Johnny’s first instrument was ukulele. “I liked ukulele because it was something I could play and back my singing up,” he says. Never too shy to perform in public, Johnny and Edgar began playing on a local TV program airing in Beaumont and Houston.
“We were on Don Mahoney and the Kiddie Troopers a lot for a long time,” says Johnny. “Me and Edgar played ukuleles and sang harmony parts on Everly Brothers songs.”
Playing in contests and talent shows came natural to the boys, who won awards, including cash prizes, in most of the competitions. Johnny and Edgar won their first talent contest playing ukuleles and singing harmony on UHF Channel 31 in Beaumont in 1953.
“We’d been on the show enough that we didn’t have to audition,” says Johnny. “Waitin’ in the studio to go on was scary—it was hard waitin’ to go on. There were other kids too and older acts. I was nine and Edgar was six. We won a seventy-dollar Bulova wristwatch and I traded Edgar my clarinet for his half of the watch. I got the watch because I was older. That was real bad. I was pretty awful to Edgar. He said he always looked up to me when we were little kids, but I didn’t know it. I always gave him the hard way to go. He was my younger brother and always got the bad end of everything. Everything we did or played, he always came after me.”
Winning the Beaumont talent contest made the boys eligible to audition for the nationally televised Ted Mack and the Original Amateur Hour, a talent contest broadcast from Radio City Music Hall. The family drove from Beaumont to New York City, a trip that took four days, traveling eight hours a day and staying in motels along the way.
“We went to Radio City Music Hall for the audition,” says Johnny. “We had our ukuleles and were gonna sing in front of the judges. There was a large waiting room with all kinds of acts, mostly older acts. We didn’t get called until probably eleven or twelve at night.”
Johnny and Edgar played their hearts out despite the late hour and were sure they’d be chosen to perform on national television. It wasn’t until they had returned to Texas that they learned they didn’t make it.
“We didn’t win the audition,” says Johnny. “We always won too, so I couldn’t believe it when we didn’t win. It was the first time. It was a drag but there wasn’t much you could do about it.”
Rather than letting the boys wallow in defeat, Edwina encouraged them to learn another instrument. She signed them up for piano lessons with Hazel Bergman, a grand pianist who played in a swing band in Beaumont.
“I started piano as a kid because my mother wanted me to,” says Johnny. “I took piano lessons two or three years—from about fourth to sixth grade. I didn’t play very much piano—I learned enough to know it was something I didn’t want to do. It didn’t feel normal to me like guitar did. They tried to get me to learn how to read music but I didn’t. Reading music didn’t interest me because the music I wanted to learn—the popular stuff on the radio—wasn’t available in sheet music and nobody knew how to play it anyway.”
During the years Johnny was halfheartedly taking piano lessons, he was also learning to play the clarinet, an instrument with more appeal.
“I was in the fourth grade when I began playing clarinet,” he says. “I played in the school band. I had a silver clarinet and learned by ear. I liked the way it sounded. I played it for a couple of years, but I had an overbite, and the orthodontist said playing the clarinet would make it worse. I had to stop playing when I was just startin’ to get it down. When the orthodontist said I couldn’t play anymore, I cried a long time about it. It was a real drag ’cause I loved playin’ clarinet.”
Determined to encourage his son’s love of music and help him discover an instrument he enjoyed, John Jr. began teaching Johnny chords on the banjo and ukulele. Although he enjoyed playing songs from the ‘20s and ’30s that were later popularized by Tiny Tim, embarking on a career as a ukulele player seemed like too much of a long shot.
“My daddy told me Arthur Godfrey and Ukulele Ike are the only ukulele players I ever heard of that made it, so maybe you ought to play guitar,” says Johnny. “I was about eleven or twelve when I started playing guitar. My first guitar had belonged to my great-grandmother on my mother’s side. It was an acoustic Spanish guitar in bad shape. The strings above the fret board were bad. It was too warped to really play. I just played around with it and learned a few chords on the bottom.
“I didn’t play the acoustic guitar very long. Just long enough to know it was something I wanted to keep doing. All the rock songs on the radio had guitars in ’em so I talked my great-grandfather into buying me a real guitar—my first electric guitar in 1956. Ole Pa bought me an ES 125—a really nice guitar—at Jefferson Music in Beaumont. I loved it. I played it in my bedroom with a Fender Bass-man, the best-soundin’ amp around.
“I taught myself songs like ‘Hound Dog,’ whatever was on the radio at the time. A lot of songs Elvis did—I was a big Elvis fan. It was always pretty easy for me to hear it and then play it on the guitar. Music has always been easy for me.”
Johnny took his first formal guitar lessons at age twelve from Luther Nallie, a country and western musician who worked at Jefferson Music Company. He took thirty-minute lessons once a week for a year and practiced six hours every day.
“Luther was twenty-two-about ten years older than me,” says Johnny. “He was playin’ around Beaumont when I was takin’ lessons; later he played with the Sons of Pioneers with Roy Rogers. Mostly country and western songs—he didn’t know any blues. I’d play a song for him and ask him how it was played. I learned a lot from him. He taught me how to finger pick, which was a style I wanted to learn how to play.”
Nallie found Johnny to be a quick study and was impressed with his talent and enthusiasm. “Johnny had me scratching my head a lot of the time because he would soak up anything I taught him immediately, and I would have to think up something else real quick to show him,” Nallie said in a 2001 interview in Vintage Guitar.
Johnny learned what he could from Nallie, then returned to Jefferson Music in late 1958 to take lessons from Seymour Drugan. A jazz guitarist, Drugan played with Paul Whiteman and other big bands in the 1930s and ‘40s before settling in Chicago in the early ’40s to play on Don McNeill’s The Breakfast Club.
“I learned a few jazz chords from him,” says Johnny. “That didn’t help much, but he did help me learn my chords. I quit after three months because I wasn’t interested in jazz. I stopped taking lessons because there wasn’t anybody that played what I wanted to play.”
Although Johnny’s lessons with Drugan were short-lived, it led to a friendship with Drugan’s son Dennis, who said his father was amazed by Johnny’s talent.
“My father told me, ‘You won’t believe the young fellow that came into the store. He’s a really good guitar player and he learns very fast,’” said Dennis Drugan.
Johnny’s talent led to a job at Jefferson Music Company teaching guitar on weekdays after school. “I was sixteen and seventeen when I gave guitar lessons,” he says. “I had six or eight customers. We made two dollars a half an hour and I got one dollar a half an hour—half of what we made.”
That job led to a meeting with Clarence Garlow, a Creole DJ who played blues and R&B on the Bon Ton Roulette Show at KJET.
“He was the main Texas guitar player who influenced me,” says Johnny. “I was giving a lesson and he came in to buy strings. I could tell him by his voice. He had a really unique voice. I knew he was Clarence Garlow and I started playing one of his songs. He said, ‘You know who I am, don’t ya?’ And I said, ‘Yeah.’ He was real nice to me after that.”
Nocturnal by nature, Johnny still has what one of his sidemen called “a vampire schedule,” staying up all night, going to bed at 6 or 7 AM, and sleeping late into the afternoon. His natural biorhythm as a night person began early in his childhood, and allowed him to indulge his love of the blues.
“I’ve always had that schedule,” he says. “I slept late all the time. I never had a day job except for giving gu
itar lessons. I hated going to bed, even as a kid. I always stayed up late at night. Edgar was better than I was about going to bed. They’d tell us to go to bed-but I always got right back up. I’d get back up, come out of my room, go in my walk-in closet, and put my radio under my pillow. I’d put my ear up to the pillow, so I could hear it, but nobody else could.
“You had better reception at night, so you could get the stations from Nashville and Shreveport—great stations that played mostly blues. They had WLAC in Nashville. KWKH in Shreveport, Louisiana was another good station on late at night. They had Ernie’s Record Shop, Buckley’s Records, Stan’s Record Shop—the record shops would sponsor the shows.
“Howlin’ Wolf was one of the first blues artists I heard. I heard ‘Somebody in My Home’ on KWKH in Shreveport. It had a real bluesy feeling to it. I liked him—he appealed to me. His voice was real raw. I didn’t ever see him perform but I heard he crawled up the curtains at a concert hall. There was another station, XERF, in Del Rio, Mexico. Their transmitter was in Mexico; the stations were in Texas. They played straight blues—Lightnin’ Hopkins, Guitar Slim, Lazy Lester, Bobby Bland, Little Walter.”
Growing up, Johnny listened to his parents’ 78 rpm records—Artie Shaw, Benny Goodman, Tommy Dorsey, Glenn Miller, and Dinah Shore—on the family phonograph in the living room. When he started buying 45s in late 1955, Johnny had his own record player in his bedroom, a portable black RCA Victor designed like a small suitcase. His first singles were “Tutti Frutti” by Little Richard and “Sixteen Tons” by Tennessee Ernie Ford. “Sixteen Tons” was written by Merle Travis, another artist whose records he bought and influenced his style of playing.
“I bought some Merle Travis and Chet Atkins real early, before I bought blues,” he says. “I first heard finger pickin’ when I got a record by Merle Travis. He played country bluegrass. Merle Travis could play with his fingers and a thumb pick—I liked the sound of finger-style guitar. You could play by yourself; keep rhythm with your thumb, and play lead with your fingers. I started off using a plastic thumb pick and have never used any other picks. Chet Atkins played the same way. Luther Nallie played with a thumb pick too.”
Johnny first started buying records through the mail from the record shops that sponsored the late night radio blues shows. Then he discovered the Gaylynn Record Store in Beaumont. He’d skip lunch at school and use his lunch money to buy 45s for “pretty close to a dollar, eighty-nine cents or something like that,” he says. He also used the allowance money he earned for taking out the garbage and cutting the grass (“$1.25 for the front yard and $1.50 for the backyard”).
The Gaylynn Record Store had a small blues section, so Johnny started shopping at the Harmony Shop. Although Beaumont was still segregated, the Harmony Shop catered to both a black and white clientele, and carried “race records,” recordings by black artists on mostly white-owned labels marketed to black audiences. He had his choice of Kent, Duke, Excello, Federal, Checker, Chess, RPM, and Vee-Jay records.
“The lady there bought a lot of records for the black juke joints. Her husband put jukeboxes in black clubs so she had a good selection of blues artists. I bought literally every blues artist I could find, even if I didn’t know who they were. The record stores had little record players where you could listen to ’em. I liked everything. I just really love them. It made my style broader because I literally bought everybody I could find so I didn’t sound just like one person. I heard everybody.”
Johnny’s first blues single was Howlin’ Wolf’s “Somebody in My Home,” released on Chess in 1957. His first Muddy Waters single was “She’s Nineteen Years Old,” featuring Little Walter Jacobs on harp, released on Chess Records in 1958. “Muddy’s records probably are my favorites,” he says. “I’d play the record, then listen to it, and learn how to do it. I would play it note for note when I first learned, but later I’d change it to my own style.
“I’d practice six or eight hours a day in my room after school. From the time I got home—with whatever my newest record was. I played so many different styles that they turned into my style. At first I’d try to learn how the artist played, and then I’d switch it around and play it my own way. I never did want to be like any particular artist—just learn from them. Listen and copy little parts of everybody’s stuff.”
Johnny’s first album was B. B. King’s Singin’ the Blues, released in 1957; his second was The Best of Muddy Waters, released in 1958. That Muddy Waters’s album was the first time Johnny heard a slide guitar; the sound perplexed and fascinated him at the same time.
“Muddy Waters was the first slide guitarist I ever heard,” he says. “It was always really interesting and amazing to me when I heard it. I hadn’t read anything about it and I didn’t know what it was. I could tell the guy was fretting the guitar and sliding something. At first I thought it was the steel guitar until I realized he was a fretting it also. It was a mystery to me how you could do both. I was trying to figure out what was goin’ on, and how it was being done. I had to listen, learn how he did it, and practice it. I had never seen anyone play a slide when I taught myself. I used the top of a lipstick holder for my first slide. Then I used my watch crystal. It sounded pretty good but it broke the watch. Then I had a test tube I bought at a drugstore. I cut it off and that worked pretty good. I was about fourteen when I started playing, but I didn’t get real serious until I was about twenty-five.
“Robert Johnson knocked me out—he was a genius. As to him selling his soul to the devil; I don’t know, it’s hard to say about something like that. He sure was better than everybody else. Later on, I bought Son House: Father of the Delta Blues. Their styles were real different—it took me awhile to get used to ’em. They were more country sounding than the 45s I’d been buying. Most of ’em were just guitar and singer, recorded in hotel rooms. Both were big influences on my acoustic slide playing.
“Elmore James was also an influence on my slide playing. Elmore played the same licks on a lot of his songs. His one little lick that he played over and over again—I picked that up. Can’t really describe it, but I liked him a lot. He was similar to Robert Johnson—his stuff sounds the same too a lot of times.
“Little Walter influenced my guitar playing too. I was good enough to be able to hear something and play it; I would play the same stuff on guitar that he played on harp. He was a great harp player. He played clear notes and did tongue blocking too. I liked everything Little Walter put out.
“Jimmy Reed was one of the guys I heard a lot around Texas. I bought a lot of his albums. He played guitar and harp and wrote a lot of songs. Nobody else sounded like Jimmy. He played a lot of high register notes on harp and he did songs I liked—‘Baby, You Don’t Have to Go,’ ‘A String to Your Heart,’ ‘Big Boss Man.’ He was one of the first black blues artists who successfully crossed over to white audiences.
“It’s important to listen to different styles of music when you’re young—be exposed to them because you learn more. Listenin’ to early blues artists—you can tell where it’s all comin’ from. You just want to know what came first and where it came from.”
Although Johnny’s early vocal influences came from his father’s barbershop quartet and his harmonies with Edgar, he soon abandoned that musical style. He wanted to develop his own style and was impressed by the bluesy vocal renderings of Bobby “Blue” Bland and Ray Charles. When he was about ten or twelve, he created his own method of voice training to help him develop the scream that has become his trademark—especially on his battle cry of “rock ‘n’ roll!”
“Singing is something I really had to work at,” he says. “I always had a good ear for music but my voice didn’t have a lot of depth to it, especially the scream. The scream seemed like a better style to me—I was trying to get a sound like Bobby Bland and Ray Charles. I really had to practice that. I can remember when I was a kid putting a pillow over my mouth and putting my fingers in my ears so I could hear what was going on and nobody else could. I’d pract
ice screaming into a pillow in my bedroom. I couldn’t just start screamin’ ’cause people would think we were getting killed or something. I really did practice a long time. At first it would sound like somebody hit me, just a yell. But a controlled scream, especially if you want to scream, get that riff, and use vibrato at the same time, took a lot of work. It didn’t come natural.”
Johnny’s passion for blues wasn’t shared by his friends or his brother. The sounds were too primitive for teenagers who grew up listening to country and western or Top Forty songs on the radio.
“When I first started playing blues, my friends didn’t know what it was, and didn’t like it,” says Johnny. “They asked me what I would do with that kind of music—‘Ain’t nobody like it.’ I said, ‘It’s good music.’ My friends would just listen to whatever was on the radio, and Edgar’s never been into blues that much. He just learned from me, from listening to my records.”
Although Johnny is known as a Texas guitarist, he doesn’t like to categorize himself, the music he plays, or the music he grew up listening to. The nuances are often subtle; and categories just can’t capture or describe the music he loves.
“It’s hard to say the difference between Mississippi Delta and Texas blues,” says Johnny. “Delta blues is more slide. There wasn’t much slide for Texas, but there was Blind Willie Johnson and he did church music. ‘Dark Is the Night, Cold Is the Ground’ is one of the best slide songs I’ve ever heard. He was an early Texas slide player, one of the first Texas bluesmen. His music had a whole lot less structure—he would play without any meter at all. He was totally different than anybody else. Definitely country blues.
Raisin' Cain: The Wild and Raucous Story of Johnny Winter (Kindle Edition) Page 4