Johnny Winter - Very White Mans Blues
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Johnny Winter is another great blues guitar player who hails from Texas. I don’t know what it is about Texan guitarists, but perhaps at some stage in it’s formative years, the Mississippi took a detour through the Lone Star State!
John Dawson Winter was born in 1944, and grew up in a musical family. His brother Edgar is also a world renowned performer. Both brothers are equally distinctive because both are albino.
I first had exposure to Johnny Winter’s music when a school friend lent me a copy of an album called Second Winter. It was so good, that I bought my own copy. My favourite cuts from this LP were a cover of the Bob Dylan song, Highway 61 Revisited, which features some of Johnny’s archetypal throaty vocals, and a great up tempo rendition of this tune. Also featured is one of my all time favourite tracks, “I Love Everybody”, which has some wonderful slide guitar playing on his Gibson Firebird.
Also to be noted was Johnny covering Johnny B Goode on this LP. Johnny had a love of Rock and Roll second only to the blues, and he made tunes like this and Jumping Jack Flash more famous than the originals, which is saying something!
One very odd quirk about this LP (which was only seen on vinyl) was that although it was a double LP, it only had music on three sides. One side was just blank. How weird is that?
Having enjoyed this LP so much, I discovered another LP of his, which is not one of his official ones. It is called Progressive Blues Experiment and features my all time favourite Johnny Winter tune called “Mean Town Blues”. Boogie, slide, blues; it doesn’t get much better than this. Here is a clip of JW playing this wonderful tune live, circa 1970.
His live LP’s, certainly from the early days featured more and more Rock and Roll standards. Johnny’s live performances are electric and this idiom suited his playing perfectly! He has never lost his love or feel for the blues though!
Here is a tab of the intro to Mean Town Blues. Bear in mind that he played this with an open A tuning ( EAEACsharpE).
You can find more about Johnny Winter and his guitar, the Gibson Firebird at GuitarnStuff dot com.
Great Video by a great guitarist! I’ve been a Johnny Winter Fan for about 20 years now! My favorite album is “Still Alive and Well”. Mainly a rock album, he covers the stones “Let it Bleed”, but it has a few blues tunes. Great Album!