Johnny Winter
| Johnny Winter | |
|---|---|
Winter in 2007
|
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| Background information | |
| Birth name | John Dawson Winter III |
| Born |
February 23, 1944 Beaumont, Texas, US |
| Died | July 16, 2014 (aged 70) near Zurich, Switzerland |
| Genres | Electric blues, blues rock, rock and roll, Texas blues |
| Occupation(s) | Musician, songwriter, producer |
| Instruments | Vocals, guitar, mandolin, harmonica |
| Years active | 1959–2014 |
| Labels | Columbia, Blue Sky, Alligator, Point Blank |
| Associated acts | Edgar Winter, Tommy Shannon, Muddy Waters |
| Website | johnnywinter |
| Notable instruments | |
|
Gibson Firebird Erlewine Lazer |
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John Dawson Winter III (February 23, 1944 – July 16, 2014), known as Johnny Winter, was an American musician, singer, songwriter, multi-instrumentalist and producer. Best known for his high-energy blues-rock albums and live performances in the late 1960s and 1970s, Winter also produced three Grammy Award-winning albums for blues singer and guitarist Muddy Waters. After his time with Waters, Winter recorded several Grammy-nominated blues albums. In 1988, he was inducted into the Blues Foundation Hall of Fame and in 2003, he was ranked 63rd in Rolling Stone magazine's list of the "100 Greatest Guitarists of All Time".
Johnny Winter was born in Beaumont, Texas, on February 23, 1944. Winter and younger brother Edgar (born 1946) were nurtured at an early age by their parents in musical pursuits. Johnny and his brother, both of whom were born with albinism, began performing at an early age. When he was ten years old, the brothers appeared on a local children's show with Johnny playing ukulele.
His recording career began at the age of fifteen, when his band Johnny and the Jammers released "School Day Blues" on a Houston record label. During this same period, he was able to see performances by classic blues artists such as Muddy Waters, B.B. King, and Bobby Bland. In the early days, Winter would sometimes sit in with Roy Head and the Traits when they performed in the Beaumont area, and in 1967, Winter recorded a single with the Traits: "Tramp" backed with "Parchman Farm" (Universal Records 30496). In 1968, he released his first album The Progressive Blues Experiment, on Austin's Sonobeat Records.
Winter caught his biggest break in December 1968, when Mike Bloomfield, whom he met and jammed with in Chicago, invited him to sing and play a song during a Bloomfield and Al Kooper concert at the Fillmore East in New York City. As it happened, representatives of Columbia Records (which had released the Top Ten Bloomfield/Kooper/Stills Super Session album) were at the concert. Winter played and sang B.B. King's "It's My Own Fault" to loud applause and, within a few days, was signed to what was reportedly the largest advance in the history of the recording industry at that time—$600,000.
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Wikipedia