Johnny Winter Caricature

Johnny Winter Caricature, illustrated here on May 3, 1969 age 25.

Winters was an American blues singer and guitarist. Best known for his high-energy blues-rock albums and live performances in the late 1960s and 1970s, Winter also produced three Grammy Award-winning albums for blues singer and guitarist Muddy Waters.

Johnny Winter was born in Beaumont, Texas, where he and his younger brother Edgar (born 1946) were nurtured at an early age by their parents in musical pursuits.

Johnny and his brother, both of whom were born with albinism, began performing at an early age and sang at churches, weddings and Rotary Club gatherings.

Winter caught his biggest break in December 1968, when Mike Bloomfield, invited him to sing and play a song during a Bloomfield and Al Kooper concert at the Fillmore East in New York City. As it happened, representatives of Columbia Records were at the concert.
Winter played and sang B.B. King’s “It’s My Own Fault” to loud applause and, within a few days, was signed to what was reportedly the largest advance in the history of the recording industry at that time: $600,000.

Winter’s first Columbia album, Johnny Winter, was recorded and released in 1969.
The album featured a few selections that became Winter signature songs, including his composition “Dallas”, “Good Morning Little School Girl”, and “Be Careful with a Fool”.
The same year, the Winter trio toured and performed at several rock festivals, including Woodstock.

With brother Edgar added as a full member of the group, Winter also recorded his second album, Second Winter, in Nashville in 1969. The two-record album, which only had three recorded sides (the fourth was blank), introduced a couple more staples of Winter’s concerts, including “Johnny B. Goode” and Bob Dylan’s “Highway 61 Revisited”. Also at this time Johnny entered into an intimate, albeit short-lived affair with Janis Joplin.

In 1970 Winter formed a new band with the remnants of the McCoys, guitarist Rick Derringer, bassist Randy Jo Hobbs, and drummer Randy Z. Originally to be called “Johnny Winter and the McCoys”, the name was shortened to “Johnny Winter And”, which was also the name of their first album. The album included Derringer’s “Rock and Roll, Hoochie Koo” and signaled a more rock-oriented direction for Winter.

Winter’s momentum was throttled when he sank into heroin addiction during the early 1970s.

In 1988, he was inducted into the Blues Hall of Fame, the first non-African-American performer to be inducted into the Hall.

Over his career, Winters would release 15 more albums, ending with his last studio album, Step Back (which features appearances by Joe Bonamassa, Eric Clapton, Billy Gibbons, Leslie West, Brian Setzer, Dr. John, Paul Nelson, Ben Harper and Joe Perry), was released on September 2, 2014.
The album won a Grammy for the Best Blues Album in 2015.

Winter was professionally active until the time of his death near Zurich, Switzerland, on July 16, 2014. He was found dead in his hotel room two days after his last performance, at the Cahors Blues Festival in France. According to his guitarist friend and record producer Paul Nelson, Winter died of emphysema combined with pneumonia.
He was 70 years old.