Raisin' Cain: The Wild and Raucous Story of Johnny Winter (Kindle Edition) by Mary Lou Sullivan Read Free Book Online

records.
    “The lady there bought a lot of records for the black juke joints. Her husband put jukeboxes in black clubs so she had a good selection of blues artists. I bought literally every blues artist I could find, even if I didn’t know who they were. The record stores had little record players where you could listen to ’em. I liked everything. I just really love them. It made my style broader because I literally bought everybody I could find so I didn’t sound just like one person. I heard everybody.”
    Johnny’s first blues single was Howlin’ Wolf’s “Somebody in My Home,” released on Chess in 1957. His first Muddy Waters single was “She’s Nineteen Years Old,” featuring Little Walter Jacobs on harp, released on Chess Records in 1958. “Muddy’s records probably are my favorites,” he says. “I’d play the record, then listen to it, and learn how to do it. I would play it note for note when I first learned, but later I’d change it to my own style.
    “I’d practice six or eight hours a day in my room after school. From the time I got home—with whatever my newest record was. I played so many different styles that they turned into my style. At first I’d try to learn how the artist played, and then I’d switch it around and play it my own way. I never did want to be like any particular artist—just learn from them. Listen and copy little parts of everybody’s stuff.”
    Johnny’s first album was B. B. King’s Singin’ the Blues, released in 1957; his second was The Best of Muddy Waters, released in 1958. That Muddy Waters’s album was the first time Johnny heard a slide guitar; the sound perplexed and fascinated him at the same time.
    “Muddy Waters was the first slide guitarist I ever heard,” he says. “It was always really interesting and amazing to me when I heard it. I hadn’t read anything about it and I didn’t know what it was. I could tell the guy was fretting the guitar and sliding something. At first I thought it was the steel guitar until I realized he was a fretting it also. It was a mystery to me how you could do both. I was trying to figure out what was goin’ on, and how it was being done. I had to listen, learn how he did it, and practice it. I had never seen anyone play a slide when I taught myself. I used the top of a lipstick holder for my first slide. Then I used my watch crystal. It sounded pretty good but it broke the watch. Then I had a test tube I bought at a drugstore. I cut it off and that worked pretty good. I was about fourteen when I started playing, but I didn’t get real serious until I was about twenty-five.
    “Robert Johnson knocked me out—he was a genius. As to him selling his soul to the devil; I don’t know, it’s hard to say about something like that. He sure was better than everybody else. Later on, I bought Son House: Father of the Delta Blues. Their styles were real different—it took me awhile to get used to ’em. They were more country sounding than the 45s I’d been buying. Most of ’em were just guitar and singer, recorded in hotel rooms. Both were big influences on my acoustic slide playing.
    “Elmore James was also an influence on my slide playing. Elmore played the same licks on a lot of his songs. His one little lick that he played over and over again—I picked that up. Can’t really describe it, but I liked him a lot. He was similar to Robert Johnson—his stuff sounds the same too a lot of times.
    “Little Walter influenced my guitar playing too. I was good enough to be able to hear something and play it; I would play the same stuff on guitar that he played on harp. He was a great harp player. He played clear notes and did tongue blocking too. I liked everything Little Walter put out.
    “Jimmy Reed was one of the guys I heard a lot around Texas. I bought a lot of his albums. He played guitar and harp and wrote a lot of songs. Nobody else sounded like Jimmy. He played a lot of high register notes on harp and he did