LONNIE JOHNSON - ANOTHER NIGHT TO CRY

ANOTHER NIGHT TO CRY

LONNIE JOHNSON

SONGWRITER: LONNIE JOHNSON

COUNTRY: U. S. A.

ALBUM: ANOTHER NIGHT TO CRY

LABEL: OBC

GENRE: BLES

YEAR: 1992

Alonzo "Lonnie" Johnson (February 8, 1899– June 16, 1970) was an American blues and jazz singer, guitarist, violinist and songwriter. He was a pioneer of jazz guitar and jazz violin and is recognized as the first to play an electrically amplified violin

Johnson was born in New Orleans, Louisiana, and raised in a family of musicians. He studied violin, piano and guitar as a child and learned to play various other instruments, including the mandolin, but he concentrated on the guitar throughout his professional career. "There was music all around us," he recalled, "and in my family you'd better play something, even if you just banged on a tin can."

Johnson pioneered the single-string solo guitar styles that have become customary in modern rock, blues and jazz music.

By his late teens, he was playing guitar and violin in his father's family band at banquets and weddings, alongside his brother James "Steady Roll" Johnson. He also worked with the jazz trumpeter Punch Miller in the Storyville district of New Orleans.

In 1917, Johnson joined a revue that toured England, returning home in 1919 to find that all of his family, except his brother James, had died in the 1918 influenza epidemic.

He and his brother settled in St. Louis in 1921, where they performed as a duo. Lonnie also worked on riverboats and in the orchestras of Charlie Creath and Fate Marable.

In 1925 Johnson married, and his wife, Mary, soon began a blues career of her own, performing as Mary Johnson and pursuing a recording career from 1929 to 1936. (She is not to be confused with the later soul and gospel singer of the same name.) As with many other early blues artists, information on Mary Johnson is often contradictory and confusing. Various online sources give her name before marriage as Mary Smith and state that she began performing in her teens. However, the writer James Sallis gave her original name as Mary Williams and stated that her interest in writing and performing blues began when she started helping Lonnie write songs and developed from there. The two never recorded together. They had six children before their divorce in 1932.

Here's one of my latest recordings in blues

Another Night To Cry

Well, it's too late to cry, baby

Your last chance is gone

Well, it's too late to cry, baby

Your last chance is gone

'Cause you been so mean and evil

And I just have to let you alone

I tried for so many years

But I just couldn't please your mind

I tried for so many years

But I just couldn't please your mind

I found out you not in love with me

It's been somebody else all the time

Well, you can't keep me, baby, and chase every man in town

Well, you can't keep me, baby, and chase every man in town

You either gonna get me in a world

Of trouble or end up in six feet of ground

Well, I want a woman

I can love and tell the whole

Round world she's mine

I want a woman

I can love and tell the whole

Round world she's mine

And I found out, baby

Lovin' you is just a waste of time

Well, it was 3 o'clock in the mornin'

And my baby staggered in the door

That did it

Well, it was 3 o'clock in the mornin'

When my baby staggered in the door

I said: Take your body where you had it all night

Don't need daddy's love any more