The Unsung Blues Legend: The Living Room Sessions
Forty years after beginning a remarkable recording career spanning multiple generations and genres, New Orleans-born blues and jazz guitar virtuoso Lonnie Johnson sat in a friend's living room in Queens, New York, with an acoustic guitar and a reel-to-reel recorder. The songs he performed that night make up this enchanting set of classics that adds yet another dimension to the great musician's legacy. Here, we find Johnson at age 66, his plaintive voice and guitar in stunning form, mining a 20th-century musical landscape for folksy treasures as diverse asBessie Smith's "Back Water Blues,"Duke Ellington's "Solitude,"Hoagy Carmichael's "Rockin' Chair," andKurt Weill's "September Song," with "Danny Boy" and "Careless Love" also among the surprises. Although it was recorded in 1965 on crude equipment, it's easy to see from this essential CD why Lonnie Johnson deeply affected so many American musical immortals, from Robert Johnson, Jerry Lee Lewis, and Elvis to Jimi Hendrix and Stevie Ray Vaughan.--Alan Greenberg