Tommy Johnson

Tommy Johnson (born 1896 in Terry , Mississippi , † November 1, 1956 in Crystal Springs , Mississippi) was an influential American blues guitarist and singer. Along with Son House and Charley Patton , he was one of the leading Delta Blues musicians before Robert Johnson .

Life

Johnson came from a large family of farmers and began playing the guitar in 1910/1911. Around 1912/1913 he left southern Mississippi with his partner (who was a good twice his age) and settled in Cleveland, Mississippi, near the Dockery Plantation . There he met Charley Patton and Willie Brown ; influenced by these, he learned to play the blues here. Around 1915 he returned to his home region as a practiced musician, where he spread the new style of music and increasingly refined his own style. He married in 1916 and the couple went back to the "Delta", where Johnson worked as a sharecropper , together with Tommy's brother LeDell .

The Tommy Johnson myth not only includes his music, but also his acrobatic performances, his countless affairs, his heavy alcohol consumption and, last but not least, through the legend he himself started that he sold his soul to the devil to get the blues right to be able to play. This legend later passed to Robert Johnson through Son House .

In 1928 and 1930 Tommy Johnson recorded two series of plays. Some of his best-known songs are the Cool Drink of Water Blues (which Howlin 'Wolf made into I Asked for Water (She Brought Me Gasoline) ) and Maggie Campbell (based on Charley Patton's "Screamin' and Hollerin 'the Blues" and later by Robert Nighthawk adapted).

In his later years his longstanding heavy alcoholism made itself felt negatively. Johnson had always drunk heavily. He hadn't even shied away from gelled denatured alcohol, which is supplied in tin cans under the brand name “Sterno Canned Heat” and which he used - diluted with water - as a cheap substitute for schnapps. Johnson set a “monument” to this “drink” in his Canned Heat Blues .

Tommy Johnson died of a heart attack while performing in 1956. In 1986 he was inducted into the Blues Hall of Fame .

reception

Blues greats who were influenced by Tommy Johnson include Howlin 'Wolf , Robert Nighthawk , Otis Spann, and countless others. His influence was particularly strong on the band Canned Heat , which named itself after one of his pieces and whose singer Alan Wilson adapted Johnson's typical falsetto singing . The band's best known track, On The Road Again , is also based on Johnson's Big Road Blues .

Remarks

1. ↑ What is meant is the region known as the Mississippi Delta in the northwest of the state of Mississippi, which has nothing to do with the mouth region of the Mississippi south of Baton Rouge , Louisiana , see →  Lower Mississippi Delta Region and →  Yazoo River

literature

• Stephen Calt, Gayle Wardlow : King of the Delta Blues. The Life and Music of Charlie Patton . Rock Chapel, Newton NJ 1988, ISBN 0-9618610-0-2 , p. 174.