Lonnie Johnson was one of the most gifted and versatile musicians in the history of the blues, a guitarist and vocalist whose recordings of the 1920s and early 1930s placed him at the intersection of blues, jazz, and popular song in ways that no other artist of his era could match. Born in New Orleans around 1894, Lonnie Johnson won a talent contest sponsored by OKeh Records in 1925 and began a prolific recording career that would produce some of the most sophisticated guitar work the blues had yet heard.
What distinguished Lonnie Johnson from his contemporaries was his extraordinary technical fluency on the guitar — a single-string melodic approach that stood in sharp contrast to the rhythmic strumming and bottleneck styles prevalent in blues of the period. Johnson himself considered his music jazz rather than blues, but the commercial expectations of the race records market steered him toward blues recordings that would sell to Black Southern audiences. That tension between his jazz aspirations and his blues output gives Lonnie Johnson’s recordings a unique character — blues feeling expressed through a harmonic and melodic sophistication that was ahead of its time.
Johnson’s fluency brought him into recorded dialogue with Eddie Lang, the Italian-American guitarist who alongside violinist Joe Venuti was pioneering jazz guitar as a serious solo voice. Their duet recordings — released under the pseudonym Blind Willie Dunn’s Gin Bottle Four — stand among the earliest and finest examples of jazz guitar on record, a meeting of two players whose melodic single-string approach would prove enormously influential on later giants including Django Reinhardt, whose Hot Club of France recordings owe a clear debt to the groundwork laid by Johnson and Lang, and Charlie Christian, who carried the single-string electric guitar tradition into the Swing Era.
The Lonnie Johnson recordings featured on this channel showcase this remarkable musician across several of his modes — intimate blues performances, sophisticated jazz-inflected pieces, and the duet recordings released as Blind Willie Dunn’s Gin Bottle Four that place Lonnie Johnson alongside the finest guitarists of his era.