Music video by Johnny Winter performing Death Letter. (C) 2014 Megaforce Records
Johnny Winter
Winter’s own musical legacy began as a 5-year-old playing clarinet in Beaumont, Texas. He continued on the instrument for four years but had to quit when an orthodontist informed the youth that he had a serious overbite. Winter switched to ukelele but that only lasted until rock and roll came out. His father advised him to switch to guitar because there weren’t too many famous ukulele players that came to his mind. A local disc jockey named Clarence Garlow turned Winter on to the blues through his Bon Ton Show on radio station KJET. The two soon became friends as Winter began to build up an impressive record collection that allowed him to study the blues masters and cop their licks. “I would learn how to play a record note-for-note,”Winter told Don Menn in The Guitar Player Book. “After I kind of got the feel of what was supposed to be going on, I just took what I heard and assimilated it, and I guess it would come out part mine and part everybody else’s… I tried to make it my own after I got the basic things down.” Read more…
