Blues researchers face the difficulties inherent to the study of an oppressed and silenced culture. These difficulties are now exponentially more problematic as decades pass and scholars’ topics of interest have either died or, in the case of a musical style or a particular song, slipped into oblivion due to a lack of recording or any living proponents of the music to keep it alive. When researching an artist as diverse in his playing and abilities as “bluesman” Lonnie Johnson, these topics open into an array of sub-genres that all need to be considered systematically. In her book, The Inconvenient Lonnie Johnson: Blues, Race, Identity, Julia Simon addresses these difficulties as she researches Johnson, his work, his persona, his place in African American culture, and his importance as a major figure in twentieth-century jazz and blues music.
As Simon points out, history dubs Johnson a blues player even though he played with early jazz greats such as Duke Ellington, Eddie Lang, and Charlie Creath, and even played as a member of Louis Armstrong’s Hot Five band in Chicago in 1927. Johnson was a multi-instrumentalist, having been recorded playing guitar, violin, banjo, piano, harmonium, and kazoo. He was a consummate musician in high demand as a session player who recorded in multiple styles including jazz, blues, vaudeville and popular songs, ballads, and swing tunes. After enlightening the reader to Johnson’s abilities as a player and his many accomplishments both in and out of the studio, Simon asks the obvious question: If Johnson’s lengthy career led him to play both solo and in ensemble groups, and in a variety of musical settings and genres, and he spent his life as an accomplished working musician, why then is he primarily known as a blues guitar player? Simon’s many insights into Johnson’s divergent yet simultaneous personas—the performer, the Black man living in Jim Crow America, and the consummate artist—lead the reader through a brilliant labyrinth of historical facts and scholarly insights.
Simon breaks her book down into four discerning chapters. In the first, “Musical Practice and Place,” she discusses the effect that the cities of New Orleans (where Johnson was born) and St. Louis had on Johnson’s early life, his musical awareness, and the importance place and its surrounding culture hold in the process of musical creativity. She follows with “Self-Construction and Self-Awareness,” which introduces identity into her study. Identity will be a mainstay throughout the remaining chapters in the book. In this chapter, she examines the cognitive choices Johnson makes to create and maintain his public, professional, and private personas. In the third chapter, Simon addresses the importance of “Social Relations,” and how race, gender, and culture ultimately affect Johnson’s persona and his music. In her final chapter, “The Suffering Self,” Simon examines the primary reasons Johnson is viewed by posterity as a bluesman while it openly disregards his many other accomplishments as a successful musician. Simon does a masterful job in each of these chapters coordinating historical fact, often questionable remembrances by Johnson and his contemporaries, and thoughtful lyrical analysis of selections from his vast body of work.
Simon has been able to document 724 songs credited to Johnson as either composer or instrumentalist; however, she believes “that total is likely incomplete.” Simon’s scholarship here is impressive and her writing demonstrates a sincere devotion to the Johnson corpus. Her analytical approach and insightful understanding of Johnson’s place within the multiple cultures through which he traveled during his approximately fifty years as a professional musician, from 1920 until his death in Toronto in 1970, as well as her thoughtful, yet reserved, approach to the intricacies of selective memory that personal interviews entail, place Simon’s book as a solid addition to not only blues scholarship but also the developing field of Lonnie Johnson scholarship. However, having spent many decades immersing myself in the lyrics and song structures of early blues artists, I never bought into the idea that one can gain greater insight into the mind of a blues player by studying their lyrics than one could gain access to the mind of Shakespeare by reading Hamlet. That is to say, there may be some light shed, but the mysteries of authorial process evade such quick solutions. Blues lyrics, thoughts, and ideas were freely shared among those practicing this art form, just as Shakespeare was not the first to write about the Prince of Denmark. Therefore, regarding Johnson’s lyrics as his own and not something he may have picked up from street musicians in New Orleans, St. Louis, or other cities through which he traveled, is a slippery slope at best. However, Simon does fit these few song lyrics (from an astoundingly sizable music catalogue) solidly into her study and relates their importance well within the context of Johnson’s professional career.
To say Johnson is “inconvenient” for modern-day blues scholars is an understatement. Johnson’s influence on early pre-war bluesmen can easily be found in comments, interviews, and the playing styles of other bluesmen spanning several decades. Robert Johnson himself was known to promote his persona by referring to himself as “one of the Johnson boys” although he has no documented familial attachment to the Johnson family of New Orleans. The inconvenience of Lonnie Johnson lies in his abilities as a musician, and the resultant difficulties involved in consigning him to one narrow genre while he was obviously a master in many. The “race records” culture of the time added to the inevitable discrepancies of his status as a performer, as did the white record-executive culture that would oversee most of his work. Simon beautifully breaks down the intricacies of Johnson’s work, the culture in which he and it were created, his identity of self as a performer, and most importantly, his prominence as a major influence in American music. Inconvenient or not, Lonnie Johnson has earned a standing role in the lexicon of twentieth-century American music and Simon has taken a major step in helping us understand the importance of his contributions.
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[Review length: 1000 words • Review posted on October 7, 2023]