Recorded at Austin’s Gas Works Club, it sports a Carnaby Street image with capes ‘n’ all. Non-stop gigging and numerous local hits (one went on to Billboard 100 as The Traits with Harlem Shuffle in ’66 the popish Eternally was licensed to Atlantic and did well in Texas and Louisiana) led to the 24 year-old’s debut The Progressive Blues Experiment (1968), a trio’s recording of ten tracks split equally between covers (including his beloved Son House) and his own songs. He ventured into black areas even when National Guardsmen were sealing off towns due to racial unrest, but always welcomed because of his sincere interest in the music. When he said he had, B.B.King lent him a guitar and at the end was greeted by a standing ovation. Because Johnny kept badgering the performer to jam with him, he was asked if he had a musicians’ union card. Three years later the brothers were the only whites in the Raven club on the ‘wrong side’ of his hometown. He was starting the climb to be among the greats of Texan blues, from Blind Lemon Jefferson and Mance Lipscomb, Lightnin’ Hopkins and his cousin Albert Collins, to T-Bone Walker, Stevie Ray Vaughan and fellow-Gibson-touter Billy Gibbons of ZZ Top. By the time he was 15 he’d cut one of his early songs for Houston’s Dart Records, School Day Blues with his 12 year-old brother as Johnny and the Jammers. Johnny graduated from ukulele to guitar, a family heirloom, when he was 11 or 12 and started his first band. The musical family had permanently moved there by the time Edgar was born almost three years later, and both played various instruments in their formative years. When first recording in the 1950s, press-shots are like a photo-negative of Elvis.Īlthough he liked to say he was from the home of blues in Mississippi, where his father was a mayor with a struggling cotton business (he also played sax and sang in swing era bands and choirs), John Dawson Winter III was in fact born in Beaumont, Texas in 1944 because there was no hospital in Leland. Never a prolific songwriter-there is just one song on the album completely by him-he modestly preferred to be known as an ‘interpreter’. Albino like his well-known younger brother Edgar (of the hit Frankenstein fame), he felt well-suited among a disadvantaged minority like those he paid tribute to live and in the studio-an international ambassador respected by other giants among white blues (what a great surname for it!). One reviewer likened him to a ‘pagan apparition’, a nice variation on the hackneyed ‘cool dude’ epithet. A gaunt, lanky albino festooned with tattoos accentuated by his pale skin, a card-playing, cigarillo-smoking, bourbon-drinking Stetson-wearer, he had alcohol and BBQ sauce brands named after him. He had his own stand-alone style musically (he never learned to read music because didn’t want to copy or trust what others wrote) and visually. An icon in America, his career as a torch-bearer of its tradition is interesting. Winter’s fame in the late ’60s was in the rock world, but his heart was in the blues from childhood in spite of the media’s own image-making. Johnny Winter’s I’m A Bluesman(Talking Elephant Records TECD334), first released by Virgin/EMI in 2004 to acclaim (one of seven Grammy nominations in his career), the title was a sharp riposte to an interviewer: ‘I’m not a rock ‘n’ roller…’. One of the important comeback albums in blues-rock this century has just been reissued in the UK by a label devoted to his catalogue.
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