A passionate and intuitive player, he is often compared to such masters of the steel-string acoustic guitar as Bruce Cockburn, John Fahey, Michael Hedges, Burt Jansch, Adrian Legg, Leo Kottke, Steve Tibbetts, and Ralph Towner. But Johnson’s style, characterized by complexity, exhilarating speed, and hauntingly unfamiliar harmonies created through ‘found’ tunings, marks this self-taught player apart from any other musician.
Johnson was raised in America’s deep South, in a small Arkansas town in the Mississippi Delta. He began playing guitar at age 9, briefly taking lessons from a hard-drinking oil field worker before deciding he’d learn more on his own. Johnson recalls that his “real jumping off point” was a cassette he received as a teenager, which featured John McLaughlin’s Mahavishnu Orchestra’s Inner Mounting Flame on one side, and Leo Kottke’s Greenhouse on the other: Says Johnson: “I thought it was one person playing this stuff! The initial impact was that it was somehow possible to make something happen that fused the linear liquidity of McLaughlin and the dense harmonic structure and drive of Kottke.” The distinctive playing of Oregon’s guitarist, Ralph Towner also impressed Johnson. Practicing incessantly on his own, he developed an idiosyncratic playing style which combined plucking and strumming, alternating between 6, 12, and 18 strings, using all parts of the guitar, and employing 30 tunings he devised. Music remained a private passion while Johnson pursued architectural photography as a profession, receiving an MFA from Louisiana Tech, running his own studio, and creating photos sought by collectors such as D.C.’s Corcoran Museum and the New Orleans Museum of Art.
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