“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 practice 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.
“I don’t consider myself ‘Texas blues,’ because I play a whole lot of different styles. Texas blues is influenced by country and western, jazz, and western swing. Generally, there are more instruments with Texas blues; but then again, there’s Lightnin’ Hopkins, and he plays mostly by himself. You can hear T-Bone Walker and Lightnin’ Hopkins and there’s no similarity between the two. There’s so many guitar players from Texas and none of them sound the same. Albert Collins doesn’t sound like anybody else; Gatemouth Brown didn’t sound like anybody else either. He played a lot of styles: blues, jazz, zydeco. His styles were different from anybody else; his tuning was much different from other people too. In his early records he sounded just like T-Bone—note for note. That changed as he learned how to play his own stuff.
“T-Bone Walker played with a lot of horns. He’s the father of the electric-blues style ’cause he’s one of the first guys to play it. You could hear western swing and big bands of the ’40s in some of his records. He had a lot of different records; he recorded prolifically. T-Bone was one of the best guitar players around. He knew more chords than most of the Mississippi players and it gave him a broader influence. Mississippi players only had to know but one or two chords.
“A lot of guys could play simple stuff that sounded great because it was very original. Like John Lee Hooker. You could always tell who John Lee Hooker was; he didn’t sound like everybody else. Muddy’s stuff was pretty similar. A musician doesn’t have to be technically great to be a good blues artist. John Lee Hooker isn’t a great guitar player but he’s a great blues artist. It doesn’t make much difference if a guy is technically good or not. You just gotta have feeling.”
Feeling was the key element that attracted Johnny to the blues, a raw, earthy music that reflects the pain people endure as they experience the hardships life has tossed their way. A sensitive child, Johnny wasn’t immune to the pain that came from being different, and found solace in music. Rather than dwelling on being ostracized by his classmates, he spent endless hours in his bedroom, pouring his energy into learning to play the blues. The old adage “you’ve got to live the blues to play the blues” is an apt description of his life.
“I’ve had enough blues in my life to where I don’t think I need anymore,” says Johnny. “Growin’ up was the hardest part. Growin’ up in school, I really got the bad end of the deal. People teased me and I got in a lot of fights. I was a pretty bluesy kid.
“When anybody would say albino—it depended on the way they said it. In Texas, they always said it the same way. ‘You’re weird and we don’t like weird people here. Later for you.’ There was a period for a year or so where I was telling people I was from Venus. I didn’t know what was wrong—I didn’t know why I was different. I know my parents felt guilty. They seemed to feel like it was something they had done that was wrong. Even though they tried to not let that show, it still came across. Some people are born with no arms or blind or whatever. Everybody has some kind of a problem—even if it’s not something you can see. This is just one of the little problems life gives to you to see how you’re gonna handle it.”
Having to endure the cruel taunts for being albino, he felt a kinship with black blues artists. “We both had a problem with our skin being the wrong color,” he says. “I never really wished I wasn’t albino. I guess I would have rather been normal, but it’s just one of those things you have to put up with. Edgar bein’ albino made it nice to have somebody else who had some of the same problems.”
“Regardless of what we go through in life, I know Johnny will always understand how I feel,” said Edgar. “Stardom is a part of that because we experienced stardom in a different way than the average person. Growing up and in school, we both experienced the reaction of people for our unusual looks—as being albino. When we were kids, I remember him talking about how albinos were viewed in different cultures. In some primitive tribes, an albino might be killed as defective; in other tribes, an albino might be venerated as a god—all because of his unusual appearance. I’ve seen that demonstrated in everyday life. I have encountered people who thought I was beautiful and people who thought I was repulsive. When you have gone through that and suddenly become well known and respected, it is such a dichotomy. And it’s an experience we share—unlike anyone else.”