John Dawson Winter III was born on February 23, 1944, in Beaumont, Texas, and died on July 16, 2014, near Zurich, Switzerland, two days after performing at the Cahors Blues Festival in France. He was an American blues rock guitarist, singer, and record producer — one of the most raw, high-energy, and technically accomplished blues guitarists of his generation, a figure whose importance to the continuity of American blues from the 1960s through the 1990s cannot be overstated. Both he and his younger brother Edgar, born in 1946, were born with albinism. Johnny started on clarinet at age five, switched to ukulele and then guitar, and began performing on local television in Beaumont as a child. A local disc jockey named Clarence Garlow introduced him to blues radio, and Johnny built an obsessive record collection through which he studied the masters note by note — Muddy Waters, B.B. King, Robert Johnson, Sonny Boy Williamson — absorbing the tradition and eventually making it entirely his own. His recording career began at fifteen when his band Johnny and the Jammers released a single on a Houston label in 1959.
By 1968 Winter had assembled a power trio with bassist Tommy Shannon and drummer John Turner in Austin and released The Progressive Blues Experiment on the small local Sonobeat Records label. A Rolling Stone reporter caught him live and wrote the famous description that lit a fuse under every major label in the country: "Imagine a 130-pound cross-eyed albino bluesman with long fleecy hair playing some of the gutsiest blues guitar you have ever heard." The resulting bidding war ended with Columbia Records signing Winter for a reported $300,000 to $600,000 — the highest advance paid by the label up to that point, an extraordinary sum for an unproven artist. He performed at Woodstock in August 1969, delivered one of the festival's most ferocious sets, and jammed with Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin. His self-titled Columbia debut and its follow-up Second Winter — a double album with a deliberately blank fourth side — established him as one of rock music's most important new figures.
In 1970 Winter formed Johnny Winter And alongside guitarist and producer Rick Derringer, bassist Randy Jo Hobbs, and drummer Randy Zehringer. The configuration pushed his sound harder into rock territory and produced the original version of Rock and Roll Hoochie Koo, written by Derringer and later a major hit for him as a solo artist. The live album became the best-selling release of Winter's career. But heroin addiction soon took a devastating toll, driving him into a two-year semi-retirement. His comeback album Still Alive and Well (1973), produced by Derringer, announced his recovery with a directness that matched the title — an aggressive, confident record that reasserted his place at the top of blues rock. Rolling Stone ranked him 74th on their list of the 100 Greatest Guitarists of All Time. His image graced the cover of the very first issue of Guitar World in July 1980.
The most enduring contribution of Winter's later career may be his work with Muddy Waters. In the late 1970s, after joining CBS Records affiliate Blue Sky, Winter produced and played on four Waters albums that are now considered the definitive recordings of the final chapter of Waters' career: Hard Again (1977), I'm Ready (1978), Muddy Mississippi Waters Live (1979), and King Bee (1980). All three studio and live albums won Grammy Awards. Winter's deep reverence for Waters and his commitment to capturing the raw Chicago blues sound on record gave Waters his most acclaimed work in decades and introduced him to a new generation. He was inducted into the Blues Foundation Hall of Fame in 1988 and into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame posthumously. His final album Step Back (2014), recorded with Eric Clapton, Billy Gibbons, Joe Bonamassa, Joe Perry, Brian Setzer, and Dr. John, won the Grammy for Best Blues Album shortly after his death.
Wayne Dennon photographed Johnny Winter as part of an archive that spans the full history of blues and rock. Winter was the direct link between the Delta blues masters he revered and the rock world that needed reminding of where it came from — a guitarist whose playing was simultaneously rooted and explosive, traditional and dangerous, and whose entire career was a sustained act of devotion to the music that shaped him.
