Johnny Shines performing at the Chicago Blues Festival in 1991. Photo courtesy of Jerry Fitzpatrick/Wikimedia Commons.
You had your chance, Tuscaloosa.
One year ago in this space, I urged you to prepare a blowout for the centenary of the late Johnny Shines, a genuine blues legend who lived right up the road in Holt.
Alas, Mayor Walt Maddox must not read Weld, because nary an official observance seems scheduled for Johnny’s 100th birthday this Sunday. Guess it’s not too late to get started planning that sesquicentennial party for 2065.
I had the good fortune to meet John Ned Lee Shines during his renascence as a bluesman in 1970, and he could not have been kinder to a neophyte in the world of vernacular music. His erudition and affability upended my every stereotype of a primitive Delta blues singer. Friendship with Johnny conferred access to his remarkable trove of knowledge of music, history and human nature.
The major misconception of which Johnny disabused me: there is no romance in the blues. Born April 26, 1915, in Frayser, Tenn., his first six years were idyllic, living on a farm in a church-based community. When his folks split up in 1921, the boy went to Memphis with his father, whose drinking and erratic behavior introduced Johnny to a life of loneliness and confusion. Hearing street musicians on Beale Street singing, as he described it later, like they were “overcome by sadness, in a trance,” resonated with the unhappy youth.
He heard a lot of those songs over the next few years. Johnny moved from town to town, taking grueling manual labor wherever he could, living hand-to-mouth in trepidation of what the next day might bring.
By 1932, Johnny was sharecropping in Hughes, Ark., and married to his first wife. Struggling to get by, he still found time to hang out at the rural version of a juke joint, called a “get-back.” There, inspired by his brother Willie, he learned guitar and eventually got good enough to play and sing there.
Johnny earned a nickname one Saturday night when Chester Burnett, a mountain of a man known throughout the region as Howlin’ Wolf, performed. While Wolf took a long break between sets, Johnny, uninvited, picked up his guitar and started singing Wolf-style songs, to the audience’s delight. When Wolf came back inside, he vowed never to leave his guitar unguarded again. Henceforth, Johnny was known far and wide as “Little Wolf.”
Johnny went to Memphis in 1934 seeking better work. Instead, he found the company of fellow blues singers, who tended to hang out in Handy Park, just off Beale Street. When he returned to Arkansas the next year, Johnny was skilled enough to start playing for hire throughout the region.
One fateful day, a piano player known only by the name M & O talked him into going to Helena to hear a new phenom named Robert Johnson, who, according to Johnny, “sang like a bird and really played the guitar.”
Johnson is regarded today as the greatest prewar blues artist, but when the young Johnny Shines met him in Helena, he was just another musician on the make.
“He was a boyish-looking young man,” Johnny told Tuscaloosa photographer and blues maven John Earl in Blues World magazine.
“The way he dressed stood out,” he said, recalling that he wore black-striped pants and fancy tan shoes.
In the fall of 1935, Johnny and Robert began traveling together across America, playing in every town to which their whims took them. Johnny not only bore witness to Johnson’s virtuosity, he absorbed a lot of that technique firsthand. Their adventures together could have filled a book, had Johnny gotten around to writing it.
After Johnson died in 1938, Johnny lived on to tell the tales. He moved to Chicago and pursued a career in music until 1946, when, having found no commercial success making records, he got out of the business and went into construction work. In the early 1960s, blues archivists discovered he was still alive and persuaded him to return to the recording studio, where he put down tracks for a classic album titled Chicago—The Blues Today, which did well enough to get him back out performing for live audiences again.
The untimely death of his daughter, and his decision to raise her seven children, led Johnny to leave Chicago in 1969 and relocate his brood to Alabama. He found a spacious home in Holt and steady construction work to pay the bills, but his renown was inescapable. Word of a local blues hero reached the ear of Natalie Matson, a singer who ran a little folk music coffeehouse called Down Under in the basement of Barnwell Hall on the University of Alabama campus.
On the weekend of April 18, 1970, Johnny Shines brought it all back home to Tuscaloosa. Speaking softly as he tuned his acoustic guitar, once he began to play the blues his voice filled the space, a powerful instrument, hollering across the fields that conjured the dark spirits innate to the old, old songs he sang. He sang Robert Johnson’s songs, but he sang his own compositions as well, songs equally steeped in the wisdom of the road.
I was amazed by Johnny’s prowess that unforgettable night, but what do I remember most? The way he dressed stood out, wearing a coat and a tie to entertain a room full of hipsters.
Johnny’s second career in the blues brought him international fame and a Grammy nomination. Though slowed by a stroke in 1980, he was not stilled; he could not chord his guitar any more, but his voice was undiminished. Until his death in 1992, Johnny remained one of the foremost exponents and explicators of the real Delta blues.
Happy birthday, old friend. Tuscaloosa might not be able to put anything together, but I bet people who love the blues will be having their own special get-backs in your honor this weekend.
