Raisin' Cain: The Wild and Raucous Story of Johnny Winter (Kindle Edition) (5 page)

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Authors: Mary Lou Sullivan

BOOK: Raisin' Cain: The Wild and Raucous Story of Johnny Winter (Kindle Edition)
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Johnny’s early memories include listening to a wooden console radio with his family in the evening. He loved “scary radio shows,” especially
Inner Sanctum Mysteries
and
The Shadow
. Those shows made such an impression on him, he still occasionally listens to vinyl recordings of
Inner Sanctum Mysteries, The Shadow,
and
Lights Out,
a mid-1930s radio show billed as the “ultimate in horror.”
Television was still in its infancy in the late 1940s, a luxury only the wealthy could afford. Johnny’s grandparents bought an RCA Victor set before the Winters had a TV, so Johnny and his family watched the early television shows at their house. Johnny woke up early on Saturday mornings to go to his grandparents’ house and watch children’s shows. He didn’t like cartoons, but never missed
Space Patrol,
a half-hour space show that debuted in 1950. He loved the adventures of the show’s hero and still imitates the announcer’s voice when he says, “Buzz Corry—commander in chief of the Space Patrol.”
When Johnny’s family finally bought a Philco television, he watched
The Howdy Doody Show, Roy Rogers,
and a local children’s show called
Uncle Willie’s.
Johnny appeared on
Uncle Willie’s,
which began as a radio show and moved to TV.
“I was on
Uncle Willie’s
on radio and TV,” says Johnny. “I was just a little kid when I first went on. Uncle Willie read books and played little kids’ records. The kids sat on a bench and we’d say our names. I’d say, ‘I’m Johnny Winter and I want to say hello to my mother and my daddy and my grandparents.’”
Johnny’s grandparents never missed
The Ed Sullivan Show,
so his family watched it with them on Sunday nights. Johnny wasn’t impressed with the smorgasbord of jugglers, acrobats, animal acts, singers, comedians, puppeteers, ventriloquists, and plate spinners, but enjoyed Elvis Presley’s debut appearance on September 9, 1956.
Elvis Presley was the
white
man with the black sound and feel that Sun Records owner Sam Philips had been searching for, so it isn’t surprising that four of Presley’s five Sun Record singles were remakes of songs written and/or recorded by black blues artists. It was the blues feel of Elvis’s records that appealed to Johnny.
Johnny was developing his taste for the blues, but had only heard homogenized versions deemed suitable for white audiences. Ironically, it was the upper-middle-class status of his parents and grandparents that introduced him to the real deal. Both families had black servants working in their homes, which would prove to be fortuitous in several ways. It made Johnny “colorblind” when it came to people and kept him from embracing the prejudice that was a way of life in Beaumont. It also exposed him to the music that would turn his life around.
“Servants were treated well, but nobody treated them normally—you wouldn’t treat them like a friend,” Johnny says. “You’d be nice to them and that was it. Sadie was my mother’s maid. We called her Sainty—she was real sweet. She lived in the black side of town and came in twice a week. She ironed clothes, cleaned the house, did laundry. I treated Sadie like a real friend. I still have a picture of her daughter in high school. I stayed friendly with Sadie.”
Johnny also befriended his great-grandfather’s servants, who introduced him to raw earthy sounds of blues by black artists.
“Ole Pa had a guy named Ameal Martin who was Creole, a black Frenchman from Louisiana.” Johnny says. “We called him Meal. He cleaned the yard, cut the grass, did chores around the house. Lilly, a black woman in her forties, was the maid. Lilly had the radio on all the time. She listened to KJET in the kitchen—the only black station in Beaumont. I was about ten or eleven and that was the first time I heard blues. It was real raw—completely different from the music my parents and grandparents listened to. I started listenin’ to blues on KJET because I liked what I heard in the kitchen.”
2
 
MUSICAL FROM BIRTH
 
G
rowing up in a family of musicians had a strong influence on both Johnny and Edgar.
“The boys were both musical from the time they were born,” said Edwina. “Part of it was because they were legally blind and their acute hearing made up in part for their lack of sight. Music was always a part of their lives. When they were little, I would play with them and for them, and their Daddy would, too. When they were little tiny fellas, they could harmonize. They had a natural ear for music.”
“I always wanted to be a musician from the time I was old enough to start singing, when I was three or four years old,” says Johnny. “I liked performing—everybody got off on me and I liked to do it. Edgar and me learned to sing as soon as we could talk because Daddy was always involved in music. When I was just a little kid—maybe five or six, Momma would play piano in our living room and we started singing three-part harmonies with Daddy. Our first songs were ‘Bye, Bye Blackbird,’ ‘Ain’t She Sweet,’ and ‘Shine on Harvest Moon’—songs Daddy sang in the barbershop quartet. It was really nice.”
Johnny’s first instrument was ukulele. “I liked ukulele because it was something I could play and back my singing up,” he says. Never too shy to perform in public, Johnny and Edgar began playing on a local TV program airing in Beaumont and Houston.
“We were on
Don Mahoney and the Kiddie Troopers
a lot for a long time,” says Johnny. “Me and Edgar played ukuleles and sang harmony parts on Everly Brothers songs.”
Playing in contests and talent shows came natural to the boys, who won awards, including cash prizes, in most of the competitions. Johnny and Edgar won their first talent contest playing ukuleles and singing harmony on UHF Channel 31 in Beaumont in 1953.
“We’d been on the show enough that we didn’t have to audition,” says Johnny. “Waitin’ in the studio to go on was scary—it was hard waitin’ to go on. There were other kids too and older acts. I was nine and Edgar was six. We won a seventy-dollar Bulova wristwatch and I traded Edgar my clarinet for his half of the watch. I got the watch because I was older. That was real bad. I was pretty awful to Edgar. He said he always looked up to me when we were little kids, but I didn’t know it. I always gave him the hard way to go. He was my younger brother and always got the bad end of everything. Everything we did or played, he always came after me.”
Winning the Beaumont talent contest made the boys eligible to audition for the nationally televised
Ted Mack and the Original Amateur Hour,
a talent contest broadcast from Radio City Music Hall. The family drove from Beaumont to New York City, a trip that took four days, traveling eight hours a day and staying in motels along the way.
“We went to Radio City Music Hall for the audition,” says Johnny. “We had our ukuleles and were gonna sing in front of the judges. There was a large waiting room with all kinds of acts, mostly older acts. We didn’t get called until probably eleven or twelve at night.”
Johnny and Edgar played their hearts out despite the late hour and were sure they’d be chosen to perform on national television. It wasn’t until they had returned to Texas that they learned they didn’t make it.
“We didn’t win the audition,” says Johnny. “We always won too, so I couldn’t believe it when we didn’t win. It was the first time. It was a drag but there wasn’t much you could do about it.”
Rather than letting the boys wallow in defeat, Edwina encouraged them to learn another instrument. She signed them up for piano lessons with Hazel Bergman, a grand pianist who played in a swing band in Beaumont.
“I started piano as a kid because my mother wanted me to,” says Johnny. “I took piano lessons two or three years—from about fourth to sixth grade. I didn’t play very much piano—I learned enough to know it was something I didn’t want to do. It didn’t feel normal to me like guitar did. They tried to get me to learn how to read music but I didn’t. Reading music didn’t interest me because the music I wanted to learn—the popular stuff on the radio—wasn’t available in sheet music and nobody knew how to play it anyway.”
During the years Johnny was halfheartedly taking piano lessons, he was also learning to play the clarinet, an instrument with more appeal.
“I was in the fourth grade when I began playing clarinet,” he says. “I played in the school band. I had a silver clarinet and learned by ear. I liked the way it sounded. I played it for a couple of years, but I had an overbite, and the orthodontist said playing the clarinet would make it worse. I had to stop playing when I was just startin’ to get it down. When the orthodontist said I couldn’t play anymore, I cried a long time about it. It was a real drag ’cause I loved playin’ clarinet.”
Determined to encourage his son’s love of music and help him discover an instrument he enjoyed, John Jr. began teaching Johnny chords on the banjo and ukulele. Although he enjoyed playing songs from the ‘20s and ’30s that were later popularized by Tiny Tim, embarking on a career as a ukulele player seemed like too much of a long shot.
“My daddy told me Arthur Godfrey and Ukulele Ike are the only ukulele players I ever heard of that made it, so maybe you ought to play guitar,” says Johnny. “I was about eleven or twelve when I started playing guitar. My first guitar had belonged to my great-grandmother on my mother’s side. It was an acoustic Spanish guitar in bad shape. The strings above the fret board were bad. It was too warped to really play. I just played around with it and learned a few chords on the bottom.
“I didn’t play the acoustic guitar very long. Just long enough to know it was something I wanted to keep doing. All the rock songs on the radio had guitars in ’em so I talked my great-grandfather into buying me a real guitar—my first electric guitar in 1956. Ole Pa bought me an ES 125—a really nice guitar—at Jefferson Music in Beaumont. I loved it. I played it in my bedroom with a Fender Bass-man, the best-soundin’ amp around.
“I taught myself songs like ‘Hound Dog,’ whatever was on the radio at the time. A lot of songs Elvis did—I was a big Elvis fan. It was always pretty easy for me to hear it and then play it on the guitar. Music has always been easy for me.”
Johnny took his first formal guitar lessons at age twelve from Luther Nallie, a country and western musician who worked at Jefferson Music Company. He took thirty-minute lessons once a week for a year and practiced six hours every day.
“Luther was twenty-two-about ten years older than me,” says Johnny. “He was playin’ around Beaumont when I was takin’ lessons; later he played with the Sons of Pioneers with Roy Rogers. Mostly country and western songs—he didn’t know any blues. I’d play a song for him and ask him how it was played. I learned a lot from him. He taught me how to finger pick, which was a style I wanted to learn how to play.”
Nallie found Johnny to be a quick study and was impressed with his talent and enthusiasm. “Johnny had me scratching my head a lot of the time because he would soak up anything I taught him immediately, and I would have to think up something else real quick to show him,” Nallie said in a 2001 interview in
Vintage Guitar.
Johnny learned what he could from Nallie, then returned to Jefferson Music in late 1958 to take lessons from Seymour Drugan. A jazz guitarist, Drugan played with Paul Whiteman and other big bands in the 1930s and ‘40s before settling in Chicago in the early ’40s to play on Don McNeill’s
The Breakfast Club.
“I learned a few jazz chords from him,” says Johnny. “That didn’t help much, but he did help me learn my chords. I quit after three months because I wasn’t interested in jazz. I stopped taking lessons because there wasn’t anybody that played what I wanted to play.”
Although Johnny’s lessons with Drugan were short-lived, it led to a friendship with Drugan’s son Dennis, who said his father was amazed by Johnny’s talent.
“My father told me, ‘You won’t believe the young fellow that came into the store. He’s a really good guitar player and he learns very fast,’” said Dennis Drugan.
Johnny’s talent led to a job at Jefferson Music Company teaching guitar on weekdays after school. “I was sixteen and seventeen when I gave guitar lessons,” he says. “I had six or eight customers. We made two dollars a half an hour and I got one dollar a half an hour—half of what we made.”
That job led to a meeting with Clarence Garlow, a Creole DJ who played blues and R&B on the
Bon Ton Roulette Show
at KJET.
“He was the main Texas guitar player who influenced me,” says Johnny. “I was giving a lesson and he came in to buy strings. I could tell him by his voice. He had a really unique voice. I knew he was Clarence Garlow and I started playing one of his songs. He said, ‘You know who I am, don’t ya?’ And I said, ‘Yeah.’ He was real nice to me after that.”
Nocturnal by nature, Johnny still has what one of his sidemen called “a vampire schedule,” staying up all night, going to bed at 6 or 7 AM, and sleeping late into the afternoon. His natural biorhythm as a night person began early in his childhood, and allowed him to indulge his love of the blues.
“I’ve always had that schedule,” he says. “I slept late all the time. I never had a day job except for giving guitar lessons. I hated going to bed, even as a kid. I always stayed up late at night. Edgar was better than I was about going to bed. They’d tell us to go to bed-but I always got right back up. I’d get back up, come out of my room, go in my walk-in closet, and put my radio under my pillow. I’d put my ear up to the pillow, so I could hear it, but nobody else could.

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