On Feb. 23, Johnny Winter will be celebrating his 68th birthday in Sighisoara, Romania. I can’t see that he really planned it that way – with the tour schedule he keeps, it could just as easily have been in Bielsko Biala, Poland, or Woodstock, N.Y. or Nagoya, Japan.
At the age of 15, Johnny and his brother Edgar Winter, younger by two years, formed the band Johnny and the Jammers and started to make a name for themselves with the single “School Day Blues.” Johnny Winter was quick to immerse himself in the blues while Edgar Winter’s writing and performance tastes regularly crossed blues, pop, rock and jazz.
Johnny Winter’s website shows 36 discs with his name on them. Allmusic.com attributes 46 titles to him. But head over to Amazon.com and there are no less than 140 titles, many of them live, bootleg or reissues. No matter which source you rely on, Johnny Winter has been a very prolific performer in his time.
For all his output over so many decades, there has to be a special place in Johnny Winter’s heart for that period in the mid 1970s when he produced recordings for Muddy Waters and played in Waters’s band. By that time in his career, Waters was all but forgotten by everyone except the seasoned blues fan. Winter’s work brought Waters back to the limelight and introduced him to a new generations of music fans across the genres.
Winter’s latest release, Roots, came out in 2011. His tour schedule has him playing upwards of 50 gigs over the next three months in 10 countries. In this day and age, in the world of blues and rock ‘n’ roll, 68 is far from old.
Happy birthday, Johnny Winter.
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posted by
Chris Martin
on Feb 23, 2012