Lonnie Johnson was an interesting dude. Among the most brilliant guitar technicians ever recorded, he completely dominated sophisticated blues and ragtime playing (Robert Johnson, among others, was a fan and imitator), and laid a solid foundation for jazz guitar. Literally, that is: if you look at early jazz guitar compilations, he pops up, both alone and in duets with the much-imitated guitarist Eddie Lang. Mr. Johnson's strumming interspersed with tightly-phrased little stingers of single-note playing set up a template for modern blues, r&b, rock, etc., lead guitar. A few other folks did this too, but his style seems to have really been the model for almost everyone who followed. As an instrumentalist, he was, especially early on, astonishingly inventive, and his fingers were precise and freakily nimble. You could compare him to other transformational instrumentalists like Louis Armstrong, Jimi Hendrix, Jimmy Smith, Art Tatum, etc. without injustice. And he was, in my unimportant opinion, an absolutely terrible singer, who sang a ton of ridiculously schmaltzy songs. Perhaps this is why, unlike the others listed above, he's largely forgotten today except by guitar nerds and historian types. Luckily, he recorded so many sides that there's no shortage of wheat hidden among the chaff.
Anyhow, this here is a pretty random collection of older stuff by him, not from any album in particular (to be honest, this is the result of me googling for free mp3s, then cramming them all in one folder)... There are some guitar duets (the ones with Eddie Lang are pretty amazing), some with singing by him, some sung by others, some solo instrumentals. Some of the instrumentals are insanely great. I recommend especially 'Swing Out Rhythm' and 'Playing With The Strings' to your attention. Just listening will give the average guitarist blisters.
I recommend looking around for more- there's lots of it, and much of it is excellent. Some of his more traditional blues recordings even sound like country blues, and can be pretty great. (The guy had range- down-home on one end, suave and genteel on the other). He was an interesting arranger and actually wrote lyrics (as opposed to many blues singers' practice of slapping together as many couplets as came to mind). Avoid the 1940s stuff, in which he croons jazz standards in a nasal, minimally inflected voice, while strumming flatly. Some of this is neat but it gets dull. (I can't get through three songs in a row of the Folkways compilation, for instance). The early, hot-jazz, ragtime flipouts, and the rootsy acoustic blues songs, are where he's at his best.
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