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

songs I liked—‘Baby, You Don’t Have to Go,’ ‘A String to Your Heart,’ ‘Big Boss Man.’ He was one of the first black blues artists who successfully crossed over to white audiences.
    “It’s important to listen to different styles of music when you’re young—be exposed to them because you learn more. Listenin’ to early blues artists—you can tell where it’s all comin’ from. You just want to know what came first and where it came from.”
    Although Johnny’s early vocal influences came from his father’s barbershop quartet and his harmonies with Edgar, he soon abandoned that musical style. He wanted to develop his own style and was impressed by the bluesy vocal renderings of Bobby “Blue” Bland and Ray Charles. When he was about ten or twelve, he created his own method of voice training to help him develop the scream that has become his trademark—especially on his battle cry of “rock ‘n’ roll!”
    “Singing is something I really had to work at,” he says. “I always had a good ear for music but my voice didn’t have a lot of depth to it, especially the scream. The scream seemed like a better style to me—I was trying to get a sound like Bobby Bland and Ray Charles. I really had to practice that. I can remember when I was a kid putting a pillow over my mouth and putting my fingers in my ears so I could hear what was going on and nobody else could. I’d practice screaming into a pillow in my bedroom. I couldn’t just start screamin’ ’cause people would think we were getting killed or something. I really did practice a long time. At first it would sound like somebody hit me, just a yell. But a controlled scream, especially if you want to scream, get that riff, and use vibrato at the same time, took a lot of work. It didn’t come natural.”
    Johnny’s passion for blues wasn’t shared by his friends or his brother. The sounds were too primitive for teenagers who grew up listening to country and western or Top Forty songs on the radio.
    “When I first started playing blues, my friends didn’t know what it was, and didn’t like it,” says Johnny. “They asked me what I would do with that kind of music—‘Ain’t nobody like it.’ I said, ‘It’s good music.’ My friends would just listen to whatever was on the radio, and Edgar’s never been into blues that much. He just learned from me, from listening to my records.”
    Although Johnny is known as a Texas guitarist, he doesn’t like to categorize himself, the music he plays, or the music he grew up listening to. The nuances are often subtle; and categories just can’t capture or describe the music he loves.
    “It’s hard to say the difference between Mississippi Delta and Texas blues,” says Johnny. “Delta blues is more slide. There wasn’t much slide for Texas, but there was Blind Willie Johnson and he did church music. ‘Dark Is the Night, Cold Is the Ground’ is one of the best slide songs I’ve ever heard. He was an early Texas slide player, one of the first Texas bluesmen. His music had a whole lot less structure—he would play without any meter at all. He was totally different than anybody else. Definitely country blues.
    “I don’t consider myself ‘Texas blues,’ because I play a whole lot of different styles. Texas blues is influenced by country and western, jazz, and western swing. Generally, there are more instruments with Texas blues; but then again, there’s Lightnin’ Hopkins, and he plays mostly by himself. You can hear T-Bone Walker and Lightnin’ Hopkins and there’s no similarity between the two. There’s so many guitar players from Texas and none of them sound the same. Albert Collins doesn’t sound like anybody else; Gatemouth Brown didn’t sound like anybody else either. He played a lot of styles: blues, jazz, zydeco. His styles were different from anybody else; his tuning was much different from other people too. In his early records he sounded just like T-Bone—note for