Johnny Winter: Beaumont’s White Lightning

Today is the birthday of Johnny Winter. He would be 83 today.

Beaumont, Texas sits in the Golden Triangle — the industrial coastal zone where the refineries run day and night and blues music grew up in the roadhouses between the shift changes. John Dawson Winter III was born there on February 23, 1944. He started playing guitar at eleven. By his teens, he and his brother Edgar were already working the Southeast Texas club circuit. The blues came naturally. Beaumont had always known how to make it.

The Slide That Stopped New York Cold

A 1968 story in Rolling Stone described Winter as an albino blues guitarist from Texas nobody had heard yet. Within weeks, every record label in New York was calling. He signed with Columbia for a reported $600,000 — a staggering advance for 1969. His debut album hit the top twenty. Then he revived Muddy Waters’s career by producing four albums for him in the 1970s, earning Waters three Grammy Awards. Winter died on July 16, 2014, in Zurich. But his slide guitar still burns through the room when you put on a record. Learn more on Wikipedia.