Still Scratchin’: Unsung blues great gets his due

Around 1999, friends and longtime blues aficionados Gordon Mese and Arnaud Staib were at Tabby’s Blues Box downtown when a 60-ish African American man from the crowd took to the stage and started playing guitar.

That kind of spontaneity wasn’t unusual at Tabby’s, the now-closed juke joint that spent most of its tenure on North Boulevard. But this time, recalls Mese, it was different.
“The guy was unbelievable,” he says. “I turned to Arnaud, and I said, ‘Who is that?’”

Staib was equally transfixed. A native of France and a Baton Rouge-based petrochemical executive, Staib was then, and is now, a rabid blues fan. When he was transferred to the United States in the early ’90s, he picked Baton Rouge over other cities because of its blues heritage. He made one of his first stops in the Capital Region the Mulatto Bend Cemetery in Port Allen, the final resting place of local blues legend Slim Harpo.

Mese and Staib would find out later that the musician riffing just like an old pro at Tabby’s was exactly that—a once-professional musician who had traded life on the road for life at home.

His name was James Johnson, and he was a guitarist and bassist who had once backed the legendary Harpo himself. In fact, Johnson is credited, although not formally, for inventing the signature guitar licks in the “chicken scratch” portion of Harpo’s hit song “Baby Scratch My Back.”

Mese, owner of the Garden District Nursery, asked around about Johnson and even called him at home once to hook him up with a live gig at another Mid City business, Bistro Byronz. The more Mese learned, the more he discovered that Johnson was a musician of incredible skill. And while the community of blues musicians knew him well, Johnson’s talent had never been adequately compensated or publicly recognized.

That changed this past August when Johnson released a CD with a fleet of original songs. The recording, Stingin’ & Buzzin’, was the result of fellow musicians encouraging Johnson, now 74, to sit down and record before it was too late. Mese and Staib footed the bill for the production cost and organized a CD release party at Phil Brady’s on Government Street Aug. 21. More than 200 guests, including blues musicians who had long looked up to Johnson, attended.

“It felt good for it to finally be my turn,” says Johnson.

Music had always come naturally for Johnson. As a child, he once blew all his money meant for school clothes on a guitar in a pawnshop in downtown Baton Rouge. He learned to play on it simply by picking and strumming on his own. An older musician gave him informal lessons in his late teens, and Johnson was so good, he ended up playing one night with Slim Harpo. Impressed with Johnson’s skills, Harpo encouraged him to join the band and begin touring.

It was an exhausting experience, and the compensation was far less than Harpo had promised, recalls Johnson.

He quit and later took a job working in custodial services at LSU. Music, however, never left his system. Even as an older man, he still played live music, much of it during informal appearances with others. The blues community always respected him and held him up as one of the finest blues musicians around. When a few of them encouraged Johnson to write and record his own music, original songs tumbled forth from Johnson’s head—songs that had been bottled up for years.

The CD features old-school blues, funky blues and even a Christmas song. Johnson is beginning to play live shows as well, including a recent gig at Teddy’s Juke Joint in October. Meanwhile, Mese and Staib aren’t looking for a return on the CD they helped create. The hope is that proceeds from the CD will help fund subsequent recordings. Nor are they looking to become music producers.

“We got paid back listening to the man play music for the last 15 years,” says Mese.