Pioneering R&B singer dies
Born white, Johnny Otis decided he’d rather be black
LOS ANGELES – Pioneering rhythm-and-blues singer, songwriter, drummer, bandleader and disc jockey Johnny Otis made the kind of conscious life choice early on that few people have the inclination, or circumstance, to carry out.
Born white, the son of Greek immigrant parents, and raised in a predominantly black neighborhood in Northern California in the 1920s, Otis decided as a youth that he’d rather be black.
The choice put him on a path to a life in music during which he created the sensually pulsing 1958 hit “Willie and the Hand Jive.” It also gave him a deep connection to black culture that helped him discover such future stars of R&B and rock as Etta James, Little Richard, Jackie Wilson, Hank Ballard and Little Esther Phillips.
Otis wrote other R&B hits, including “So Fine,” “Double Crossing Blues” and “All Nite Long,” and produced early recordings for Little Richard, Big Mama Thornton and Johnny Ace.
“Yes, I chose,” Otis told the Los Angeles Times in 1979, “because despite all the hardships, there’s a wonderful richness in black culture that I prefer.”
Otis died Tuesday in the Los Angeles area, where he had lived for much of his life, said Tom Reed, a black-music historian. He was 90.
Inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1994, Otis continued leading a big band R&B, jazz, soul, gospel and roots-rock revue in recent years, literally and figuratively beating the drum for the music that fired his imagination.
“I get a wave of pride in America when I look back at what we’ve accomplished in the field of music,” Otis told the San Francisco Chronicle in 2000. “People are going to wake up to this great reservoir of music we’ve created in America – cakewalks, one-steps, boogie-woogie, country and western. I had a bit to do with one of those traditions.”
“I’m not suggesting our music is the only music,” he told the Times in 1986 when the once-endangered musical style he helped create was staging a comeback, “but I am suggesting that there are certain elements in America’s culture that are so precious that it would be a shame for them to go down the drain.”