says, “the blues.”
There are too many artists to name, even within the confines of the 1920s - e.g., if you sit through that Georgia Public TV doc, you’ll see a guy, 1) name a solid dozen of the early innovators (most of whom I didn’t know), and 2) give a good demonstration of what the early artists did when they played. He focuses on Blind Willie McTell, obviously, so that’s where I’ll start too.
The Unstoppable Willie McTell
“Few facts are known about his early life. Even his name is uncertain: his family name was either McTear or McTier, and his first name may have been Willie, Samuel, or Eddie. His tombstone reads ‘Eddie McTier.’”
- Georgia Encyclopedia
That detail makes Blind Willie McTell - often pronounced “MAC-tell” - a common type of blues artist. As for his name, Wikipedia went with William Samuel McTier, and gives 1898 as the year of his birth. The place was Thomson, Georgia, but McTell made a habit of not staying anywhere for long for most of his life. The Georgia Public Television documentary states he was born blind, Wikipedia says born blind in only one eye, but that he lost sight in his good eye before puberty. He grew up around guitar - both his mother and father could play, as well as an uncle - but only for so long as they stuck around. His father left fairly early and his mother died around 1920, leaving McTell an orphan…but he’d already run away a couple times by then, joining and playing in medicine shows.
Shortly before her death, McTell's mother had moved to Statesboro, Georgia to start a new family; he joined her around the same time. After she passed, he drifted a little (into moonshine production, apparently) until a neighbor paid for Blind Willie to attend his first school for the blind. He attended a couple others up and down the Eastern seaboard where he learned to read everything in Braille, including music. Through all that, he played the music he heard growing up, first on a six-string guitar (and a harmonica and an accordion), then on a 12-string. The latter became his instrument of choice for the rest of his long career, not just for its depth, but also for the volume he needed for performing on the streets. To the extent McTell had a regular job, it was busking.
He returned to Georgia at a time of general migration. A plague of bollweevils chased farmers from their fields, a lot of them to Northern cities like Detroit and Chicago - but some, like McTell, stayed local, bouncing between Atlanta and Augusta, Georgia. Whether he knew it or not, that put him at the epicenter of a feeding frenzy for agents of the blossoming recording industry. As they’ve done since their conception, record labels descended en masse anywhere they thought they can find a sound that sells - and, in the 1920s, that meant Atlanta, the area around Decatur Street, in particular, where they'd walk past buskers working the crowd into between scouting the juke joints. If you’ve heard Blind Willie McTell play, you know why he stood out.
He recorded prolifically from his first recordings in 1927 and, unlike a lot of artists of the era, regardless of genre, he kept recording all the way up to World War II. Because his name would bind him to a label and a contract, he didn’t always record as Blind Willie McTell, though that’s who he was for Victor and Decca; he became Blind Sammie for Columbia Records, Georgia Bill for Okeh, Barrelhouse Sammie for Atlantic and, in homage to a Georgia (and beyond?) barbecue franchise, he recorded as Pig & Whistle Red for Regal Records. For all that time in the booth, he never recorded a hit - not even “Statesboro Blues” sold well, though it became his signature song - but he put out enough material for five artists.
Circa 1934. he married the daughter of an old family friend, a woman named Ruth Kate Williams. Due to her need to keep in a job in one place (she was a nurse) and his need to go wherever he could find a paying audience, they lived apart for most of their marriage (seriously, 1942 to 1959), but she performed and recorded with him from the start of their marriage to 1940. For instance, I assume that’s her on songs like “Rollin’ Mama Blues” and “Mama Let Me Scoop for You.” [Ed. - Never mind, it's someone named Ruby Glaze.]
Those were the comparative glory days, but I neither heard nor read anything about McTell taking a break from performing - even when he struggled to find good-paying work. The other thing McTell never took a break from was drinking and, late in life, both chronic alcoholism and diabetes caught up with him. He did get one final recording session and, if you take the time to look at both Wikipedia and the Georgia Public TV doc, you’ll get two very different versions of that event. In Wikipedia’s telling, a record store owner named George Rhodes “discovered McTell playing in the street for quarters and enticed him with a bottle of corn liquor into his store, where he captured a few final performances on a tape recorder.” Rhodes himself gives a very different account in the documentary. He recalls being impressed by McTell’s playing and making a series of attempts to get him to record, only to have McTell talk about all the material put out in the ‘20s and ‘30s and the same record companies’ failure to provide for him at that point (circa 1956). To paraphrase, he told Rhodes “he’d recorded plenty and it only came to grief.” Rhodes finally convinced him - and even confirmed McTell was “pretty drunk” that night, which, here, means passing out - and to the point he had to drop him off where he lived (under a place called the Dixie Dance Hall) after the session. Rhodes even recalls stuffing some money in his pocket. And that’s where another fascinating detail comes in.
As Rhodes recalls, McTell, who had apparently been rolled plenty after passing out, took the time to seek him out to thank him. And that picks up a story that gets repeated a lot through that documentary: McTell’s comprehensive knowledge of the streets, and even the alleys, of Atlanta. Rhodes claims McTell had to have walked 7-8 miles to show his appreciation. With as little research as I’ve done, I’m in no position to put the documentary’s version of events over Wikipedia’s; on the other hand, only one source gets into what went on in the parking lot behind the Blue Lantern Lounge, and why McTell thought he could make money there. Something about a lover’s lane…
McTell hung up his guitar shortly after that and, from 1957 until the stroke that killed him in 1959, he refused to play anything but religious music. He even became a preacher at Atlanta’s Zion Baptist Church. He died something close to penniless, another hallmark of early blues artists, but a fan paid for his tombstone when he was laid to rest at the Jones Grove Church, near Thomson, Georgia, thus letting his life end where it started.
About the Sampler
The cheapest way I can translate Blind Willie McTell for a modern audience would be to mention that Jack White’s a fan - something you can hear when you listen to a lot of his numbers*. Apart from the few songs noted above, I slipped a mix of what’s popular and some stray stuff I heard onto the sampler. In no particular order, “Kill It Kid,” “Dying Crapshooter's Blues*,” “Pinetop’s Boogie Woogie,” “I Got to Cross the River Jordan,” “Atlanta Strut,” “Southern Can Is Mine*,” “Georgia Rag,” “Dark Night Blues,” and “Searching the Desert for the Blues*.” For what it’s worth, Blind Willie McTell is the most “modern” artist I’ve heard so far - i.e., there isn’t much of a culture gap to leap over. If you like any kind of early rock, Blind Willie McTell shouldn't throw you far.
Now, the next pioneer…
Lonnie Johnson, Inventor of the Guitar Solo
Lonnie Johnson came into the world in 1899, and the City of New Orleans, specifically. He grew up in a performing musical family and he was already playing with his father’s band as early as his late teens. Like Jelly Roll Morton and several others, Johson also knocked around the Big Easy’s Storyville district, earning enough recognition and respect before his 20th birthday to punch a ticket with “a revue” (no genre specified) that toured Europe from 1917-19. He came home to tragedy: the 1918-19 “Spanish flu” epidemic carried away almost his entire family; only one brother survived. They both relocated to St. Louis in 1921 and started to build careers in music, originally playing as a duo. Lonnie Johnson didn't take too long to eclipse his (unnamed) brother.
The year 1925 saw two big moments in Johnson’s career: 1) he married the woman who would perform as Mary Johnson (original surname unknown), and 2) he won a blues contest that had a recording contract with Okeh Records as the winning prize. Wikipedia reports that he later regretted winning that blues competition, as it it limited his (genuinely) considerable range as a guitarist. Okeh, on the other hand, struck gold, landing one of their most popular artists before the Great Depression came around and crushed the record industry. With that platform under him, Johnson performed with some of the biggest artists of the 1920s and 30s - e.g., Bessie Smith, Duke Ellington, Victoria Spivey and Louis Armstrong and his Hot Five. For all his fretting about getting type-cast as a blues artist, Okeh Records called him in for sessions with their jazz artists and one of his favorite collaboration from a long career came when he played with a white jazz guitarist named Eddie Lang. As he told Valerie Kilmer in a 1963 London interview:
“That was a great guitar player. I met him in Philadelphia, that was his home. He was an Italian kid, a very wonderful guitar player.”
That pairing counted among the first times a White artist played with a Black artist and, the times being the times, the label had Lang record under the pseudonym, Blind Willie Dunn. It’s fair to ask which artist should have felt more flattered in the collaboration given that, two years prior to their 1929 recording, Johnson “pioneered the guitar solo,” starting with his 1927 track, “6/88 Glide.” For those wondering what “guitar solo” means, Wikipedia clarifies:
“According to the blues historian Gérard Herzhaft, Johnson was ‘undeniably the creator of the guitar solo played note by note with a pick, which has become the standard in jazz, blues, country, and rock.’”
Further:
“Johnson's early recordings are the first guitar recordings that display a single-note soloing style with string bending and vibrato.”
As already noted above, the Depression put a screeching halt to Johnson’s career, just like everyone else’s. Unlike a lot of musicians, Johnson never balked at the idea of working a “straight job,” so he simply returned to work when he could neither play nor record. The Depression’s worst year (1932) saw him working in Peoria in the steel industry; he moved to Cleveland for the rest of the decade and did nothing particularly connected with music. Johnson would drift in and out of the music business for the rest of his life, and he always had a fall-back (again, from that 1963 London interview):
“I am a carpenter by trade and an electrician, also I'm a cook by trade, that's right. I've been a cook for thirty years. So with that, I can always make a living. I'm not froze out. If I can't make it in music I can always get something else. But I love music and I can't get away from it.”
It's no surprise, then, that Johnson’s career revived when the recording industry did; He put out a couple recordings on Decca in the late 1930s, but he had his biggest revival after World War II, when he switched to…rhythm and blues (the ellipses mean I’m not clear on what rhythm and blues means after hearing the relevant songs). Johnson scored the biggest hit of his career with 1948’s butter-smooth, “Tomorrow Night,” as well as follow-up numbers like “Confused” and “So Tired." And yet, even after that comeback, Johnson again faded into obscurity and/or Philadelphia for much of the 1950s. An NPR bio describes how he was rediscovered yet again:
“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!’”
Johnson did a little more touring - highlighted by yet another European tour, 1963’s Folk Blues Festival, with Muddy Waters on the bill - and then relocated to Toronto. There, he tried to go straight on his own terms - he even mapped it out in that 1963 interview (“I'm going to open up a private nightclub, just a supper club, put me a nice little combo in there and sit down and rest myself”). He followed through in 1965, opening a venue called Home of the Blues on Yorkville Avenue, but that venture went bust when a new owner took over and promptly fired Johnson. Just four years later, he got hit by a car while walking on the sidewalk, an accident that finally ended his career. He managed one more performance, struggling through the after-effects of a stroke, in February of 1970, but that was his last. He died June 16, 1970. And, in a recurring theme, he died broke. Give freely to your favorite recording artists, it's tough work.
About the Sampler
I flagged most of his late career material above, as well as the song that featured his (alleged) first guitar solo, but, as with McTell, I went with a mix of his most famous numbers and a bunch more I like, including: “What a Woman,” “Tears Don’t Fall No More,” “Hard Times Ain’t Gone Nowhere,” “Some Day Baby,” “Racketeer’s Blues,” “Guitar Blues,” “Pleasing You (As Long as I Live),” and, a song that talks about Rudy Vallee ripping him off, “Looking for a Sweetie.” It’s harder to pin down Johnson musically - e.g., the distance between “Racketeer’s Blues” and “Tomorrow Night” isn’t small. All of it is, however, very good. I like where I started this whole blues series.
Until the next one…should be next Sunday.
The form of the blues relevant to this post evolved in southern Black communities, mostly after the American Civil War and during the decades after the abolition of slavery. In the same way that good and healthy things grow out of manure, the roots of the genre extended into the slavery era in musical forms like spirituals, work songs, field hollers and old ballads. A 1997 Georgia public television documentary on Blind Willie McTell, one of the subjects of this post, gives a short, but more compelling take on how communal music like work songs evolved into the classic blues format of a lone singer and his guitar. In that telling, Black Americans moving around in search of both livelihoods and lost family members often wound up as solitary farmers (often sharecroppers), and they held those same songs in their collective memory. The second part involved Sears catalogs ubiquitous across the American south, a lot of which sold guitars, a fairly new instrument at that time; the guitar eventually evolved into the “response” in the “call-and-response” structure of old work songs - i.e., the singer sings the lines (or the story) and the guitar "calls back" in an alternating pattern.
A whole bunch of threads cross here - e.g., country music (with the banjo borrowed from African Americans), music from the popular minstrel shows - but (riffing a bit here) blues seemed to develop within Black communities, i.e., in isolation from the other two. Minstrelsy, in particular, held onto the slave days. Black amateur musicians moved the genre forward playing “juke joints” and making the songs more lyrically complex - e.g., from repeating the same three lines to the AAB pattern (line, line, concluding line) - and richer and more varied musically, until, by the beginning of the 20th century, blues started to sound like a stripped-down version of the popular songs of the 1920s and 1930s.
A man named Hart Wand published the first blues composition in 1912, with “Dallas Blues”; the same year saw W. C. Handy publish “St. Louis Blues” and “Memphis Blues” - none of which will register as "blues" to a modern audience; the mash-up of blues and jazz quickly differentiated (while ragtime became parody before it died before the 1920s). Conveniently, the place names of those titles map a loose boundary around where the genre took root and grew. For reference, Wikipedia had this to say about Handy’s work: “his compositions can be described as a fusion of blues with ragtime and jazz, a merger facilitated using the Cuban habanera rhythm that had long been a part of ragtime.” The blues took a detour in the early 1920s, when female singers - e.g., Lucille Bogan, Ma Rainey and Bessie Smith (both covered in this series) - dominated what was popularly called the blues. That was one version of what became known as “the Urban blues”; the one man and his guitar model formed the other branch. By the end of the 1920s, that became what comes to mind for most people when someone says, “the blues.”
There are too many artists to name, even within the confines of the 1920s - e.g., if you sit through that Georgia Public TV doc, you’ll see a guy, 1) name a solid dozen of the early innovators (most of whom I didn’t know), and 2) give a good demonstration of what the early artists did when they played. He focuses on Blind Willie McTell, obviously, so that’s where I’ll start too.
The Unstoppable Willie McTell
“Few facts are known about his early life. Even his name is uncertain: his family name was either McTear or McTier, and his first name may have been Willie, Samuel, or Eddie. His tombstone reads ‘Eddie McTier.’”
- Georgia Encyclopedia
That detail makes Blind Willie McTell - often pronounced “MAC-tell” - a common type of blues artist. As for his name, Wikipedia went with William Samuel McTier, and gives 1898 as the year of his birth. The place was Thomson, Georgia, but McTell made a habit of not staying anywhere for long for most of his life. The Georgia Public Television documentary states he was born blind, Wikipedia says born blind in only one eye, but that he lost sight in his good eye before puberty. He grew up around guitar - both his mother and father could play, as well as an uncle - but only for so long as they stuck around. His father left fairly early and his mother died around 1920, leaving McTell an orphan…but he’d already run away a couple times by then, joining and playing in medicine shows.
Shortly before her death, McTell's mother had moved to Statesboro, Georgia to start a new family; he joined her around the same time. After she passed, he drifted a little (into moonshine production, apparently) until a neighbor paid for Blind Willie to attend his first school for the blind. He attended a couple others up and down the Eastern seaboard where he learned to read everything in Braille, including music. Through all that, he played the music he heard growing up, first on a six-string guitar (and a harmonica and an accordion), then on a 12-string. The latter became his instrument of choice for the rest of his long career, not just for its depth, but also for the volume he needed for performing on the streets. To the extent McTell had a regular job, it was busking.
He returned to Georgia at a time of general migration. A plague of bollweevils chased farmers from their fields, a lot of them to Northern cities like Detroit and Chicago - but some, like McTell, stayed local, bouncing between Atlanta and Augusta, Georgia. Whether he knew it or not, that put him at the epicenter of a feeding frenzy for agents of the blossoming recording industry. As they’ve done since their conception, record labels descended en masse anywhere they thought they can find a sound that sells - and, in the 1920s, that meant Atlanta, the area around Decatur Street, in particular, where they'd walk past buskers working the crowd into between scouting the juke joints. If you’ve heard Blind Willie McTell play, you know why he stood out.
He recorded prolifically from his first recordings in 1927 and, unlike a lot of artists of the era, regardless of genre, he kept recording all the way up to World War II. Because his name would bind him to a label and a contract, he didn’t always record as Blind Willie McTell, though that’s who he was for Victor and Decca; he became Blind Sammie for Columbia Records, Georgia Bill for Okeh, Barrelhouse Sammie for Atlantic and, in homage to a Georgia (and beyond?) barbecue franchise, he recorded as Pig & Whistle Red for Regal Records. For all that time in the booth, he never recorded a hit - not even “Statesboro Blues” sold well, though it became his signature song - but he put out enough material for five artists.
Circa 1934. he married the daughter of an old family friend, a woman named Ruth Kate Williams. Due to her need to keep in a job in one place (she was a nurse) and his need to go wherever he could find a paying audience, they lived apart for most of their marriage (seriously, 1942 to 1959), but she performed and recorded with him from the start of their marriage to 1940. For instance, I assume that’s her on songs like “Rollin’ Mama Blues” and “Mama Let Me Scoop for You.” [Ed. - Never mind, it's someone named Ruby Glaze.]
Those were the comparative glory days, but I neither heard nor read anything about McTell taking a break from performing - even when he struggled to find good-paying work. The other thing McTell never took a break from was drinking and, late in life, both chronic alcoholism and diabetes caught up with him. He did get one final recording session and, if you take the time to look at both Wikipedia and the Georgia Public TV doc, you’ll get two very different versions of that event. In Wikipedia’s telling, a record store owner named George Rhodes “discovered McTell playing in the street for quarters and enticed him with a bottle of corn liquor into his store, where he captured a few final performances on a tape recorder.” Rhodes himself gives a very different account in the documentary. He recalls being impressed by McTell’s playing and making a series of attempts to get him to record, only to have McTell talk about all the material put out in the ‘20s and ‘30s and the same record companies’ failure to provide for him at that point (circa 1956). To paraphrase, he told Rhodes “he’d recorded plenty and it only came to grief.” Rhodes finally convinced him - and even confirmed McTell was “pretty drunk” that night, which, here, means passing out - and to the point he had to drop him off where he lived (under a place called the Dixie Dance Hall) after the session. Rhodes even recalls stuffing some money in his pocket. And that’s where another fascinating detail comes in.
As Rhodes recalls, McTell, who had apparently been rolled plenty after passing out, took the time to seek him out to thank him. And that picks up a story that gets repeated a lot through that documentary: McTell’s comprehensive knowledge of the streets, and even the alleys, of Atlanta. Rhodes claims McTell had to have walked 7-8 miles to show his appreciation. With as little research as I’ve done, I’m in no position to put the documentary’s version of events over Wikipedia’s; on the other hand, only one source gets into what went on in the parking lot behind the Blue Lantern Lounge, and why McTell thought he could make money there. Something about a lover’s lane…
McTell hung up his guitar shortly after that and, from 1957 until the stroke that killed him in 1959, he refused to play anything but religious music. He even became a preacher at Atlanta’s Zion Baptist Church. He died something close to penniless, another hallmark of early blues artists, but a fan paid for his tombstone when he was laid to rest at the Jones Grove Church, near Thomson, Georgia, thus letting his life end where it started.
About the Sampler
The cheapest way I can translate Blind Willie McTell for a modern audience would be to mention that Jack White’s a fan - something you can hear when you listen to a lot of his numbers*. Apart from the few songs noted above, I slipped a mix of what’s popular and some stray stuff I heard onto the sampler. In no particular order, “Kill It Kid,” “Dying Crapshooter's Blues*,” “Pinetop’s Boogie Woogie,” “I Got to Cross the River Jordan,” “Atlanta Strut,” “Southern Can Is Mine*,” “Georgia Rag,” “Dark Night Blues,” and “Searching the Desert for the Blues*.” For what it’s worth, Blind Willie McTell is the most “modern” artist I’ve heard so far - i.e., there isn’t much of a culture gap to leap over. If you like any kind of early rock, Blind Willie McTell shouldn't throw you far.
Now, the next pioneer…
Lonnie Johnson, Inventor of the Guitar Solo
Lonnie Johnson came into the world in 1899, and the City of New Orleans, specifically. He grew up in a performing musical family and he was already playing with his father’s band as early as his late teens. Like Jelly Roll Morton and several others, Johson also knocked around the Big Easy’s Storyville district, earning enough recognition and respect before his 20th birthday to punch a ticket with “a revue” (no genre specified) that toured Europe from 1917-19. He came home to tragedy: the 1918-19 “Spanish flu” epidemic carried away almost his entire family; only one brother survived. They both relocated to St. Louis in 1921 and started to build careers in music, originally playing as a duo. Lonnie Johnson didn't take too long to eclipse his (unnamed) brother.
The year 1925 saw two big moments in Johnson’s career: 1) he married the woman who would perform as Mary Johnson (original surname unknown), and 2) he won a blues contest that had a recording contract with Okeh Records as the winning prize. Wikipedia reports that he later regretted winning that blues competition, as it it limited his (genuinely) considerable range as a guitarist. Okeh, on the other hand, struck gold, landing one of their most popular artists before the Great Depression came around and crushed the record industry. With that platform under him, Johnson performed with some of the biggest artists of the 1920s and 30s - e.g., Bessie Smith, Duke Ellington, Victoria Spivey and Louis Armstrong and his Hot Five. For all his fretting about getting type-cast as a blues artist, Okeh Records called him in for sessions with their jazz artists and one of his favorite collaboration from a long career came when he played with a white jazz guitarist named Eddie Lang. As he told Valerie Kilmer in a 1963 London interview:
“That was a great guitar player. I met him in Philadelphia, that was his home. He was an Italian kid, a very wonderful guitar player.”
That pairing counted among the first times a White artist played with a Black artist and, the times being the times, the label had Lang record under the pseudonym, Blind Willie Dunn. It’s fair to ask which artist should have felt more flattered in the collaboration given that, two years prior to their 1929 recording, Johnson “pioneered the guitar solo,” starting with his 1927 track, “6/88 Glide.” For those wondering what “guitar solo” means, Wikipedia clarifies:
“According to the blues historian Gérard Herzhaft, Johnson was ‘undeniably the creator of the guitar solo played note by note with a pick, which has become the standard in jazz, blues, country, and rock.’”
Further:
“Johnson's early recordings are the first guitar recordings that display a single-note soloing style with string bending and vibrato.”
As already noted above, the Depression put a screeching halt to Johnson’s career, just like everyone else’s. Unlike a lot of musicians, Johnson never balked at the idea of working a “straight job,” so he simply returned to work when he could neither play nor record. The Depression’s worst year (1932) saw him working in Peoria in the steel industry; he moved to Cleveland for the rest of the decade and did nothing particularly connected with music. Johnson would drift in and out of the music business for the rest of his life, and he always had a fall-back (again, from that 1963 London interview):
“I am a carpenter by trade and an electrician, also I'm a cook by trade, that's right. I've been a cook for thirty years. So with that, I can always make a living. I'm not froze out. If I can't make it in music I can always get something else. But I love music and I can't get away from it.”
It's no surprise, then, that Johnson’s career revived when the recording industry did; He put out a couple recordings on Decca in the late 1930s, but he had his biggest revival after World War II, when he switched to…rhythm and blues (the ellipses mean I’m not clear on what rhythm and blues means after hearing the relevant songs). Johnson scored the biggest hit of his career with 1948’s butter-smooth, “Tomorrow Night,” as well as follow-up numbers like “Confused” and “So Tired." And yet, even after that comeback, Johnson again faded into obscurity and/or Philadelphia for much of the 1950s. An NPR bio describes how he was rediscovered yet again:
“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!’”
Johnson did a little more touring - highlighted by yet another European tour, 1963’s Folk Blues Festival, with Muddy Waters on the bill - and then relocated to Toronto. There, he tried to go straight on his own terms - he even mapped it out in that 1963 interview (“I'm going to open up a private nightclub, just a supper club, put me a nice little combo in there and sit down and rest myself”). He followed through in 1965, opening a venue called Home of the Blues on Yorkville Avenue, but that venture went bust when a new owner took over and promptly fired Johnson. Just four years later, he got hit by a car while walking on the sidewalk, an accident that finally ended his career. He managed one more performance, struggling through the after-effects of a stroke, in February of 1970, but that was his last. He died June 16, 1970. And, in a recurring theme, he died broke. Give freely to your favorite recording artists, it's tough work.
About the Sampler
I flagged most of his late career material above, as well as the song that featured his (alleged) first guitar solo, but, as with McTell, I went with a mix of his most famous numbers and a bunch more I like, including: “What a Woman,” “Tears Don’t Fall No More,” “Hard Times Ain’t Gone Nowhere,” “Some Day Baby,” “Racketeer’s Blues,” “Guitar Blues,” “Pleasing You (As Long as I Live),” and, a song that talks about Rudy Vallee ripping him off, “Looking for a Sweetie.” It’s harder to pin down Johnson musically - e.g., the distance between “Racketeer’s Blues” and “Tomorrow Night” isn’t small. All of it is, however, very good. I like where I started this whole blues series.
Until the next one…should be next Sunday.
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