Lonnie Johnson
photo: russell lee · public domain ↗In Storyville, New Orleans, around 1908, teenage Lonnie Johnson was already the second-best musician in a house full of them. "My brother, he played piano, and violin, and guitar," he told the blues historian Paul Oliver decades later. "He was better than me." Eleven children, a violinist father who led a string band — "there was music all around us," Johnson recalled, "and in my family you'd better play something, even if you just banged on a tin can." The 1918 Spanish flu epidemic killed nearly all of them while Johnson toured Europe; he came home to St. Louis broke, entered an OKeh talent contest in 1925 on a whim, and won an eleven-year recording contract. He cut 572 sides across four decades, inventing single-string guitar soloing along the way, and was still playing when he died in Toronto in 1970.
In 1925, Johnson watched Sylvester Weaver — a day laborer from Louisville who two years earlier had become the first guitarist ever captured on a blues record — play behind the singer Sara Martin, and something in him sat up. The blues historian Paul Oliver, who later taped hours of Johnson's own recollections, reported that "Johnson was very impressed by Weaver's guitar playing — in fact he very seldom spoke about anyone else's work." Whatever passed between them that night, Johnson made his own recording debut within months.
listen forWeaver's "Guitar Blues" drops the strummed, chordal backing typical of 1923 blues sides for slow, sliding single-string melody lines — a guitar voice going it alone, two years before Johnson's own debut. On Johnson's 1926 instrumental "To Do This, You Got to Know How," listen for the same idea carried further: the blues writer Paul Merry describes Johnson there "playing and sustaining single notes," turning the guitar into a lead voice rather than accompaniment. No recording shows Weaver teaching Johnson the trick directly — but Weaver's side proves the idea already existed on wax.