Lonnie Johnson
New Orleans native Alonzo “Lonnie” Johnson was a multi-instrumentalist, vocalist, and songwriter whose professional career spanned six decades.
a guitar soloist, instrumental accompanist, vocalist, songwriter, and recording artist in the genres of jazz, blues, and rhythm and blues (R&B) over the course of a six-decade career from the 1910s through 1970. His style influenced such diverse musicians and his impact on pop culture.
He was one of twelve children, Johnson grew up in a family of musicians, learning violin, piano, guitar, banjo, and mandolin. He played backup violin in his father’s band at social functions and performed on street corners. He worked his way up the musical ranks in pre–World War I New Orleans, eventually landing a steady job with jazz trumpeter Ernest “Punch” Miller’s band in Storyville. Johnson left the city to venture into new opportunities and joined musical revues that toured Europe.
in the year of 1919, Johnson returned to New Orleans. When he arrived he learned that nearly all of his family had died from the influenza epidemic that took place in 1918. fallen prey to the 1918 influenza epidemic. Now essentially on his own, he purchased a guitar and relocated to St. He Johnson played on excursion riverboats with two renowned bands, Fate Marable’s Society Syncopaters, and Charlie Creath’s Jazz-O-Maniacs. This did not provide a steady income for him, so Johnson took up factory work in Peoria and East St. Louis, Illinois.
Johnson married his wife, blues vocalist Mary they had six children over seven years, but they divorced in 1932.
Johnson recorded a total of 130 tracks in Chicago and New York City, many under his own name; on other now-classic early jazz recordings, he played as a session guitarist. He contributed outstanding guitar solos to recordings by Louis Armstrong and the Duke Ellington Orchestra. He recorded a series of highly prized duets in the early 1930s with pioneer jazz guitarist Eddie Lang, who was billed as Blind Willie Dunn to hide the fact that they were a mixed-race duo. Johnson accompanied blues queens Bessie Smith and Victoria Spivey as well as the rustic country blues singer Alger “Texas” Alexander. Johnson also made at least forty Okeh records as a vocalist.
After the Great Depression caused the recording industry to collapse. Johnson worked at tire and steel factories in Cleveland to support himself during that time. Eventually through friends, he went back to Chicago and recorded sessions at Decca Records with clarinetist Johnny Dodds and drummer Warren “Baby” Dodds. In the late 1930s, as rhythm and blues were emerging as a new musical genre, Johnson began playing electric guitar and had major hits for Bluebird Records with “Jelly Roll Baker” and “In Love Again.” Johnson’s career resurgence in the 1940s resulted in recordings with the Disc and Aladdin labels in Chicago.
Johnson’s first King recording, “Tomorrow Night,” rode to the top of the charts for seven weeks in 1948, selling millions of records and influencing musicians across genres. Elvis Presley, Jerry Lee Lewis, and others subsequently recorded versions of Johnson’s hit. Bob Dylan remembers idolizing Johnson in Greenwich Village during the early 1960s: “He greatly influenced me … ‘Corrina, Corrina’ [which Dylan covered on his 1963 album, The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan], that’s pretty much Lonnie Johnson. I used to watch him every chance I got and sometimes he’d let me play with him.”
Johnson went and recorded with Cincinnati with King Records. After the success and his being rediscovered, he relocated to Toronto in 1965. opened his own nightclub, Home of the Blues. In 1967, during his stint in Toronto, Johnson ventured to Chicago and made his final recordings; half were romantic ballads and the other half were his distinctive brand of urban blues. Unreleased until 1982, Lonnie Johnson: The Complete Folkways Recordings contains the only known instance of Johnson speaking about his experiences. “I’ve lived a beautiful life,” he told producer Moses Asch. “It’s been kind of rough in spots; like everybody, I have ups and downs in life. I’ve seen it very sweet, and I’ve seen it very hard, when you couldn’t get a job, no kind of a job, doing nothing. But somehow or other, I managed it, I managed to make it.”
In 1968, a careening automobile jumped a curb and ran into the aging bluesman. He made his final live appearance at a 1970 benefit concert in his honor in Toronto, accompanied by fellow Louisiana bluesman Buddy Guy. Johnson died several months later, unable to recover from his injuries sustained in the car accident. Twelve years after Johnson’s death, biographer James Sallis concluded that Johnson “remains to this day one of the originals, uniquely both a first-generation bluesman and jazzman—an innovator and model musician whose authorship of modern blues guitar alone would guarantee his position in the history of American music.” In Louisiana Rocks! The True Genesis of Rock & Roll, an encyclopedic overview of Louisiana musicians’ contributions to modern rock music, author Tom Aswell groups Johnson with four other groundbreakers: jazz pianist and composer Jelly Roll Morton, jazz trumpeter and vocalist Louis Armstrong, folk singer and twelve-string guitar master Lead Belly, and gospel singer Mahalia Jackson. Compared to these iconic figures, however, Lonnie Johnson’s importance in popular American music thus far has remained mostly hidden. Indeed, in his 2004 revisionist history of the blues, Escaping the Delta: Robert Johnson and the Invention of the Blues, Elijah Wald laments that Johnson has been largely disregarded by the rock-historian view of blues history that dominated the late twentieth century.