Lonnie Johnson (musician)
Lonnie Johnson | |
---|---|
Background information | |
Birth name | Alonzo Johnson |
Born | New Orleans, Louisiana, U.S. | February 8, 1899
Died | June 16, 1970 Toronto, Canada | (aged 71)
Genres | Jazz, blues |
Occupation(s) | Musician |
Instrument(s) | Guitar, violin, vocals |
Labels |
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Alonzo "Lonnie" Johnson (February 8, 1899[1][2] – June 16, 1970) was an American blues and jazz singer, guitarist, violinist and songwriter. He was a pioneer of jazz guitar and jazz violin and is recognized as the first to play an electrically amplified violin.[3][4]
Biography
Early career
Johnson was born in New Orleans, Louisiana and raised in a family of musicians. He studied violin, piano and guitar as a child and learned to play various other instruments, including the mandolin, but he concentrated on the guitar throughout his professional career. "There was music all around us," he recalled, "and in my family you'd better play something, even if you just banged on a tin can."[5]
In 1917, Johnson joined a revue that toured England, returning home in 1919 to find that all of his family, except his brother James, had died in the
He and his brother settled in
In 1925, Johnson married, and his wife, Mary, soon began a blues career of her own,[7] performing as Mary Johnson and pursuing a recording career from 1929 to 1936.[8] (She is not to be confused with the later soul and gospel singer of the same name.)
As with many other early blues artists, information on Mary Johnson is often contradictory and confusing. Various online sources give her name before marriage as Mary Smith and state that she began performing in her teens. However, the writer James Sallis[9] gave her original name as Mary Williams and stated that her interest in writing and performing blues began when she started helping Lonnie write songs and developed from there. The two never recorded together. They had six children before their divorce in 1932.[8]
Success in the 1920s and 1930s
In 1925, Johnson entered and won a blues contest at the Booker T. Washington Theatre in St. Louis, the prize being a recording contract with
Okeh used the images of Louis Armstrong and Johnson in ads for the Defender.
Johnson's compositions often depicted the social conditions confronting urban African Americans ("Racketeers' Blues", "Hard Times Ain't Gone Nowhere", "Fine Booze and Heavy Dues").[7] In his lyrics he captured the nuances of male-female love relationships in a way that went beyond Tin Pan Alley sentimentalism.[7] His songs displayed an ability to understand the heartaches of others, which Johnson saw as the essence of his blues.[10]
After touring with Bessie Smith in 1929, Johnson moved to Chicago and recorded for Okeh with the stride pianist James P. Johnson. However, with the temporary demise of the recording industry in the Great Depression, he was compelled to make a living outside music, working at one point in a steel mill in Peoria, Illinois.[7] In 1932 he moved again, to Cleveland, Ohio, where he lived for the rest of the decade. There he performed on radio programs and intermittently played with the band backing the singer Putney Dandridge.
By the late 1930s, he was recording and performing in Chicago for Decca Records, working with Roosevelt Sykes and Blind John Davis, among others. In 1939, during a session for Bluebird Records with the pianist Joshua Altheimer, Johnson used an electric guitar for the first time. He recorded 34 tracks for Bluebird over the next five years, including the hits "He's a Jelly Roll Baker"[14] and "In Love Again".
Later career
After World War II, Johnson made the transition to
In 1952 Johnson toured England.[15] Tony Donegan, a British musician who played on the same bill, paid tribute to Johnson by changing his name to Lonnie Donegan. Johnson's performances are thought to have been received poorly by British audiences; this may have been due to organizational problems with the tour.[16]
After returning to the United States, Johnson moved to Philadelphia. He worked in a steel foundry and as a janitor. In 1959 he was working at the Benjamin Franklin Hotel in Philadelphia when WHAT-FM disc jockey Chris Albertson located him and produced Blues by Lonnie Johnson for Bluesville Records. This was followed by other Prestige albums, including one (Blues & Ballads) with the former Ellington boss Elmer Snowden, who had helped Albertson locate Johnson. Snowden had been the original bandleader of the Washingtonians, which Ellington took over after Snowden vacated the position and made into the famous Ellington orchestra. There followed a Chicago engagement for Johnson at the Playboy Club. This succession of events placed him back on the music scene at a fortuitous time: young audiences were embracing folk music, and many veteran performers were stepping out of obscurity. Johnson was reunited with Duke Ellington and appeared as a guest at an all-star folk concert.
In 1961, Johnson was reunited with his Okeh recording partner Victoria Spivey for another Prestige album, Idle Hours, and the two singers performed at
In May 1965, he performed at a club in Toronto before an audience of four people.[17] Two weeks later, his shows at a different club attracted a larger audience, and Johnson, encouraged by Toronto's relative racial harmony, decided to move to the city. He opened his club, Home of the Blues, on Toronto's Yorkville Avenue in 1966, but it was a business failure, and Johnson was fired by the man who became owner.[17] Through the rest of the decade, he recorded, played clubs in Canada, and embarked on several regional tours.
In 1993, Smithsonian Folkways released The Complete Folkways Recordings, an anthology of Johnson's music, on Folkways Records. He had been featured on several compilation blues albums from Folkways, beginning in the 1960s, but never released a solo album on the label in his lifetime.
Injury
In March 1969 he was hit by a car while walking on a sidewalk in Toronto.
Death
Johnson died on June 16, 1970. A funeral was held at Mount Hope Cemetery in Toronto by his friends and fellow musicians, but his family members insisted on transferring the body to Philadelphia where he was buried.[17][21] He was "virtually broke."[17] The Killer Blues Headstone project, a nonprofit organization that places headstones on unmarked graves of blues musicians, purchased a headstone for Johnson around 2014.[22]
Influence
Johnson's early recordings are the first guitar recordings that display a single-note soloing style with string bending and vibrato. Johnson pioneered this style of guitar playing on records, and his influence is obvious in the playing of Django Reinhardt, T-Bone Walker and virtually all electric blues guitarists.
One of Elvis Presley's earliest recordings was a version of Johnson's blues ballad "Tomorrow Night", written by Sam Coslow and Will Grosz. Presley's vocal phrasing mimics Johnson's, and many of Presley's signature vibrato and baritone sounds can be heard in development. "Tomorrow Night" was also recorded by LaVern Baker and (in 1957) by Jerry Lee Lewis.
In the liner notes for the album
Discography
As leader
- Lonesome Road (King, 1958)
- Blues by Lonnie Johnson (Prestige Bluesville, 1960)
- Blues & Ballads (Prestige Bluesville, 1960)
- Losing Game (Prestige Bluesville, 1961)
- Another Night to Cry (Prestige Bluesville, 1962)
- Idle Hours (Prestige Bluesville, 1962)
- Swingin' the Blues (Xtra, 1966)
- Eddie Lang & Lonnie Johnson Vol. 1 (Swaggie, 1967)
- Eddie Lang & Lonnie Johnson Vol. 2 (Swaggie, 1970)
- Mr. Trouble (Folkways, 1982)
- Tears Don't Fall No More (Folkways, 1982)
- Blues, Ballads, and Jumpin' Jazz Vol. 2 (Prestige Bluesville, 1990)
- The Unsung Blues Legend (Blues Magnet, 2000)
As sideman
- Victoria Spivey, Woman Blues (Prestige Bluesville, 1962)
- Victoria Spivey, The Queen and Her Knights (Spivey 1965)
See also
References
- ^ There is some dispute over the year of his birth; 1894 is given on his passport. Some other sources give 1889.
- ^ Big Bill Broonzy remembered that "Lonnie told me he was born in New Orleans in 1894..." Source also references 1894 as birth date. Sallis, James (1982). The Guitar Players One Instrument and Its Masters in American Music. p. 33
- ^ a b Herzhaft, Gérard (1979). Encyclopedia of the Blues
- ^ "Delmark History". Delmark.com. Archived from the original on June 6, 2018. Retrieved August 30, 2015.
- ISBN 0-525-93375-1
- ISBN 0-85112-673-1.
- ^ ISBN 978-0-306-80743-5.
- ^ a b "Mary Johnson, Complete Works in Chronological Order, 1929–1936: Review". AllMusic.
- ^ Sallis, James (1982). The Guitar Players. Bison Books. University of Nebraska
- ^ ISBN 0-87722-583-4
- ISBN 978-0-393-06582-4.
- ISBN 978-0-393-06582-4.
- ISBN 978-0-06-052427-2
- ISBN 1-85868-255-X.
- ^ ISBN 0-214-20512-6.
- ^ Davies, Lawrence (2014). "On a Kind of Vacation: Re-examining African American Blues Musicians' Visits to Britain, 1950–58". allthirteenkeys.com. Retrieved October 10, 2014.
- ^ a b c d Campbell, Richard, "A Legend of Jazz World, Lonnie Johnson Dies". Toronto Star. June 17, 1970. p. 50
- ^ "Jazzman Johnson Injured in Crash". Toronto Star. March 14, 1969. p. 26
- ^ Rubin, Don. "One of the Best Jazz Shows Ever." Toronto Star. May 5, 1969. p. 28
- ^ McCracken, Melinda. "Blues Show Turns Them On." The Globe and Mail. February 24, 1970. p. 13
- ^ Miller, Mark (2011). Way Down That Lonesome Road: Lonnie Johnson in Toronto 1965–1970. Mercury Press & Teksteditions. pp. 129, 145
- ^ "Non-Profit to Help Bluesman with Unmarked Graves". Killer Blues. Killer Blues Headstone Project. Killerblues.net. Retrieved July 30, 2016.
- ^ Crowe, Cameron (1985). Liner notes, Biograph. Columbia Records. p. 10
Relevant literature
- Simon, Julia. The Inconvenient Lonnie Johnson: Blues, Race, Identity. Penn State University Press, 2022.