I got a standing ovation, and he took his guitar back!” Finally, he decided that there enough people who wanted to hear me that, no matter if I was good or not, it would be worth it to let me on stage. Also, I kept sending people over to ask him to let me play. He asked me for a union card, and I had one. But Johnny already had his chops down and wanted to play with the revered B.B.”I was about 17,” Johnny remembers, “and B.B. ![]() The only whites in the crowd, they no doubt stood out. King at a Beaumont club called the Raven. There’s a famous story about a time in 1962 when Johnny and his brother went to see B.B. Clarence, who recorded for the swamp boogie specialty label Goldband, KRCO, Frolic, Diamond, Moon-Lite, Hall-Way and other regional labels. Who opened Winter’s eye’s and ears to rural blues and Cajun music. I always felt welcome.” He also became friends with Clarence Garlow, a deejay at the black radio station KJET in Beaumont. I went to black clubs all the time, and nobody ever bothered me. Looking back, he believes people in the black community knew that he was sincere, that he was genuinely possessed by the blues. Despite the brutal legacy, Johnny remembers never hesitating as a kid to venture into black neighborhoods to hear and play music. Mobs wandered the streets, businesses burned, martial law went into effect, and more than 2,000 uniformed National Guardsmen and Texas Rangers sealed off the town from the rest of the world until tempers cooled. The town had been side to one of the worst race riots in Texas history just nine months before Johnny’s birth. Racial tensions in Beaumont were still high in those days. He formed his first band, Johnny and the Jammers, in 1959 at the age of 15, with his 12-year-old brother Edgar on keyboards. Richardson – The Big Bopper of “Chantilly Lace” fame – and became hooked on 50’s rock & roll. Growing up in a rough-and-tumble town populated by oilfield wildcatters and shipyard workers, he spent long hours listening to a local deejay named J.P. Constantly shifting between simple country blues in the vein of Robert Johnson, to all-out electric slide guitar blues-rock, – Johnny has always been one of the most respected singers and guitar players in rock and the clear link between British blues-rock and American Southern rock (a la the Allman Brothers and Lynyrd Skynyrd.) Throughout the ’70s and ’80s, Johnny was the unofficial torch-bearer for the blues, championing and aiding the careers of his idols like Muddy Waters and John Lee Hooker. Signing to Columbia records in 1969 called largest solo artist deal of it’s time, Johnny immediately laid out the blueprint for his fresh take on classic blues a prime combination for the legions of fans just discovering the blues via the likes of Jimmy Page and Eric Clapton. Winter was the first non-African American performer elected to the Blues Hall of Fame.Has been a guitar hero without equal. His biography, Raisin’ Cain: The Wild And Raucous Story of Johnny Winter, was published in 2010. In between dealing with health problems, both drug-related and hereditary, Winter managed to keep his career going and continued to return to the blues for inspiration into the 21st century. While his next albums were more rock-oriented, Winter later refocused his energies on blues by producing a series of albums by his idol, Muddy Waters, recording Sonny Terry for his own Mad Albino imprint, and signing with Chicago’s Alligator Records for three chart albums in the 1980s. ![]() A few years later the family resettled in Beaumont.) Johnny Winter became the first of sixteen Winter albums to hit Billboard‘s Top 200 charts. ![]() (The Winter family was living in Mississippi when his mother became pregnant she chose to go to her hometown of Beaumont for Johnny’s birth on Feb. Rolling Stone had provided the advance hype in a December 1968 article heralding "a 130-pound cross-eyed albino bluesman with long fleecy hair playing some of the gutsiest blues guitar you have ever heard.’ Winter grew up in blues territory (Leland, Mississippi, where his father had once served as mayor) but began his blues/rock journey as a teenager with his brother Edgar in Beaumont, Texas. Johnny Winter burst on the national scene with a barrage of guitar pyrotechnics during a period when blues was super-hip to the rock ‘n’ roll crowd and staked his claim to fame with his first album for Columbia, Johnny Winter, a 1969 showcase of his high-energy reworkings of blues classics.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |