Lonnie Johnson

Lonnie Johnson

The Blues Collection - Lonnie Johnson - Guitar Blues(Download Album)

Singing guitarist Lonnie Johnson looms as a major stylistic innovator in both the jazz and blues fields. His single-string approach to soloing and sophisticated harmonic sense left a profound mark on several generations of guitar players, including Eddie Lang, Charlie Christian, T-Bone Walker Lowell Fulson, and B.B. King.

Blues guitar simply would not have developed in the manner that it did if not for the prolific brilliance of Lonnie Johnson. He was there to help define the instrument's future within the genre and the genre's future itself at the very beginning, his melodic conception so far advanced from most of his prewar peers as to inhabit a plane all his own. For more than 40 years, Johnson played blues, jazz, and ballads his way; he was a true blues originator whose influence hung heavy on a host of subsequent blues immortals.

The Blues Collection - Lonnie Johnson - Guitar Blues(Download Album)

Johnson's extreme versatility doubtless stemmed in great part from growing up in the musically diverse Crescent City. Violin caught his ear initially, but he eventually made the guitar his passion, developing a style so fluid and inexorably melodic that instrumental backing seemed superfluous. He signed up with OKeh Records in 1925 and commenced to recording at an astonishing pace -- between 1925 and 1932, he cut an estimated 130 waxings. The red-hot duets he recorded with white jazz guitarist Eddie Lang (masquerading as Blind Willie Dunn) in 1928-1929 were utterly groundbreaking in their ceaseless invention. Johnson also recorded pioneering jazz efforts in 1927 with no less than Louis Armstrong's Hot Five and Duke Ellington's orchestra. 

The Blues Collection - Lonnie Johnson - Guitar Blues(Download Album)