[Dixielandjazz] Lonnie Joihnson -- Elmer Snowden

[ROBERT R. CALDER]

Lonnie was really more of the pre-jazz generation, with the ballads in his 
repertoire from the start, and a master guitarist (excellent fiddler too) close 
enough to what became blues to work things out applying a fairly orthodox guitar 
technique, make dozens of recordings, and have a lot of fans and imitators, not 
least the superlatively blues-accomplished Robert Johnson.  He was a somewhat 
limited improviser, but very successful as a singer-guitarist right into the 
1950s, when even he became a janitor. It can seem a little odd to find a guy 
playing electric guitar and singing on the 1950s "R&B" King label and producing 
the Johnson ballad repertoire -- even into Count John McCormack sentimental 
repertoire. 

The duets with Eddie Lang are of course something else, and there is another 
pair of them in accompaniment to Texas Alexander. Obviously there were some 
mediterranean influences in common between the Italian Lang and the Louisiana 
Johnson. 

Unfortunately Lonnie preceded Ike Turner in marrying a singer who later 
expressed her unhappiness -- Mary Johnson Blues is about having become Johnson 
by marrying Lonnie. 


Elmer Snowden was a north east coast professional, orthodoxly schooled and the 
leader of a big band after his earlier Ellington and almost pre-jazz 
involvement. See him with Roy Eldridge and Dickie Wells and Big Sid on YouTube, 
and still playing banjo.  Unfortunately the brilliant and somewhat younger Teddy 
Bunn never got taken up around 1960 to resume acoustic guitar.  And he was 
crippled by a stroke around the time he was thinking of getting together with 
his very accomplished pianist brother Jimmy to form what he said to Peter Tanner 
would be like the King Cole trio, only better. 


Josh White was an east coast bluesman who managed to survive as a professional 
musician by getting in with folkies and indeed Commies, a very different later 
career after an earlier one unlike the other guys mentioned. One of his betters 
as a bluesman, Buddy Moss, was brought back to recording after he'd called in on 
Josh's dressing-room when Josh was touring. Josh didn't have the same breadth of 
musical base, and by the time he was in Britain as a folkie his singing had lost 
the edge it had on his early recordings -- unlike Buddy Moss, whose voice did 
start to show its years, and whose south-eastern rural background made him quite 
different from jazzmen. Better say he was specialised rather than limited. Josh 
could ot course work with Chris Barber, and people used to think of blues as 
pre-jazz. But as Eddie Lambert once exclaimed, it's too accomplished and too big 
to be called pre-anything!