The Lonnie Johnson – Eddie Lang Acoustic Guitar Duets

The Peak of 1920s Blues and Jazz Guitar

Lonnie Johnson (photo by Russell Lee, Library of Congress)

During the Roaring Twenties, Lonnie Johnson emerged as the decade’s most gifted and influential blues guitarist. Time and again, his uncanny dexterity, sophisticated sense of harmony, and brilliant solos enabled him to play in a wide variety of settings. He recorded classic jazz with Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington, groundbreaking guitar duets with Eddie Lang, field-holler blues with Alger “Texas” Alexander, and plenty of blues, ballads, hokum, and pop under his own name.

Johnson’s prewar 78s were especially popular among Black record buyers. “Lonnie Johnson has never been recognized as one of the transcendental people who influenced everybody,” says Ry Cooder. “You can recognize Lonnie Johnson in just about anybody, with his voice and elegant style. The stuff he did with Louis Armstrong is just incredible. What he must have sounded like to country Black people! They must have thought, well, this is somebody else. He’s uptown, getting this fabulous tone, and he’s very elegant and top-hatted. It’s a whole other thing. Pop music, really. You can see people copying him right and left. Oh, it’s amazing.”  

Gifted with strong hands, a great touch, and a wonderfully fertile imagination, Lonnie Johnson could make his guitar thump like a country blues starvation box or comp-and-fill like a piano. His crisp rhythms reveal a vast chord vocabulary, and his solos provide textbook examples of flawless articulation and superlative string bends. He had a way of beginning and ending songs with distinctive chord climbs. With his brilliant right-hand technique and one-of-a-kind left-hand vibrato, he could approximate the sounds of a mandolin or bottlenecked guitar. Long, beautiful solos spooled out of him, conveying a sense that his hands were hardwired to his very heart and soul. Few guitarists – then or now – have achieved such an instantly recognizable style.