West Virginia Music Hall of Fame – Class of 2007
Johnnie Johnson should be a household name. When it comes to the history, development, and craft of rock ‘n’ roll piano playing he easily stands alongside Fats Domino, Jerry Lee Lewis, and Little Richard as one of the best ever. Chuck Berry drove the train in the early days of rock ‘n’ roll, but Johnnie Johnson was the man who stoked the engine. His rollicking boogie-woogie licks were the driving force behind Chuck Berry’s songs.
Keith Richards, Rock & Roll Hall of Fame Induction Speech for Johnnie Johnson, 2001
By December of 1952, twenty-eight year old Fairmont, West Virginia native Johnnie Johnson had been living in St. Louis for ten months. The talented blues and jazz pianist had put together a band, The Sir John Trio, and they were establishing themselves in the East St. Louis club scene, and working steadily. Their biggest gig of the year was coming up on December 31st. The pay was double and the house was always full for a New Year’s Eve show. But two days before the big night at the Cosmopolitan Club, Johnson learned that his saxophone player had fallen ill, and he now needed another musician to play the show.
Most of the musicians Johnson knew were already working New Year’s Eve gigs. He took a chance and called a twenty-six year old, inexperienced, but talented guitar player he had seen a month earlier at a small club. As he had been playing professionally for just six months, and only knew twelve songs, the newcomer was available. They got together an hour before the show to “rehearse” and then played a five hour show that went over so well, afterwards, the club’s owners insisted that Johnson hire this guitar fellow as the newest member of The Sir John Trio. The next day Johnnie Johnson hired Chuck Berry. The rest is history.
Johnnie Johnson was born in Fairmont, West Virginia on July 8, 1924. His mother found a second hand piano and at a very young age Johnson began teaching himself the piano. Family members remember him impressing groups of friends and neighbors by playing “Cow-Cow Blues” at the age of six.
A few months after his eighth birthday, Fairmont radio station WMMN heard about Johnnie through an employee and invited him to the station to play on the air.
According to Johnson biographer Travis Fitzpatrick: When Johnnie made his debut on local radio in 1932, it was a thrill to the black community. “It gave them something to be proud of,” Johnson says of his spot on the radio. “My folks and neighbors were really excited. After that show I remember my uncle started waking me up in the middle of the night and sneaking me out of the house so I could play at fish fries and neighborhood parties. People liked seeing this kid up there playing piano. I started to know what I wanted to do with my life. Play piano.”
As a boy Johnson listened to late night radio shows coming out of Pittsburgh on KDKA that played a lot of blues and jazz. He remembered, “I used to fall asleep listening to people like Count Basie and Glenn Miller on this show called ‘The Dawn Patrol’.
As Johnnie grew older and more experienced he began to develop his own style, based partly on country music but more so on the jazz and big-band swing he’d absorbed through late night radio. He recalled, “My parents, living in West Virginia, were big country music fans so I learned some of those songs. But my first love has always been jazz.” By the time he was 13, he had joined his first band, the Blue Rhythm Swingsters.
Johnson moved to Detroit in 1941 to work at one of the Ford defense plants. He also found gigs in local clubs and at private parties. In 1942, as World War II was raging, he joined the Marines, serving 31 months in the South Pacific.* (Johnnie Johnson was posthumously awarded the Congressional Gold Medal for breaking racial barriers in the military as a Montford Point Marine, where he endured racism and inspired social change while integrating the previously all-white Marine Corps during World War II. Source- Wikipedia)
During World War II Johnnie Johnson became a member of Bobby Troup’’s all-serviceman jazz orchestra: The Barracudas. Playing with this band permanently put Johnson on the path of being a professional musician. The Barracudas were a twenty-two-piece orchestra, featuring members of Glenn Miller’s, Tommy Dorsey’s, and Count Basie’s big bands. Again according to Fitzpatrick:
The Barracudas were an elite group made up of some of America’s finest jazz and swing musicians. As a premiere military band in World War II, they were assigned to many of the U.S.O. functions, including backing up such stars as Bob Hope and Betty Hutton. Band members were selected from hundreds of aspiring players who had tried out for a position. Bobby Troup was impressed with the nineteen-year-old’s abilities and Johnnie Johnson became a ‘Barracuda.’”
The young man from West Virginia could hardly believe he was playing side-by-side with the players whom he had heard years before on the radio in Fairmont. Johnnie remembered, “Here I was, nineteen, small-town boy from West Virginia playing with cats from Lionel Hampton’s band. Backing up big names like Bob Hope.”
In 1946, at age twenty-two, he left the Marines and tried again to make it in Detroit. Musically, things went well, as he started gigging some with John Lee Hooker and a few other Detroit blues acts but overall Johnnie Johnson was not doing very well. An older brother threw him a life line of obtaining a higher paying job, and encouraged him to leave Detroit for St. Louis, which he did in March of 1952, which sets the stage for the fateful New Year’s Eve show later that year, where Chuck Berry enters the story.
Years later, when Johnson was asked to recall why it was Chuck Berry that he called to see if he was available, on very short notice, to play a big New Year’s Eve gig at the Cosmopolitan Club in East St. Louis on December 31, 1952, he said, “I saw Chuck playing a few months before in a small club and he had the audience in the palm of his hand. I went back again because that guy just singing and playing his guitar could make me laugh more than anybody I ever saw. They would be playing a regular blues set when all of a sudden this man would break into a country song-what I call hillbilly music-which was a music I knew and liked ‘cause I’d grown up around it in West Virginia.” It wasn’t even Berry’s playing that interested Johnson, so much as his inherent skills as a comic performer. Berry made him laugh. And it was just for one night.
“And that one night”, Johnson later explained, “lasted pretty close to 30 years.” Although lacking in professional experience compared to Johnson, Berry had a strong personality and natural leadership skills, and soon he had taken charge of the band, with Johnson’s approval. “He did so many things for the band,” Johnson explained. “We didn’t have a booking agency so he got out and hustled up the jobs.” Berry also took a demo tape of the trio’s music to Chicago, where Leonard Chess, head of Chess Records, was so impressed that he requested that the band come to his studio and perform the numbers for him live.
“Maybellene,” the first song the trio recorded, became a huge hit, as did dozens of others such as “Roll Over Beethoven,”Sweet Little Sixteen,” and “Rock and Roll Music.” Over the next twenty years, the two collaborated on many of Berry’s songs, including “School Days,” “Carol,” and “Nadine,”. The song “Johnny B. Goode” was reportedly a tribute to Johnson’s behavior when he was drinking.
Despite all of the collaboration in putting together these songs, Johnson never received songwriting credits. “Chuck wrote all the lyrics himself. I had nothing to do with that,”Johnson commented in Blues Music Now! “It was just that we’d get down to the piano and guitar between recordings and have our little rehearsal. That’s when we’d work out the music to what he had already written.”
In the 1987 Chuck Berry documentary Hail! Hail! Rock ‘n’ Roll, Keith Richards goes to great lengths to point out that Chuck Berry’s songs are mostly written with piano chords, Johnnie’s chords, and not with guitar chords, Chuck’s chords. Richards remarks, “Johnnie ain’t copying Chuck riffs on piano. Chuck adapted them to guitar and put those great lyrics behind them. Without someone to give him those riffs, viola, no song…just a lot of words on paper.”
(In November 2000, Johnson sued Chuck Berry, alleging he deserved co-composer credits and royalties for 30+ Chuck Berry songs, which credit Berry alone. The case was eventually dismissed, because too many years had passed since the songs in dispute were written.)
In the early ‘70s Johnnie Johnson’s partnership with Chuck Berry came to an end. Johnnie never did like to fly, and Berry was at a stage in his career where he was “bigger” overseas than in the US. In the late ‘70s and most of the ‘80s, Johnnie Johnson lived in obscurity, in St. Louis, working odd jobs, rarely playing piano. He was driving a van for senior citizens when Keith Richards of the Rolling Stones looked him up in 1986 and invited him to perform in two concerts scheduled to be performed for the Chuck Berry documentary. The exposure he got in Hail! Hail! Rock ‘n’ Roll offered Johnson the opportunity to resurrect his musical career.
He recorded his first solo album Blue Hand Johnnie in 1987 and he soon returned to performing all over the world (and overcoming his fear of flight). Eric Clapton hired him as a featured artist for his annual Royal Albert Hall blues shows. Keith Richards employed Johnson in the X-Pensive Winos and Johnson played piano on Richards’ debut solo album, Talk Is Cheap, in 1988.
Johnson’s final album, Johnnie Be Eighty. And Still Bad. was recorded in St.Louis in late 2004, consisting of all original songs.
In 2005, he played piano on Styx’s re-recording of “Blue Collar Man” for their album Big Bang Theory.
In 2001, he was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, in the category of “Sidemen,”. Keith Richards and Robbie Robertson did the induction speeches for Johnnie Johnson.
In 2007, Johnnie Johnson was inducted in the first class of the West Virginia Music Hall of Fame.
The Johnnie Johnson Music Festival is held annually in Fairmont, WV, only a few blocks from where Johnson was born.
Johnnie Johnson died at the age of 80 in 2005. He was interred in the Jefferson Barracks National Cemetery.
Author’s Note:
I would like to cite two books that I used extensively in writing this piece.
Father of Rock & Roll: The Story of Johnnie “B. Goode Johnson. Travis Fitzpatrick. 1999.
Chuck Berry: An American Life. RJ Smith. 2022.
Photo Sources.
JJ. In color seated at piano. Source: Listal. Com
The Sir John Trio. From left to right, Ebby Hardy, drums, Chuck Berry, guitar, and Johnnie Johnson, piano. Source: Michael Ochs Archive
Johnnie Johnson, in color and cap, playing live. Source: St. Louis Walk of Fame.
Chuck Berry and Johnnie Johnson playing live, vintage ‘50’s B&W. Source: Michael Ochs Archive.
Chuck Berry and Johnnie Johnson playing together, leaning into each other, B&W. Source: RiverfrontTimes.com
RECOMMENDED LISTENING – by the author.
“Maybelline”. This rock and roll classic was Chuck Berry’s first hit. It was modeled on a country swing song called “Ida Red”. Originally that was the title Berry used for this tune. However, Chess Records thought the name needed to be changed because it sounded too “rural”. The story is label owner Leonard Chess spotted a mascara box on the studio floor and, according to Johnson, Chess said, “Well, hell, let’s name the damn thing Maybellene,” altering the spelling to avoid a suit by cosmetic giant Revlon. Like on many of Chuck Berry’s records, Johnnie Johnson’s piano playing is often hard to hear as it is mixed into the background. However, close listening will bring many rewards, and oftentimes his playing leaps forward and truly shines.
“Wee Wee Hours”. When Chuck Berry and Johnnie Johnson traveled to Chicago to make their first record for Chess Records, they were sure it was this song that was going to be their first release on that label. Chess was after all primarily a blues label, and this song, modeled after a Big Joe Turner song, would make a great single. However it was “Maybelline” Chess put out first. Johnnie Johnson’s playing is front and center throughout this late night classic. If there was any song where Johnnie Johnson should have received a song writing credit, it’s this one.
“Tanqueray”. In 1992 Keith Richards produced the album Johnnie B. Bad. Eric Clapton is one of many guest stars who show up to play and pay their respects. This author is very fond of this album. His playing is solid, swinging, and yet, measured. He even does the vocals. This song is a showcase for his versatile piano playing style and the natural groove he always finds in any song he plays.
____________________
