![]() ![]() Winter opened up about his heroin, prescription pill and alcohol addictions that derailed his career in the 1980s and 1990s in an authorized biography “Raisin’ Cain - The Wild and Raucous Story of Johnny Winter,” published in 2010. “It’s the only thing that I’ve really been good at.” “I was sure I was going to be successful. “I was almost always sure it would,” Winter said. Winter was asked in the documentary if he every dreamed that playing a guitar would take him around the world. His summer tour schedule was filled with shows, including 15 concerts planned across the United States in August. ![]() “Step Back” will include contributions from guests including Eric Clapton, Joe Perry and Dr. Winter announced this year that he had another album ready for release in September. Though none of his several dozen albums earned a Grammy, he shared three for producing blues legend Muddy Waters in the late 1970s. “One week we’re playing clubs for about 20 people and in a matter of a few months we’re playing Woodstock,” bassist Tommy Shannon said in the documentary.Ĭolumbia Records won a bidding war for Winter that resulted in a self-titled debut album, followed by a second titled “Second Winter” in late 1969. “It seemed a big year for me,” Winter told an interviewer for the documentary “Johnny Winter: Down & Dirty.” The film was released this year.Īnother big year for Winter was 1969, when he played at the Woodstock festival. It was also the year he started drinking and smoking. Winter was just 15 in 1959 when he began playing guitar in Texas clubs. Johnny and brother Edgar, who was nearly three years younger, both were born with albinism, a melanin production deficiency that left them with little color in their hair, skin and eyes. ![]() Winter’s family moved from Mississippi to Beaumont, Texas, when he was an infant. Rolling Stone now ranks Winter 63rd on its list of 100 greatest guitarists. It captioned his photo: “Johnny Winter, Albino Bluesman.” The article said guitarist Mike Bloomfield considered the young Winter the “best white blues guitarist he had ever heard.” Winter first gained national attention when Rolling Stone magazine featured the the Texas music scene in a December 1968 cover story. Winter was in Zurich, Switzerland, as part of a tour of Europe, although he was scheduled to return to the United States for shows later in July, according to his official Facebook page. “His wife, family and bandmates are all saddened by the loss of their loved one and one of the world’s finest guitarists,” his spokeswoman, Lori Haynes, said. Winter was the first non-African American performer elected to the Blues Hall of Fame.American blues guitarist and singer Johnny Winter died Wednesday in a hotel room in Switzerland, his representative said Thursday. His biography, Raisin’ Cain: The Wild And Raucous Story of Johnny Winter, was published in 2010. In between dealing with health problems, both drug-related and hereditary, Winter managed to keep his career going and continued to return to the blues for inspiration into the 21st century. While his next albums were more rock-oriented, Winter later refocused his energies on blues by producing a series of albums by his idol, Muddy Waters, recording Sonny Terry for his own Mad Albino imprint, and signing with Chicago’s Alligator Records for three chart albums in the 1980s. A few years later the family resettled in Beaumont.) Johnny Winter became the first of sixteen Winter albums to hit Billboard‘s Top 200 charts. (The Winter family was living in Mississippi when his mother became pregnant she chose to go to her hometown of Beaumont for Johnny’s birth on Feb. Rolling Stone had provided the advance hype in a December 1968 article heralding "a 130-pound cross-eyed albino bluesman with long fleecy hair playing some of the gutsiest blues guitar you have ever heard.’ Winter grew up in blues territory (Leland, Mississippi, where his father had once served as mayor) but began his blues/rock journey as a teenager with his brother Edgar in Beaumont, Texas. Johnny Winter burst on the national scene with a barrage of guitar pyrotechnics during a period when blues was super-hip to the rock ‘n’ roll crowd and staked his claim to fame with his first album for Columbia, Johnny Winter, a 1969 showcase of his high-energy reworkings of blues classics. ![]()
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