Background
Johnson was born in Holly Springs, Mississippi.
Johnson was born in Holly Springs, Mississippi.
In his younger years he played piano and sang in gospel groups. He and his family moved to Chicago in 1950, where he worked as a welder and played guitar in his spare time. As a guitarist he was influenced by Buddy Guy and Otis Rush.
He played with Freddy King, Albert King, Magic Sam, Otis Rush, and Eddy Clearwater, among others
In the 1960s he played music in more of an Rhythm & Blues style, working with Otis Clay, Denise LaSalle, and Garland Green. He had his own group from the early 1960s, and by the mid-1960s he had released his first single.
In 1965, he released the original version of "Don"t Answer the Door", which was his only single to make the charts, reaching number 16 on the Billboard Rhythm & Blues chart. A year later, it became a number 2 Rhythm & Blues hit for B. B. King, who featured it in his live shows and albums through the 1970s.
By 1974, Johnson had returned to playing blues, working with Jimmy Dawkins and touring Japan with Otis Rush in 1975.
His first solo albums appeared on MCM Blues Records in 1978 and Delmark Records in 1979, when he was fifty years old. His career continued to pick up until December 2, 1988, when his touring van crashed in Indiana, killing his keyboardist Saint James Bryant and bassist Larry Exum. Johnson was injured but took an extended break from the music industry.
He returned to record for Verve Records in 1994.
He remained active and among other things toured Europe in 2009, playing the United Kingdom and the Copenhagen Blues Festival in Denmark. He collaborated in 2014 on Beyond Any Form, an album of Persian traditional music