Since the appearance of this article in Blues Unlimited, little additional significant factual information has emerged about Louise Johnson and she largely remains a mystery. Census researcher Bob Eagle recently suggested that Johnson was born about 1908 in Tennessee and possibly lived near Son House in 1940 on the Tate Place at Banks in Mississippi. She has more recently appeared on various reissues focused on Mississippi prewar Delta blues, including the Document and Yazoo labels.
—Mark Camarigg
A Handful of Keys: Louise Johnson Again!
Bob Hall and Richard Noblett
Blues Unlimited #115 (Sept./Oct. 1975)
Very few piano recordings have caused as much controversy as the four sides made by Louise Johnson in May 1930 for Paramount, and as promised in our discussion of Cripple Clarence Lofton (BU 113), we are returning to these recordings in this article.
As is fairly common with female blues artists very little is known about Louise Johnson. She is thought to have been about 28 when she recorded, which places her birth around the turn of the century. She appears to have spent most of her life in the Clarksdale area of Mississippi and was believed to have been from Robinsonville. The pianist John “Red” Williams remembers her in Tunica in the late 1920s. She was a small girl about twenty years old at the time, playing piano in a joint attached to the cotton-oil mill quarters (Olsson 1970, 80). By 1930 she was playing and living on Joe Kirby’s plantation near Claxton on Highway 61, Mississippi. Here she seems to have met Willie Brown and, through him, Charley Patton and Son House. She appears, at this time, to have been playing for one Liny Armstrong, presumably a juke owner.
From the collection of John Tefteller and Blues Images. Used with permission. www.bluesimages.com.
When Art Laibley was traveling through Lula on his way to Texas, he stopped off to get Patton to arrange to go up to Grafton, Wisconsin, to record for Paramount. He left 100 dollars for expenses and another 100 dollars for Wheeler Ford (one of the Delta Big Four) to drive the artists up. Patton went up with Son House and Willie Brown and they picked up Louise Johnson at Joe Kirby’s. All the musicians, at this time, stayed around Joe Kirby’s largely because they made more corn whiskey on this plantation than anywhere else, and it seems possible that Son House was also living there at this time.
Louise Johnson seems to have been well known by the musicians and was one of Patton’s many girlfriends, but just out of Memphis she attached her affections to House after an argument with Patton. At Grafton they all stayed in a small hotel kept by Paramount for their artists. It is here that the story gets a bit confusing, for Son House states that Lemon Jefferson was at the hotel and shared a room with Patton and Brown, but Jefferson was almost certainly dead then. At the recording Louise Johnson was said to be so nervous that she needed the verbal encouragement of House and Brown, although it seems just as likely that they were all drunk.
After the recording session very little is known about Louise, but she seems to have moved to the Clarksdale area, where she continued to play in the juke houses on the plantation in the company of Son House and Willie Brown. Around the early forties she is said to have been going to Memphis, but no trace can be found of her there. It would probably be impossible to trace her now, for she could have married and changed her name or simply stopped playing. In any case, Son House seemed pretty certain that she is dead.1
What precisely is the controversy that surrounds this session? It derives from two conflicting statements, one by Clarence Lofton to the effect that he accompanied a female blues singer for Paramount in the twenties and, secondly, one by Son House that Louise Johnson played her own piano accompaniment. Previously we have outlined fairly strong evidence that Lofton was not the pianist. This was based on the keys used during the recordings and on the fact that there is no such thing as an “embryonic” Lofton on record. To our minds there is no doubt that Lofton was not the pianist.
Son House is described by John Fahey as honest, but not possessing a uniformly accurate memory and as freely admitting when he was confused. Son was, however, positive in his identification of Louise Johnson as the pianist. Yet in spite of this it is difficult for many people to believe that Johnson did accompany herself and much argument has been aimed at disproving this.2 The main objection is the independence of the piano and vocal parts, which is atypical of vocalist/pianists, who normally sing a line and then play an answer phrase on the piano. We concluded: “either Louise Johnson was a quite exceptional performer or we must look elsewhere for her accompanist.”
The simplest way to locate unknown accompanists is to look at surrounding matrices. Two possible pianists present themselves here: Rudy Foster (Pm 12981) and the unknown pianist who accompanied Marie Griffin (Pm 13015). However, neither of these pianists sound in the slightest like the supposed Louise Johnson accompanist. The Rudy Foster sides are believed to be his own piano, but we doubt this and will return to these sides at a later date. In the case of Marie Griffin the pianist plays in a style reminiscent of Cow Cow Davenport but is not as accomplished, and aurally it seems highly improbable that Marie Griffin’s accompanist is the Louise Johnson pianist.
Further, in reviewing the hundreds of piano recordings which were made at this time, we have found only two which resemble aurally the Louise Johnson accompaniments, and these were supposedly recorded at a later Paramount session. The artist concerned is the obscure Kingfish Bill Tomlin, and Godrich and Dixon list the session as follows:3
KINGFISH BILL TOMLIN: vocal. acc. unk. piano.
Grafton, Wis., c. November 1930.
| L-618-2 Dupree Blues | Pm 13057 F |
| L-619-1 Army Blues | Pm 13034 F |
| L-620-1 Hot Box | Pm 13034 F (F) |
| L-621-1 Mean and Unkind Blues | Pm 13057 B (B ) |
(The apparent keys of the recordings are given by each issue number. In those cases where we believe that the apparent key is not the true key, we have given the possible true keys in parentheses.)
There are almost certainly two pianists involved in the Tomlin session, and in view of the key displacement on the last two tracks, probably sides are accompanied by a generally inept pianist who is almost certainly Tomlin himself. It is interesting to note that these two songs are fairly traditional and Tomlin himself sounds [like] an older singer. On “Hot Box” he gives a clue to his origins by referring to “mamlish dog,” which would indicate he came from Alabama. What, however, appears to have happened after these two tracks is that Tomlin was replaced by another pianist after “Army Blues,” another fairly rare WW I blues, and full of mistakes. “Hot Box” and “Mean and Unkind Blues” are more strictly blues than the previous two titles, and the piano accompaniment is strikingly similar to that on the Louise Johnson records and in the same keys.
A secondary hypothesis in the debate about Louise Johnson’s accompanist is the view that there are two pianists on her records (Heath 1970). This view derives from the existence of a jump in the microgroove reissues of “By the Moon and Stars” after the first 12 bars of the vocal. While this break exists on the microgroove reissues, it is not so apparent on the 78 and appears to be merely a change in tempo. Certainly there is no musical evidence whatever to indicate that two pianists were present on the session.
Apart from Son House’s statements and [the fact] that Louise Johnson is known from elsewhere to have been a pianist, there is internal evidence from the recordings themselves, such as the spoken comments by House and Brown throughout the records. The most important of these for our purposes are as follows:
L-398-1 All Night Long Blues
“Play it long time, Louise” just before the vocal.
“Play it long time, Louise” after the eighth bar of the first verse.
“Play ’em, little mama” just before the verse preceding the piano break.
L-399-2 Long Ways from Home
“Play it long time, Miss Louise” just before the first verse.
“Play ’em, Miss Piano Whupper” during the piano break.
L-419-1 On the Wall (contrary to Godrich and Dixon there are comments on this track)
“Do it a long time, honey” toward the end of the piano break.
There are no comments on “By the Moon and Stars.”
Admittedly some of the transcriptions are a bit doubtful. For example, “Louise” could be “Lewis” and “Miss” could be “Mrs.” or “Mr.,” but overall, we believe the above are accurate.
What conclusions, then, can be drawn from all this discussion? We feel that in view of the evidence, notwithstanding our previous statement, there seems little doubt that Louise ranked as one of the finest blues pianists of all time. An intriguing possibility remains: did Louise Johnson accompany Kingfish Bill Tomlin? We will probably never know. We do know that Son House was invited back by Paramount but didn’t go, and so it is not beyond the realms of possibility that Louise Johnson was also invited back and accepted the invitation. There is also evidence (see Discographical Note) that the Louise Johnson session took place not in May but in August, and thus it may be that she and Kingfish Bill Tomlin were recorded at the same time.
We would like to thank Gayle Dean Wardlow, Francis Smith, John Mastaka, and the John Edwards Memorial Foundation Inc. at the Folklore and Mythology Center, UCLA. Naturally, any error of fact or inference is the responsibility of the authors.
1. The biographical information comes from a variety of sources and only a joint credit is really feasible. We would like to thank Gayle Dean Wardlow, Francis Smith, Steve Calt, and Steve La Vere. Reference was also made to Peris (1967), Fahey (1970), Godrich (1969), and Charters (1967).
2. See, for example, F. Owen with J. Langmead (1965) and R. Heath (1970).
3. [Robert Dixon and John Godrich’s Blues & Gospel Records: 1890–1943 is an exhaustive listing of African American recordings made up to the end of 1943.]
The dating of Paramount recordings is always problematic, because no company files are known to exist. In the case of the recordings made around the Louise Johnson session, a precise date is imputed because a test pressing dated May 28, 1930, of matrix L-348-2 for issue on Pm 13121 is in the possession of Irene Scruggs. As a result of this, most of the records made around this matrix are dated May 28, which we feel is possibly misleading not least because of the number of recordings made at this time. If we assume that matrices L-312 to L-440 were recorded consecutively, then many days were involved in this session. In addition to this, we feel that the recording-speed fault on the first two Louise Johnson titles indicates a probable known point at which a session would have been terminated. The other two Louise Johnson titles do not display this fault and are undoubtedly a different session.
However, Son House remembers the session as being in August, and the only recording from this session which was “advertised,” Pm 12990, appears in a dealer’s listing for October, which would fit more accurately with an August recording date. The linking of all these sessions seems to result from Wheeler Ford driving the artists up to Grafton. Wheeler Ford was a member of the Delta Big Four, and it is assumed that they recorded at the same time as Johnson, House, etc. It seems equally possible, however, that they did not, for it is obvious that all these people did not go to Grafton in the same car and we are left with the problem of how the other members of the Delta Big Four got to the session. What seems just as likely is that Wheeler Ford was traveling back from Grafton with Laibley or was in his employ and merely took the artists to Grafton.
If we accept an August date for these recordings, it makes it possible that Louise Johnson accompanied Kingfish Bill Tomlin, for there is no reason to accept the November dating of his session. There is, however, a gap of some 200 matrices between the recordings, and this prompts us to ask whether the Paramount L matrix series truly reflects recording order. It seems increasingly likely that this is not so.
Charters, S. The Bluesmen. Oak, 1967.
Fahey, J. Charley Patton. Studio Vista, 1970.
Godrich, J. “Discographical Games People Play.” Storyville 23 (June/July 1969).
Heath, R. “The Louise Johnson Controversy.” Blues World 29 (April 1970): 14–15. See also “Blues Forum 205” in Blues World 32 (July 1970): 19, and “Blues Forum 252” in Blues World 38 (Spring 1971): 12.
Olsson, B. Memphis Blues. Studio Vista, 1970.
Owen, F., with J. Langmead. “Where Have All the Loftons Gone?” Storyville 2 (December 1965): 11–12.
Peris, N. “Son House Interview—Pt. 1.” 78 Quarterly 1, no. 1 (1967): 59–61.
Godrich, J., and R.M.W. Dixon. Blues & Gospel Records, 1902–1942. Storyville, 1969.
Studies in Jazz Discography 1. Rutgers University, 1971.
Vreede, M. E. Paramount 12000/13000 Series. Storyville, 1971.
In not so recent years, digital technology has given vintage music restorers a wonderful tool that not only helps them to get the most out of what remains in the grooves but also allows enthusiastic amateurs to easily carry out tasks that would have taken highly skilled engineers weeks to complete. We can now “cut and paste” bits of the music, remove sections, and even rearrange the order.
It did seem possible that the clue to the identity of the piano player could be found in the comments heard during the songs, so (and this to many people may sound like sacrilege) I set about cutting the music out (digitally, not physically) to leave just the comments so that they would be easier to concentrate on—the music being too powerful otherwise.
As I progressed with this heinous crime, what was becoming clear, to my ears at least, was that there are more people around in the background adding comments than just Son House, Charley Patton, and Willie Brown.
Son House is easily recognizable on the two takes of “All Night Long,” by his booming rich voice—“Lord let’s have a meeting here” or “Louise, you telling,” while Willie Brown appears to play only a minor role, and I believe that it’s his gruff tones that give out the occasional “Hey, hey”, or “Ah, sure now.” Charley Patton is perhaps the one who makes the first comment—“Play it long time, honey,” and later on, “Play it long time, Louise”—so do we need any more proof than that that Louise is indeed the piano player?
But there is some conflicting evidence as someone in the background chirps in with “I can sit here all night long” and “I can play ’em all night long,” or maybe that’s “I can stay here all night long,” and there appears to be someone else who shouts “wait till my woman comes.” Someone else joins in on “Long Ways from Home,” but in a more conversational tone. At times he can be heard in the background, talking away almost as though they are talking somebody through something difficult; unfortunately the words are too indistinct to pick out anything that makes sense. It’s interesting to note that there is more in the way of background comments on “Long Ways” than on any other track, but Louise can be clearly heard to say, “Now, you can do it a long time, boy,” so is that addressed to the piano player? And why does she say, “I’m trying to keep up” on “All Night Long” as if she is indeed struggling to stay with another piano player?
Also the whole session is now thought to be more likely to have taken place in July-August 1930 starting at L-398-1 with Louise Johnson’s “All Night Long” and ending with L-433, Charley Patton’s “Bird Nest Bound,” a total of thirty-five tracks, and that’s without outtakes and false starts. Even given the twelve-hour day that Paramount workers were said to have put in during their heyday (which was past by this date), recording one song every twenty minutes would take quite some effort, especially with four artists and both the piano and guitar(s) to set up. It’s more likely, then, that there were two separate sessions at least and that Louise started her respective sessions.
This may be the reason why the background comments are few and far between during “On the Wall” and no comments at all on “By the Moon and Stars”—perhaps they had indeed sobered up after a couple of days, or run out of corn whiskey! Certain the piano style seems more confident on the last two tracks.
On balance there is more evidence to suggest that Louise Johnson is the piano player than not, and perhaps the last spoken comment on all of these wonderful recordings is relevant—“play it a long time, honey.”