Johnny winter5/20/2023 ![]() I just hope maybe more people will hear it and go back and listen to Johnny. But as you say, I never thought much about awards. I just wanted to perpetuate the Winter name. I did it for Johnny and for our mom and dad who have passed on. So doing the album was an expression of love, from start to finish. I just wanted to play with people I admired, and first on that list was Johnny. My dream was to learn as much about chords, harmony, rhythm, and pass it on to others. I was the quiet kid who played all these instruments. He was Cool Daddy Winter with the shades. He had the drive, determination and ambition as far back as I can remember. Johnny and I were so different in terms of our approach to music. Honestly, I never expected at my age and at this stage in my career to have any music on the charts ever again, much less win a Grammy. Q: It’s a cliché for a Grammy winner to say “Awards aren’t the reason I made this album…” But I think you have a particularly strong claim to such a sentiment.Ī: It was such a surreal moment, and still hard for me to grasp. He discussed his tribute to his brother, the Grammy and some of his first musical memories as a kid growing up in the Golden Triangle. Winter, 76, is preparing to head on a spring tour with Ringo Starr and His All Starr Band, though the itinerary won’t bring him back to his native Texas. You hear it in every form of popular music that exists today.” “In some ways, it’s all the blues,” Winter says. While Johnny kept to the blues, Edgar’s trail was full of offshoots into jazz, blues, R&B, pop, rock and any other sound that caught his ear. The Winter brothers developed their own connection that Edgar calls “telepathic,” and they collaborated well into the '70s. As teenagers the brothers would visit Beaumont clubs to see blues and R&B stars like Bobby “Blue” Bland, Ray Charles and B.B. ![]() The Winter brothers grew up in Beaumont to two musically inclined parents, who placed ukuleles in their hands while they were young. “Brother Johnny” found the younger sibling working out his grief and paying tribute to his first musical hero by covering songs associated with Johnny, assisted by guests including Ringo Starr, Billy Gibbons, Keb’ Mo’, Derek Trucks, Joe Walsh and Kenny Wayne Shepherd, among others. Winter’s big brother, blues great Johnny Winter, died in 2014. Fast forward a half century: Winter last month won a golden gramophone for best contemporary blues album for “Brother Johnny.”ĭepending on one’s accounting, “Brother Johnny,” released on Quarto Valley Records, was eight years or one lifetime in the making. The first time, he drew two nods for “Frankenstein,” his iconic '70s instrumental, but saw Eumir Deodato and Gato Barbieri take home Grammys that night. (Enterprise file art) Photo: fileįifty years separate the first and most recent Grammy nominations earned by Edgar Winter. His performance of Ray Charles’ seemingly untouchable “I’ll Drown in My Own Tears” is tender and vulnerable without ever going soft.Johnny and Edgar Winter are from Beaumont. ![]() The guitar craft is spectacular-Winter combines the gutsiness of Lightnin’ Hopkins and the madness of Jimi Hendrix. He cut his teeth playing R&B and blues around Beaumont, and his down-home feel is what elevates his performances of well-worn standards like “Good Morning Little School Girl,” “Country Girl," and “Back Door Friend,” the last of which is about raw as white blues got in the '60s. Winter, on the other hand, was a Texas original. Though Bloomfield was a virtuoso, he was also an outsider who had to work his way into Chicago's blues culture. It’s not hard to imagine what a guy like Bloomfield must have felt when he first heard Winter. A&R men from Columbia were in attendance and signed Winter on the spot within months his self-titled debut was in stores. Johnny Winter’s big break came when Mike Bloomfield and Al Kooper brought him onstage as a special guest during a 1969 concert at the Fillmore East.
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