Big Jack Johnson was a longtime fixture in the Clarksdale, MS. blues scene. Born the son of a sharecropper in Lambert, MS. in 1939, Johnson played a raw, electrified version of Delta blues. He was a member of the Jelly Roll Kings and also had a successful solo career. As a driver for Shell Oil, his nickname was "The Oil Man."
When he had a concert in Cleveland in 1999, I picked him up at the airport. There was time to kill before his show. We stopped at a garden in Akron, Oh. He picked an apple off the tree and ate it. He was always a humble country man at heart.
Big Jack Johnson: Akron, OH, 1999