Topic: The Influence of Lonnie Johnson

[Prof Scratchy]

[jostber]

Hi all,
I was listening to Blind Boy Fuller looking for Lemon-influenced tunes and came across "You Never Can Tell", on which he plays Lonnie Johnson's signature lick over and over, albeit in C.  More Lemonisms to follow.
All best,
Johnm

Listened to this today. A lot of Lonnie Johnson influence on this one and a fine track.

[Chris A]

Yesterday, I came across another tape that I made of Lonnie playing in my apartment. It's from February, 1960 and has Lonnie performing blues and some of the ballads he so loved. He also does "Tomorrow Night" and joins Elmer Snowden on some instrumentals (Elmer is playing banjo)

I will be posting this (about 90 minutes) on my blog before the end of this month. I'll post a link here when that happens.

[Rivers]

Very much looking forward to hearing it Chris, and reading the background story.

[uncle bud]

Ditto! Looking forward to it.

[Pan]

What they said!

Cheers

Pan

[jostber]

Looking forward to your post Chris! Will be great to hear this.

[Shovel]

Not sure if its a direct influence as requested by the thread, but Bo Carter's guitar playing always makes me think Lonnie Johnson with the thumping, and the crystal clear single note runs. Even their general performance style strikes me as being pretty similar, with one being more countrified and the other more urban, but both seriously musical. 

[d. spree]

Makes me think of Elijah Wald;s study (book) Escaping the Delta: Robert Johnson and the Invention of the Blues.  he talks at length about Johnson's influence of Robert Johnson, and while I think that his book moves a little too far in its view that some/much of Johnson's work was not truly "delta" or "country blues" and was unknown to other delta musicians, I did like his study of the influences on Robert. It helped me approach my "study" of his music - i.e. learning to play it!

[GhostRider]

As an afterthought, I think Clifford Gibson was very influenced by Lonnie Johnson, both in his singing and in his playing.  And coming up in St. Louis when he did,  he must have heard Lonnie quite a lot.
All best,
Johnm

I just got the Document Complete Clifford Gibson, and he has by far the closest tie to Lonnie. My goodness, the first tune into the CD and I thought they'd put the wrong disc in.
CG does a great imitation of LJ bends, vibrato and tone. And his vocals are very imitative, going even to ending vocal lines of the low notes LJ did.
None of this is to denigrate CG recordings, this tunes are great. A v. good listening album

[Prof Scratchy]

Just got round to listening to this one, which was mentioned in the first post on this thread. Great performance from 1934: