Free Raisin' Cain: The Wild and Raucous Story of Johnny Winter (Kindle Edition) by Mary Lou Sullivan Page A

with professional musicians at the Red Lion Club, where he went to hear Clarence Garlow. Johnny had grown up listening to Garlow’s Bon Ton Roulet Show at KJET in the late 1950s and 1960s. Garlow promoted his own records on the show, as well as his upcoming club dates. A Louisiana Creole, he’s been described as a pioneer zydeco artist, a rhythm and blues and jump blues artist heavily influenced by T-Bone Walker. Garlow enjoyed national recognition with sales of his single “Bon Ton Roula” and played clubs in Texas and Louisiana.
    Enamored by the Creole bluesman, Johnny made a tape recording of one of Garlow’s records, then called the radio station and played it to Garlow over the phone. KJET was close to Johnny’s grandparents’ house, so he often visited Garlow at the station and forged a friendship that inspired the budding musician. Johnny showed up at many of his gigs, and Garlow would call him up out of the audience and hand him his guitar.
    “He’d bring me up and let me play,” says Johnny. “I was fifteen or sixteen and had a fake ID I got from some kid. It was a selective service card with somebody else’s name. They asked to see it once in a while; a lot of times they didn’t care. I was about 5’10”, my hair was white, and I looked older. Clarence liked it that some white kid was loving his music. He got off on it. We wouldn’t play together; I’d usually have to use his guitar. He had drums, bass, guitar, piano, and two saxes. He had a special introduction: ‘This is the boy that loves me.’ He wanted to make sure everybody knew I was in love with his style.
    “Clarence told me about using small-gauge strings and playing with unwound thirds, when the third string of the guitar doesn’t have any winding on it. I found out it was easier to bend the string with an unwound third. It’s just easier to play.”
    Prior to that, Johnny was using heavy-gauge strings that wouldn’t stretch and made it impossible for him to bend notes. Just listening to records, he had no idea how to replicate the sound he was hearing. Garlow took the time to mentor the young guitarist and show him how to create the sound he was searching for. It left an indelible impression.
    Deeming Garlow “the main Texas guitar player that influenced me,” Johnny later paid his respects by covering Garlow’s “Bon Ton Roulet” on Raisin’ Cain, his 1980 Blue Sky LP, and “Route 90” and “Sound the Bell” on his 1985 Alligator Records release Serious Business . Johnny dedicated Guitar Slinger , his 1984 LP on Alligator Records, to Garlow.
    Feeling Garlow never received the recognition he deserved, Johnny interviewed him in the 1980s for an article for Living Blues . The article was never published, an omission that still bothers him.
    “I interviewed Clarence for a magazine but it never came out,” says Johnny. “Nobody cared about it, I guess. Nobody asked me to do it—I did the interview on my own. I just had it recorded on tape. They said it was too much trouble to put it on paper.”
    B. B. King is another artist who influenced and encouraged Johnny as a teenager.
    Jim Crow laws were very much in effect in Texas when Johnny met King in 1960, with Jefferson County segregated into black and white neighborhoods. But Johnny’s love of the blues overcame the culture of racism and drew him to clubs on both sides of town.
    “When I was sixteen, there were two or three white clubs the band could play,” says Johnny. “The Black Cat Club and the Pleasure Pier Ballroom in Port Arthur, and the Red Lion Club in Beaumont. They were beer joints where they had fist fights and a few knives. They served Lone Star beer in longneck bottles. Later on, they passed laws where they could drink booze, but in those days, there wasn’t anything but beer.
    “At the white clubs, the jukeboxes had a lot of country and western. Growin’ up in Texas, you had to play country and western music to get a job. I played whatever was popular