Time is a funny thing when it comes to when music is released. Lonnie Johnson was a pioneering guitarist who recorded in the 1920s and 1930s. He toured and accompanied many of his day’s most notable acts, including Louis Armstrong, Bessie Smith, and Duke Ellington. The guitarist’s distinctive single-note soloing style with string bending and vibrato inspired blues and jazz players such as Charlie Christian and Django Reinhardt.
Johnson was rediscovered during the Folk Revival of the late 1950s and early 1960s. Bob Dylan claims Johnson significantly influenced his playing during his time in Greenwich Village. This album, recorded in 1960, was his second effort for the Prestige Bluesville label and originally received generally positive, if mixed, reviews.
Johnson sings lead and plays electric guitar, with Elmer Snowdon an acoustic and Wendell Marshall on bass, The latter two are seldom heard except as part of the background. It’s a difficult record to enjoy because the songs are so morose. These are blues tunes, and half of the selections have the word “blues” in their titles (“Blues for Chris”, “Backwater Blues”, “Elmer’s Blues”) and not really any ballads.
Lonnie Johnson sings the blues with a pain in his voice. When he croons lines such as “How I wish I could forget / Those happy yesteryears / That have left a rosary of tears” from Eubie Blake and Andy Razaf’s maudlin “Memories of You”, the listener cannot help but feel downright suicidal. However, Johnson’s guitar picking is simultaneously uplifting and recalls the cheerier times remembered. The music offers a strange combination of Johnson’s talents.
When Johnson’s recording career began in the 1920s, blues music performed by Black musicians frequently moaned about racism and hard times. This trend continued during the Great Depression. The songs on Blues & Ballads would not have been out of place, and indeed, several were hits back then, such as W.C. Handy’s “St. Louis Blues”. These 1960 recordings were considered authentic because they were made by an actual artist from the past and undecorated with frills and unnecessary accompaniments the way so many folk records by white artists singing the blues were. This reflected what was happening in the larger society, namely the modern Civil Rights Movement.
Craft Recordings has remastered the original analog tapes to give the new recording a pristine gleam. Lonnie Johnson’s voice is loud and clear as it is placed in the front. On songs such as “I Found a Dream”, the singer has an R&B lilt reminiscent of Elvis Presley or the Platters’ records from the era. Johnson’s earlier recordings may have influenced Elvis and the Platters, so deciding who informed who is unclear. But Johnson’s guitar playing is the star. The instrumental number “Savoy Blues” is the album’s highlight, showcasing the instrumentalist’s command of the blues idiom. He can play one note on repeat and make it sound different and affecting with each stroke of the strings.
The fact that an artist who was a star when racism in the recording industry was rampant was able to revive his career by singing many of those same songs during the modern Civil Rights Movement is heartwarming. (He had fallen on hard times during the 1950s.) The re-release of this material in 2025 suggests that audiences can still draw inspiration from the painful past with hope for the present and future.