![]() Radio broadcasts beamed in from WLAC in Nashville and KWKH in Shreveport gave Winter an advanced education on blues heavyweights, including Howlin’ Wolf, B.B. ![]() The duo’s fast-blossoming talents got them a regular slot on a local kids’ television program, and they even auditioned for Ted Mack’s Amateur Hour in New York but weren’t chosen to be on the show. At age five, he was singing harmonies with his parents in the living room while his mother played piano (little Edgar joined in too), and his great-grandfather on his mother’s side bought him his first uke and guitar. Johnny’s own interest in music surfaced early. Their father had played banjo and ukulele and led his own band in college and sang in a barbershop quartet when Johnny was a lad. First in Leland, Mississippi and from age four back in Beaumont, Johnny and his brother grew up in an upper middle-class environment. If there was such a thing as a genuine prodigy capable of exploring any blues-rooted genre, Johnny surely fit the bill.īorn John Dawson Winter III on Februin Beaumont, Johnny and his younger brother Edgar (born December 28, 1946) were albinos, and Johnny’s eyesight was poor because of it. Here we have two jam-packed discs, one primarily on a rock kick and the other concentrating more on blues material, though Winter blended the two genres so seamlessly that it’s sometimes difficult to tell which idiom predominated. Those vintage sides were totally undeserving of their obscurity, as this collection attests. When Johnny hit big, the tape vaults of the tiny labels he’d cut for underwent a thorough scouring so their contents could quickly be assembled on LPs attempting to cash in on Winter’s meteoric rise to fame. He’d cut a stack of regional 45s ranging from lowdown Gulf Coast blues to brassy, soul-slanted R&B to crunching psychedelic rock for local producers, confirming over and over precisely how astonishingly versatile the guitarist was despite his tender years. Perhaps only his friends, family, and rabid fans back home knew that Winter had already amassed a sizable recording legacy over the previous eight years. His ascension to stardom was nearly instantaneous. The following year, the flashy fleet-fingered axeman from Beaumont released a spectacular debut album on Columbia Records and blasted his in-your-face fretwork inside a host of major venues across the country. I was lucky enough to be able to get a contract the way I wanted it, where I could put out the kind of music that I wanted completely.” Everybody wanted me, and I wasn’t under contract to anybody. “So it was just at that point of checking it out and taking the best offer-not the most money, but the person who I really thought could do the most good. And overnight, people that wouldn’t even talk to me were calling me from New York, California, Europe, every place, man. And there was a big picture of me, talking about how great I was. “It was just about Texas people, how many good people had made it from Texas and how many good people there still were in Texas undiscovered. ![]() “The Rolling Stone article came out about Texas musicians, saying that I was the greatest thing in Texas still starving to death,” recalled the late Johnny Winter. The piece touted a newly unearthed young blues-rock guitarist whose insanely speedy licks were stirring up a veritable Lone Star tornado. The Decemissue of Rolling Stone published an extensive feature on the wide-ranging scope of contemporary Texas music.
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