Kevin Johnson's Musical Biograpy

Blues & Bread: Playing Acoustic Guitar

Kevin Johnson’s Music Page

Blues & Bread: Playing Acoustic Guitar

“Everybody needs beauty as well as bread, places to play in and pray in, where Nature may heal and cheer and give strength to body and soul alike.” - John Muir

Guitar playing is one of the most rewarding social pastimes. There is nothing equal to the pleasure of sitting down with an acoustic instrument, singing with friends and family, watching your fingers wiggle across the fret board and hearing the musical notes and melody vibrate off the strings.

I started playing guitar in 1975. At the age of 16, a couple of high school buddies could play and they helped me get started. I’ve been hooked ever since. Before that, around 8 or 9, I learned how to play folk songs on the ukulele after seeing Tiny Tim perform “Tiptoe Thru the Tulips” on the Tonight Show.

As a child, my summer vacations were spent mostly lying in the grass with my ear glued to the radio speaker. I sang all the time. When I perform these days people often ask me how I learned to sing. The secret for me was simply listening for hours to good singers.

I listened to records at an early age. Even at three years old my parents exposed me to classical music, African polyrhythm, jazz, black spirituals, ragtime, folk and contemporary pop. Music was an everyday part of our family life. Mom played the piano and the trombone, Dad played organ, accordion, guitar and violin.

Yet it wasn’t until I turned 37 that I somehow got the itch to start practicing the guitar with a lot more commitment. Since then I’ve learned a lot of new things, wrote a few songs, learned some old ones, recorded a couple of CD’s and started playing a few regular gigs: private parties, farmer’s markets, churches, restaurants and coffeehouses. Everywhere I perform, it never ceases to amaze me how many people ask about guitar playing. Guitars are truly a social instrument.

No matter how much time I spend listening to records, trying to figure out songs, nothing beats having one-on-one interaction with someone who already knows how to play a tune; I think I can learn something from just about any guitar player. Sitting with someone who plays well is still the best way to learn.

Although playing the guitar at advanced levels is something I’ve always wanted to accomplish, I remained stuck for many years on a 3-chord strumming plateau. There was little opportunity for me to improve my playing ability; I simply had no means to hire a teacher, nor interest in learning guitar theory or scales. I just wanted to learn how to make pretty sounds come out of my acoustic guitar. Purchasing expensive, electronic gadgets was not an option either (loopers, drum machines, effects, phase shifters, and so forth), so I’ve had to work on finding my own creative style and approach to playing.

Over the years I’ve had to strip away a lot of superfluities in my life and get in touch with what music really means to me, which meant living a year out in the woods just down the road from the hillbilly music town of Mountain View, Arkansas. Back in 1996 I lived alone in a tent, with no job, no running water and no idea how I was going to make it through the next day. I’d go to the Friday night street jams and watch these incredible musicians get together and play folk music for hours. But this is exactly the experience I needed to figure out what I really wanted to do with the rest of my life - bake bread and play blues!

There were times I would be hungry, not enough money for food, so I’d just sit alone in the woods, just me and the guitar, humming and strumming the same two chords over and over for a couple of hours, just trying to connect with the sound stream. Through this process of stripping down, this tentative practice, I eventually decided to apply myself to making real progress on the guitar. I knew I wanted to learn old songs and write my own as well. But to do that, I first had to uncover my own limitations.

I spent a long time experimenting with the guitar, noodling around with scales, harmony notes, chords and alternate tunings. Sometimes it was awful, but there were times when it would be such sweet music to my ears. Over time, this kind of simple, honest approach naturally opened me up to listening to roots music in the form of delta blues and Piedmont style finger picking - the style of ragtime blues guitar playing developed by the early east coast blues guitarists during the 1920’s, (musicians such as Blind Blake, Blind Willie McTell, Big Bill Broonzy, Brownie McGhee and Elizabeth Cotton). In my opinion, this is acoustic guitar playing at its’ best and some of the finest music ever recorded.

It is here that I found the form of music that really speaks to me. Over the years, I’ve sought to experience directly that same creative stream through sound by learning the traditional tunes of some of the great blues singers, people like Charley Patton, Son House, Mississippi John Hurt, Jimmie Rodgers and Rev. Gary Davis.

The older I get, the more I really appreciate the old delta and country blues guitarists and their incredible skills. They had to make their music interesting to their audiences with just their fingers alone, no electronics, no amplifiers, just raw passion, enthusiasm, hard work and genuine talent. For me, the real guitar heroes are the guys who intuitively developed interesting sounds, rhythm and texture on their box guitars without the aid of electronic gizmos: blues masters including Tommy Johnson, Skip James, Willie Brown, Robert Johnson and even Muddy Waters. They were the real thing. Each one possessed unique, astonishing genius and demonstrated creative artistry with their acoustic sounds.

Charley Patton, considered by many to be the Father of the Blues, sometimes played the guitar with a knife blade in order to create a peculiar slide sound, Son House and Robert Johnson both used glass bottle necks, Tommy Johnson perfected a bouncy percussive groove, Skip James often tuned his guitar to a minor key and Willie Brown finger picked and performed string snapping sounds along with a descending bass line. These little tricks of the trade made the music exciting and interesting. Contemporary blues guitarists such as Happy Traum, Stefan Grossman, Eric Clapton, Ernie Hawkins, Roy Book Binder, Steve James, Catfish Keith, Rory Block, Del Rey, Mary Flowers, Kevin Moore and Bonnie Raitt (and many others) have mastered these kinds of embellishments as well.

Music is a universal language, one that easily stretches across all social barriers, throughout time and culture. It can bring people together in mysterious ways. As a social instrument, the guitar is perhaps the most popular in the world. What I have realized is that, at the heart of the universe there are basically three creative expressions. These are the trinity of life, light & sound.

1. Life manifests itself as biological power, the life process as well as the timeless creativity of nature.

2. Light is synonymous with wisdom. It streams through experience in the form of poetry, color, painting, shape and sculpture.

3. Finally, sound - this stream manifests itself through love, music, chanting and the soothing sounds of nature, such as water, birdsong, even silence.

Making music has always been a way for people to preserve the collective stories and wisdom of older traditions – the social joys, laments, verses of praise and even love songs. All of these have been sung to keep alive the message of hope and optimism for children and grandchildren. Folk music has always been the most effective and universal means of expressing the kinds of feelings that all people have at one time or another in their lives – the various aspects of human struggle for survival, overcoming inequality, injustice, poverty, racism and hatred.

In the past, it was usually only the rich people who could afford to pay musicians to write down and perform musical symphonies while the common people had to create their own “work” songs and sing them to one another. For the early settlers in America, singing was their primary form of recreation. Folk music has always been the universal thread, the voice of the common people. This process happened in the rural south with the development of the early blues, a blend of European and African folk music, which led to the development of some of the most popular music in the world.

If technology were to disappear tomorrow, people would inevitably return to folk music traditions as the primary means of preserving their knowledge and history. Aboriginal people have been known to recite and sing 50,000 years of their own ancient history.

I feel that the music I make is just a link in a continuous chain that has existed long before me and will continue long after I’m gone. When I play at a coffeeshop, or on somebody’s front porch, I’m just keeping the “lamp trimmed and burning”, like so many others before. It is in keeping this stream flowing that the wisdom and mystery of the music is passed on to the next generation.

Through this process, especially here in America, amid our rich cultural heritage of folk & blues, we can individually participate by passing along our own joy and enthusiasm to young people. Though music is made up of only melody and words, these words mean different things to different people at different times. And because music is a living art our greatest songs still remain unsung. But exploring how things change and how we all differ is part of the fun. And when we eventually create a world of peace, justice and equality, we will begin to appreciate the treasure of our diversity, our different paths, our different values, and then we’ll discover a harmony we never knew existed. That’s when we will know there really is hope for the world. But in the meantime, we can sing together and learn to listen to one another.

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L. Kevin & Donna Johnson are certified Teachers of Biogenic Living and folklife artists. Kevin bakes authentic Old World Sourdough Bread and performs acoustic folk & country blues at local coffee shops, schools, re-hab centers, community markets and private parties. He and his wife have a website called: EarthStar Primal Habitat, with many articles about their lifestyle of voluntary simplicity, independent thinking and the true values of self-reliance, whole food nutrition, natural health as well as folk music.

Learn more about their EarthStar project at: www.earthstar.newlibertyvillage.com

the B.E.L.L.