Johnny Winter burst on the national scene with a barrage of guitar pyrotechnics during a period when blues was super-hip to the rock ‘n’ roll crowd and staked his claim to fame with his first album for Columbia, Johnny Winter, a 1969 showcase of his high-energy reworkings of blues classics. Rolling Stone had provided the advance hype in a December 1968 article heralding "a 130-pound cross-eyed albino bluesman with long fleecy hair playing some of the gutsiest blues guitar you have ever heard.’ Winter grew up in blues territory (Leland, Mississippi, where his father had once served as mayor) but began his blues/rock journey as a teenager with his brother Edgar in Beaumont, Texas. (The Winter family was living in Mississippi when his mother became pregnant; she chose to go to her hometown of Beaumont for Johnny’s birth on Feb. 23, 1944, and then returned to Leland. A few years later the family resettled in Beaumont.) Johnny Winter became the first of sixteen Winter albums to hit Billboard‘s Top 200 charts. While his next albums were more rock-oriented, Winter later refocused his energies on blues by producing a series of albums by his idol, Muddy Waters, recording Sonny Terry for his own Mad Albino imprint, and signing with Chicago’s Alligator Records for three chart albums in the 1980s. In between dealing with health problems, both drug-related and hereditary, Winter managed to keep his career going and continued to return to the blues for inspiration into the 21st century. His biography, Raisin’ Cain: The Wild And Raucous Story of Johnny Winter, was published in 2010. Winter was the first non-African American performer elected to the Blues Hall of Fame.
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— Jim O’Neal
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