Tommy Johnson: 1896 - 1956

Pre-war Delta bluesman Tommy Johnson made some of the rawest and most powerful music ever recorded. He emerged in the same period as Charley Patton and Son House and was just as vital. A talented guitarist who helped originate Delta blues vernacular, it was as a vocalist that he truly left his mark. Johnson sang like a man running from demons after midnight, channeling the torment and spirituality of the field holler into his songs. His tenure was short, yet he managed to influence a wide swath of blues musicians including Howlin Wolf, Robert Nighthawk, Floyd Jones, and Houston Stackhouse.

Tommy Johnson was one of thirteen children, born on a plantation in Terry, Mississippi, about twenty miles south of Jackson. The family moved to Crystal Springs when he was around fourteen years old and it continued to be his home base for the rest of his life. About this time, he began learning guitar from his older brother and ultimately the two  played for small change at local parties. In 1916 he married his first wife, Maggie Bidwell (the inspiration for his song “Maggie Campbell Blues), and they started a life in the Yazoo delta region, not far from the famous Dockery’s Plantation.

The Dockery Plantation was home to Charley Patton and his musical partners, Willie Brown, and Dick Bankston. Their meeting and playing together would have a huge influence on Johnson’s singing and playing style. One can imagine this collection of men becoming a hatchery or conceptual workshop for the Delta blues sound. A year later Johnson was hoboing and playing throughout the states of Mississippi, Louisiana, and Arkansas.

It was at this stage that the bizarre stories and legend began to inflate. Tales of wild live performances, raucous womanizing, and obscene levels of alcoholism have all added to his holy terror reputation. Johnson was also immersed in the Creole tradition of the Hoodoo underworld, claiming to have signed the infamous pact with the Devil (a good decade before Robert Johnson’s version ever circulated) to justify his talents. If Johnson’s extreme lengths to obtain alcohol are any indication - a weakness for drinking cooking oil, hair tonic, shoe polish or anything else buzz-inducing - such possessed behavior and bargains with Satan would seem logical.

This apparent journey into the depths of his own psyche inevitably came through in his music. Johnson was an advocate of voice and guitar interplay, pitting descending and ascending bass figures against opposing vocal lines. An original and facile guitar player, his chord progressions and licks became the template for many of the Delta’s blues guitarists. Yet it was his voice that really dug its hooks in the listener. It could shift from a gentle drone to a spooky falsetto yodel, expressing fearful despair in one vocal swoop. The sound of a man totally committed to his music.

Johnson’s first recordings were for the Victor label in February and August of 1928. With Charlie McCoy as a second guitarist they cut eight sides which cemented his status. Songs like “Cool Drink of Water Blues” (later covered by Howlin’ Wolf) and “Big Road Blues” would become representative of the Delta blues canon, and his “Canned Heat Blues,” a grim account of his addiction to cooking fuel, would inspire the name of a sixties blues-rock group. His third and final recording session for Paramount in December of 1929 was organized by his friend Charley Patton and was only slightly less compelling, if only because his desperate drinking habits were beginning to impede on his abilities. All tolled, perhaps a dozen songs made it to wax, all of them classics.

With the economic assault of the Depression Johnson never returned to the recording studio and spent the remaining years playing house parties and juke joints. He apparently remained popular in his home region of Jackson. In November of 1956, after playing music all night at his niece’s birthday party, he dropped dead of a heart attack. By Tim Kirker

Click here to purchase Tommy Johnson or other great artists MP3 packages.