Lonnie Johnson (musician)

Alonzo "Lonnie" Johnson (February 8, 1899 – 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.

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."

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 1918 influenza epidemic.

He and his brother settled in St. Louis in 1921, where they performed as a duo. Lonnie also worked on riverboats and in the orchestra of Charlie Creath. He was good friends with Fate Marable but never performed with him.

In 1925, Johnson married, and his wife, Mary, soon began a blues career of her own, performing as Mary Johnson and pursuing a recording career from 1929 to 1936. 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.

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 Records. Between 1925 and 1932 he made about 130 recordings for Okeh, many of which sold well (making him one of the most popular OKeh artists). He was called to New York to record with the leading blues singers of the day, including Victoria Spivey and the country blues singer Alger "Texas" Alexander. He also toured with Bessie Smith, a top attraction of the Theater Owners Booking Association. In December 1927, Johnson recorded in Chicago as a guest artist with Louis Armstrong and His Hot Five, paired with the banjoist Johnny St. Cyr. He played on the sides "I'm Not Rough", "Savoy Blues", and "Hotter Than That". The most famous of the three sides, "Hotter than That," encompassed the New Orleans traditions of polymetric tension, scar, dialogue, collective improvisation, and timbral diversity. In an unusual move, Johnson was invited to sit in with many OKeh jazz groups. In 1928, he recorded "Hot and Bothered", "Move Over", and "The Mooche" with Duke Ellington for Okeh. He also recorded with a group called the Chocolate Dandies (in this case, McKinney's Cotton Pickers). He pioneered the guitar solo on the 1927 track "6/88 Glide", and on many of his early recordings he played 12-string guitar solos in a style that influenced such future jazz guitarists as George Barnes, Charlie Christian and Django Reinhardt giving the instrument new meaning as a jazz voice. He excelled in purely instrumental pieces, some of which he recorded with the white jazz guitarist Eddie Lang, with whom he teamed in 1929.

Much of Johnson's music featured experimental improvisations that would now be categorized as jazz rather than blues. According to the blues historian Gérard Herzhaft, declared that in the 1920s and 1930s Johnson was best known as a sophisticated and urbane singer rather than an instrumentalist: "Of the forty ads for his records that appeared in the Chicago Defender between 1926 and 1931, not one even mentioned that he played guitar."

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"). and "In Love Again".

Later career

thumb|left|alt=Lonnie Johnson posing with his guitar|Johnson in 1960

After World War II, Johnson made the transition to rhythm and blues, recording for King in Cincinnati and having a hit in 1948 with "Tomorrow Night" written by Sam Coslow and Will Grosz. The song topped the Billboard Race Records chart for seven weeks and reached number 19 on the pop chart with sales of three million copies. A blues ballad with piano accompaniment and background singers, the song bore little resemblance to much of Johnson's earlier blues and jazz material. The follow-ups "Pleasing You", "So Tired", and "Confused" were also R&B hits.

In 1952 Johnson toured England.

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 Duke Ellington's former 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 Gerdes Folk City. In 1963 he toured Europe as part of the American Folk Blues Festival with Muddy Waters and others, 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. He was seriously injured, suffering a broken hip and kidney injuries. A benefit concert was held on May 4, 1969, with two dozen acts that included Ian and Sylvia Tyson, John Lee Hooker, and Hagood Hardy. He never fully recovered from his injuries and suffered what was described as a stroke. He was able to return to the stage for one performance at Massey Hall on February 23, 1970, walking with the aid of a cane, to sing a couple of songs with Buddy Guy; Johnson received a standing ovation.

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. He was "virtually broke."

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. B.B. King wrote in his 1996 autobiography Blues All Around Me that, when he was a young boy, Blind Lemon Jefferson and Lonnie Johnson “hit me the hardest, I believe, because their voices were so distinct, natural, and believable. I heard them talking to me.”

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 Biograph, Bob Dylan described his encounters with Johnson in New York City. "I was lucky to meet Lonnie Johnson at the same club I was working and I must say he greatly influenced me. You can hear it in that first record. I mean Corrina, Corrina...that's pretty much Lonnie Johnson. I used to watch him every chance I got and sometimes he'd let me play with him. I think he and Tampa Red and of course Scrapper Blackwell, that's my favorite style of guitar playing." In his autobiography, Chronicles, Vol. 1, Dylan wrote about the performing method he learned from Lonnie Johnson and remarked that Robert Johnson had learned a lot from Lonnie Johnson. Some of Robert Johnson's songs, such as "Malted Milk," are seen as new versions of songs recorded by Lonnie Johnson.

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)

References

Relevant literature

Simon, Julia. The Inconvenient Lonnie Johnson: Blues, Race, Identity. Penn State University Press, 2022.

External links

Discography and brief biography
1960 interview with Paul Oliver