Customer Reviews

Steppin on the Blues

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Robert Johnson, Robert Johnson, Robert Johnson. If I hear one more word about Robert Johnson I will have to hurt somebody. The man is primarily famous not for the handful of recordings he made, but for a moving but most likely fictional myth. I will give him credit for being a pretty good bluesman, but if he really wanted to learn the blues he needn't sell his immortal soul to Satan, but rather just find Mr. Lonnie Johnson. You should do the same.
Lonnie Johnson was the precursor to the more famous guitar slingers from Chicago years after these recordings. One listen and you will be astounded at his clarity, the crisp, perfectly phrased lines he creates with his acoustic guitar. I definitely was. But he was also an outstanding songwriter. The blues requires a penchant for storytelling and a certain dry wit that most all other musical genres severely lack. And Lonnie had both of these qualities in spades. I cannot help but laugh and chuckle at some of the lyrics he sings with his smooth, classic crooner-style voice. Every line is truly brilliant.
Make no mistake, ALL modern music, from jazz to pop, metal to hip-hop, is based on the blues. Some of them took the music and instrumentation and ran with it(pop and rock), while others took the rhythm and lyrics(r&b and hip-hop), but it can ALL be traced back to the porch steps and cotton fields of the south. Being so, Lonnie Johnson is an essential link between the old and the new. His instrumentation and guitar skill are matched, in my mind, only by the great Reverend Gary Davis, and his music is timeless.
For its age, these recordings sound fantastic. You can hear every note and hum. Sometimes there is a little microphone buzz, and the piano and bass in the background are occasionally muffled, but overall an excellent recording and well worth your money.

Lonnie Johnson was the first great blues guitarist, along with his partner Eddie Lang, he was the first great Jazz guitarist, he remained a song writer and a vocalist able to hit the charts with R & B hits well intothe late 1940s. He was class as both a jazz and blues folk revivalist when he was "refound" in the 1960s and was popular in the US, Europe, and Canada.

Robert Johnson obviously studied Lonnie's Work pretty well. In fact, Robert Johnson would lie and tell people that he was a cousin of the great Lonnie. Lonnie's records sold in the hundreds of thousands into the 1940s, while Robert Johnson never sold more than 2000 records while living on any tune.

Lonnie was the antithesis of the false folkie-based stereotype of a blues performer. He was a professional performer as a kid violin virtuosi in vaudville touring the world before he ever learned to play the guitar! While born in New Orleans, he based himself in Chicago and New York during his playing career Johnson was not refound in some Mississippi Cotton field, but as a janitor in Philiadelphia. he went on to open his own night club in Toronto, Canada where he was killed byu complications after an automobile accident.

What we see here in these records is a master musician. The guitar playing is unbelievably good, sweet, hot,and very very clean. The singing is always on key, professional, and cuts like a razor. The richness and saltiness of the verses ios tremendous. In the 20s, Johnson once bet someone he could play and compose 300 different blues, and he did with no difficulty and recored most of them!

Even without their historical importance--this is what Blues performers aspired to--the records are just fun as expression and entertainment. I would also recommend the great records Johnson made with Lil Hardin Armstrong and others in Bluebird's Chicago stables in the 1940s, as well as the Verve Folkways recordings he made in the late 1960s. Heck, I would recommend you listem to birdcalls if Lonnie Johnson had recorded them!

In a previous review it's pointed out that Lonnie's earliest recordings (the recordings on this cd) happened about a decade before Robert Johnson's recordings. While that is true, it's of little importance. Lonnie and Robert get compared because of their last names more than because of their music. They were two very different men with two very different musical aesthetics. Robert's name should come up during a discussion of Son House before it should come up in a discussion of Lonnie.

While it's pointed out that the instrumentals steal the show here, don't discount the vocal songs. SWEET POTATO BLUES is great. Although vocally, I think the 2 best songs are the Texas Alexander songs with Lonnie on accompanying guitar. Take a listen to the two TOOTHACHE BLUES'. This is the music that was making mothers cover their childrens ears in 1928, quite risque stuff. Victoria's great voice and yearning moans surely made pre-Depression teenage male hearts go pitter-pat!

Although Lonnie is thought of as a "blues guitarist" make no doubt about it, some of this stuff is the birth of what's now known as "string swing". I have no doubt that Django and Oscar Aleman were listening to Lonnie before we knew their names.

On the sonic quality of the recordings... it is wonderful! If you've heard Charlie Parker stuff on Dial from the mid 1940's and the hissy, scratchy quality bothered you don't worry. Although these recordings were made almost 20 years earlier in some cases, they are better. Lonnie's gloriously strong acoustic guitar tone comes through loud and clear and his melodic solo's are a marvel even now. Because of Lonnie's innovations there are alot of people now who can play faster than he played, but few who play better than he played.

Lonnie Johnson was a tremendous talent and this CD supports his legendary status. Johnson's vocals are outstanding and his guitar playing is matched by few. Most recordings predate Robert Johnson's by ten or so years. This disc even includes some cuts with Eddie Lang who had to be billed as Blind Willie Dunn because he was white and white bluesman were not welcome anywhere. This is clearly an essential CD to any music collection --especially a blues collection.

Lonnie Johnson (1899(?) -- 1970) had a long, highly successful career as a blues and jazz singer and guitarist. Johnson was a gifted musician who, when he began recording in the mid-1920s, had already appeared as a performer in England. Johnson's early recordings date from the time in which the women "Classic Blues Singers", including Bessie and Clara Smith, Ma Rainey and others were the predominant voice in the blues. Lonnie Johnson soon joined them and became the best-selling blues artist of his era. His recordings influenced the work of the delta blues singer Robert Johnson, among others. There was a great deal of interplay between the urbane, musically sophisticated style of Lonnie Johnson and the sometimes raw and intense blues that later became legendary with Robert Johnson.

This CD, part of the "Roots and Blues" series includes 19 of Johnson's early recordings and shows him as a singer, guitarist, and accompanist. It is an outstanding introduction to the achievement of Lonnie Johnson. I want to mention some of the tracks on this CD that I enjoyed and that are particularly noteworthy for showing the scope of Johnson's early artistry.

The opening track, "Mr. Johnson's Blues" was part of Johnson's first release in 1925 and is justly famous. The song opens with a rolling instrumental passage for guitar and piano followed by a single short blues verse sung by Johnson. The remainder of the recording features a long instrumental take-off on the vocal by Johnson on the guitar together with the piano. This song already shows great originality in the way the brief vocal section is integrated with the the long instrumental solos.

This CD includes several instrumental selections, and the two I want to note are "How to Change Keys (to Play these Blues)" and "Guitar Blues" in which Johnson teams with the white guitarist Eddie Lang (playing under the name "Blind Willie Dunn"). These are outstanding complex guitar solos, showing Johnson's virtuosity on his instrument. The first is a slow, drag with many changes of key while "Guitar Blues" is more uptempo.

The two-track "Toothache Blues" shows Johnson singing with Victoria Spivey, one of the "Classic" blues singers. Spivey had a light voice, and she was known for performing songs with strong sexual innuendos. Her collaboration with Johnson on this song fits that pattern.

Finally, two tracks in which Johnson accompanies the singer Texas Alexander deserve mention for the contrast they show between Johnson's urban blues and country blues. Texas Alexander performed in a country style of the sort that in our day has become better known that the urbane blues style of Lonnie Johnson. One scholar of the blues has written of this collaboration between Alexander and Johnson:

"[Texas Alexander] sang a lot of songs in a loose field holler style, which meant he didn't worry about what the guitar was supposed to be doing. Among the musicians who accompanied him on record was Lonnie Johnson who was one of the finest blues and jazz guitarists of the 1920s. The songs Alexander recorded with Lonnie were brilliant examples of how a guitarist can fill behind a singer who isn't bound much by regular rhythmic patterns."

This CD shows Johnson's musical gifts as vocalist, guitarist, and accompanist, as well as his gifts in developing a blues line and lyric in songs such as "Racketeer's Blues" and "I'm Nuts about that Gal". For listeners wanting to explore the blues and its place in American music, this CD is an excellent choice.

The quotation about Lonnie Johnson's recordings with Texas Alexander is taken from Samuel Charters's recent book, "Walking a Blues Road" (2004) page 221.

Robin Friedman

Suburbanites, beware- the finest Johnson to ever play the blues wasn't Robert; it was Lonnie, whose soul searching vocals and masterful guitar work (easily one of the five finest acoustic guitar players the blues has ever seen) outshine anything that other Johnson ever recorded. This collection, which features 20 selections from Lonnie's extensive recording career, is a fantastic anthology, and one not to be missed.

I sure wish I hadn't read everyone else's review before buying this, because I kept comparing Lonnie back and forth with Robert throughout my first listen. It was, anyway, a helpful structuring device for the experience.
I'm personally uncertain of the chronology, but I hear Django Rheinhart's work in L. Johnson as well as R. Johnson's. The songs often seemed spiced with bright Appalachian riffs on small occasions too (like the Carter family), there's jug band strumming and heavy doses of the kind of off-beat guitar entrances that I value so much in Jimi Hendrix and Neil Young. He often rushes in ahead of the assumed metronomic beat, or subtly answers it like substance supplanting its shadow, in very strong and controlled abrupt lines. It sounds as though he's taking apart American musical history, deconstructing it, if you will, and recombining its elements almost like a cubist painter did with lines and forms, and his own melodic lines change so often, radically and smoothly that he even seems to anticipate Zorn like cut-up. Even if L. Johnson was hardly the first to syncopate, he seems to make stronger and more abrupt use of it than anyone else I can think of till Thelonious Monk (see especially the Have to Change Keys track with Lang--my personal favorite on here).
So my overall experience was of a master of style, a genius who was anticipating so much of the greatness of 20th century music that one has to consider him essential to a ripe understanding of that century's music in the United States. L. Johnson, after this listen, seems like the brains of the culture at the time, and I'm mystified as to why I first heard of him last month while reading Ted Berrigan's Sonnets. I'm certainly not new to these kinds of music. Was it that L. Johnson was just doing too many things to really be assimilated by a monolithic block large enough to project him into history as an honored ancestor, or was it that brains like this in a black man in 1930 needed to be culturally repressed? In the CD booklet Johnson's billed on race record posters with two grinning monkeys holding up his picture, and it's enough to break your heart.
My guess is that L. Johnson's brain was just too eclectic. And given the success he enjoyed in his lifetime, he was able to market himself and probably play the part with the grinning monkeys to make a buck (and I would too, as Burroughs always asked on ethical points, "What would you do?", and Snoop Dog too.) Also, his music, despite the overt nature of the lyrics and the true wildness of it, is very controlled, almost gentlemanly, riding on a vehicle of personal dignity, even though I don't know what his life was like. He seems wild like a mountain lion, resting, walking, prowling, everything at once alert and calm...
But let's give Robert Johnson his due. If L. was the brains, R. was the guts, the haunted and menacing voodoo chile outcast limping broken on the outskirts of town, more easily assimilated and romanticized by white boys in England 30 years post mortem. That's neither L. nor R.'s problem though. Robert Johnson took what Lonnie gave him and used it to show us the most chilling artistic portrait of southern pre-war life we're ever likely to know. That's what artists do. What if you could ONLY read Homer, Tu Fu and Ezra Pound for the rest of your life...you wouldn't be very smart, would you?

This is a great CD, and so are all of Robert Johnson's records. This debate about their relative merits is rather pointless, and driven by the "better technique means better music" school of thought. Consider this; perhaps the most awesome blues song ever recorded is "Moanin in the Moonlight" by Howlin' Wolf. The Wolf sings paranoid lyrics to a blues melody, singing the chord changes, and Willie Johnson and Destruction play a recurring hypnotic riff behind the singer that stays ON ONE CHORD! They never leave the dominant chord. In my mind it cuts anything by either of the Johnsons, great as they were, and yet technically it is probably mediocre at best. Doesn't mean it ain't great. If you view blues as simply "fast playing", go watch the rubbish movie "Crossroads."

I heard a re-make of an old Lonnie Johnson song on a PBS station the other day, and knew right away that it was for me. I knew nothing about Lonnie Johnson, but have always been a blues fan. The radio characterized him as THE pioneer of single-string guitar blues, and this recording certainly reflects some of the sounds you would expect from a pioneer - fresh, sometimes naive, always honest, low-down and happy, and right-to-the-point. This recording is "old", but the music is timeless. (And some lyricists could take a lesson from it.)

Parts of the following have been used in a review of Lonnie Johnson Blues and Ballads CD (hereafter B&B).

Okay, Okay those of you who have been keeping tabs know that I have spend much of the last year, when not doing political commentary or book or movie reviews, reviewing many of the old time blues artists that were the passion of my youth (and still are). So this writer, who thought he had heard virtually all the key bluesmen and women of the old days, got his comeuppance recently when the name of Lonnie Johnson and his version of the classic double-entendre song "Jelly Roll Baker" came up. To name drop just a little, the occasion was a local reunion of Geoff Muldaur and Jim Kweskin of the old Jim Kweskin Jug Band from the 1960's (that also included Geoff's ex-wife and great performer in her own right, Maria Muldaur). They did a stirring rendition of the song and attributed it to the performer under review here. After scratching my head I ran out to get some more of Brother Lonnie's work and as noted above I have fulsomely praised his B&B CD in this space.

Although this CD has merit musically and certainly has historical worth as a comparison of young Lonnie Johnson in the 1920's to the later B&B Lonnie this is one time when aging seems to have created a better body of work. A comparison of "I'm Nuts About That Gal" (really an early version of his classic "Jelly Roll Baker") and the "Jelly Roll Baker" of the B&B make my point succinctly. That said, the noted Johnson guitar work is highlighted on "Guitar Blues", the novelty sassy song in two parts "Toothache Blues" and "Deep Blue Sea Blues". That is why you want this album.