At 65, Winter still brings the blues
Johnny Winter is truly the colorless man.
Born legally blind and albino in the wake of the 1943 race riots in Beaumont, Texas, Winter had a sort of invisible green card to get in to black clubs like The Raven. He and his albino brother, Edgar, were the only two whites in the audience at a B.B. King concert there in 1962.
A budding bluesman at the time, Winter talked his way onstage and earned a standing ovation before he stepped off, he recalls in his artist biography.
A few years later he was the subject of a bidding war between major labels. A year after that he was playing a historic performance at Woodstock in 1969.
Forty years and 40 albums later, Winter is a Grammy-winning Blues Foundation Hall of Famer.
This year he released two retrospectives marking the most significant moments in his career.
“The Johnny Winter Anthology” is the first collection to include songs from Winter’s entire career, from his early start on Imperial Records to his major label classics on Columbia to his latest material, including his Grammy-nominated 2004 album, “I’m A Bluesman.”
“The Woodstock Experience” is a box set with studio albums and live Woodstock performances by five artists: Winter, Santana, Janis Joplin, Sly & the Family Stone and Jefferson Airplane. The Winter edition contains his 1969 self-titled sophomore studio album.
Winter has survived a heroin addiction and multiple health issues. While he often appears seated during recent live shows, swapping out rock tunes for mostly blues numbers, the 65-year-old guitar guru still tours regularly.
In a 1977 interview with The Beaumont Enterprise newspaper, Winter’s father, John Winter II, talked about raising two albino sons in the supercharged South during the 1940s.
“When Johnny was born in 1944, I was still in the Army. And they wrote me and said I had a son but they didn’t send any pictures,” the elder Winter recalled.
“They told me Johnny was an albino,” he said, adding that the colorlessness didn’t matter: “He was my son.”