James P. Johnson facts for kids

Quick facts for kids James P. Johnson
Background information
Birth name	James Price Johnson
Born	(1894-02-01)February 1, 1894 New Brunswick, New Jersey, U.S.
Died	November 17, 1955(1955-11-17) (aged 61) Jamaica, Queens, New York City, U.S.
Genres	Jazz
Occupation(s)	Composer, musician
Instruments	Piano
Years active	1912–1955

James Price Johnson (born February 1, 1894 – died November 17, 1955) was an American piano player and composer. He was a pioneer of a piano style called stride piano. He was one of the most important pianists in the early days of recording music. Like Jelly Roll Morton, he helped change ragtime music into what we now call jazz. Johnson greatly influenced famous musicians like Count Basie, Duke Ellington, Art Tatum, and Fats Waller, who was his student.

Johnson wrote many popular songs, including "The Charleston", which was a huge hit in the 1920s. He was known as the "king" of New York jazz pianists for most of the 1930s. Johnson's amazing talent and his impact on early popular music and musical theater are sometimes forgotten. Because of this, music expert David Schiff called him "The Invisible Pianist."

Biography

Johnson was born in New Brunswick, New Jersey, United States. Being close to New York City meant he could experience all kinds of music. This included music from bars, cabarets, and even the symphony. Johnson's father, William H. Johnson, worked in a store and as a mechanic. His mother, Josephine Harrison, was a maid. She sang in the Methodist Church choir and taught herself to play the piano. Johnson later said that the popular African American songs and dances he heard at home and around the city influenced his musical taste early on.

In 1908, Johnson's family moved to the San Juan Hill area of New York City. This is near where Lincoln Center is today. They moved again in 1911 to uptown New York. James had perfect pitch and a great memory. He could quickly learn any piano tune he heard.

Johnson grew up listening to the ragtime music of Scott Joplin. He always kept a connection to the ragtime era. He played and recorded Joplin's "Maple Leaf Rag" and the more complex "Euphonic Sounds" many times in the 1940s. Johnson got his first job as a pianist in 1912. He decided to follow his music career instead of going back to school. From 1913 to 1916, Johnson studied European piano music with Bruto Giannini. Over the next four or five years, Johnson kept improving his ragtime piano skills. He did this by studying other pianists and writing his own ragtime songs.

In 1914, Johnson met Willie "The Lion" Smith while playing in Newark, New Jersey. He was performing with singer Lillie Mae Wright, who later became his wife. Smith and Johnson had similar ideas about how entertainers should act on stage. These shared beliefs and their friendly personalities made them best friends. Starting in 1918, Johnson and Wright toured together in the Smart Set Revue. They settled back in New York in 1919.

Before 1920, Johnson was known as a top pianist on the East Coast. He was as good as Eubie Blake and Luckey Roberts. He made many player piano roll recordings. These first showed his own ragtime songs. Later, he recorded for several companies from 1917 to 1927. During this time, he met George Gershwin, who was also a young piano-roll artist.

Johnson was a pioneer in the stride style of jazz piano. Stride piano is often described as sounding like a whole orchestra. Unlike boogie-woogie blues piano, it needs great independence between the hands. The left hand plays bass and middle notes, while the right hand plays the melody. Johnson practiced his skill by playing night after night. He had to play songs in any key to please the many singers he worked with. He became a very sensitive and skilled accompanist. He was the favorite accompanist of Ethel Waters and Bessie Smith. Waters wrote in her autobiography that working with musicians like Johnson "made you want to sing until your tonsils fell out."

As his piano style grew, his 1921 recordings became very important. His songs "Harlem Strut", "Keep Off the Grass", "Carolina Shout", and "Worried and Lonesome Blues" were among the first jazz piano solos ever recorded. They were recorded along with Jelly Roll Morton's Gennett recordings from 1923. Johnson seemed to play his best when he attacked the piano like it was a drum set. Other pianists learned these difficult songs. They used them as test pieces in piano competitions. New York pianists would show off their keyboard skills, swing, harmonies, and improvisational abilities. These skills would make the great masters of that time stand out.

Most of his recordings in the 1920s and early 1930s were for Black Swan Records (started by Johnson's friend W. C. Handy) and Columbia. In 1922, Johnson became the music director for a show called Plantation Days. This show took him to England for four months in 1923. In the summer of 1923, Johnson and lyricist Cecil Mack wrote the show Runnin' Wild. This show toured for over five years and also played on Broadway.

James P. Johnson, Fess Williams, Freddie Moore, Joe Thomas in 1948. Photo by William P. Gottlieb.

During the Great Depression, Johnson's career slowed down. As the swing music era became popular, Johnson found it hard to change his style. His music became less popular for a while. But he had a steady income from his song royalties. This allowed him to spend time on his education and write "serious" orchestral music. Johnson started writing for musical shows and composed many orchestral pieces that are now forgotten. Even though he was a well-known composer and a member of ASCAP, he couldn't get financial help from foundations.

In the late 1930s, people became interested in traditional jazz again. Johnson slowly started to become popular once more. He began recording with his own groups and other bands. Johnson played at the Spirituals to Swing concerts at Carnegie Hall in 1938 and 1939. These were organized by John Hammond, who also recorded many of Johnson's solo and band songs in 1939.

Johnson had a mini-stroke in August 1940. When he returned in 1942, he started a busy schedule of performing, composing, and recording. He led several small groups, often with bands that included musicians of different races. These included Eddie Condon, Yank Lawson, Sidney de Paris, Sidney Bechet, Rod Cless, and Edmond Hall. In 1944, Johnson and Willie "The Lion" Smith took part in stride piano contests in Greenwich Village. He recorded for jazz labels like Asch, Black & White, Blue Note, Commodore, Circle, and Decca. In 1945, Johnson performed with Louis Armstrong and had his own works played at Carnegie Hall and Town Hall in New York City. He was a regular guest on Rudi Blesh's This is Jazz radio show. He also studied with Maury Deutsch, who taught other famous musicians like Django Reinhardt and Charlie Parker.

In the late 1940s, Johnson had various jobs, including jam sessions at Stuyvesant Casino. He also became a regular on Rudi Blesh's radio show. In 1949, actor and band leader Conrad Janis, who was 18, formed a band. It included James P. Johnson on piano, Henry Goodwin on trumpet, Edmond Hall on clarinet, Pops Foster on bass, and Baby Dodds on drums, with Janis on trombone. Johnson stopped performing permanently after a severe stroke in 1951 that left him paralyzed. He lived off his songwriting royalties while he was unable to play. He died four years later in Jamaica, New York. He is buried in Mount Olivet Cemetery in Maspeth, Queens.

Composer

Johnson wrote many popular songs for musical theater, including "Charleston". This song first appeared in his Broadway show Runnin' Wild in 1923. Some say he wrote it years earlier. It became one of the most popular songs of the "Roaring Twenties". He also wrote "If I Could Be With You (One Hour Tonight)", "You've Got to Be Modernistic", "Don't Cry, Baby", "Keep off the Grass", "Old Fashioned Love", "A Porter's Love Song to a Chambermaid", "Carolina Shout", and "Snowy Morning Blues". He wrote waltzes, ballet music, symphonic pieces, and light opera. Many of these longer works are kept as manuscripts in his collection at the Institute of Jazz Studies at Rutgers University in Newark, New Jersey. Johnson's success as a popular composer made him a member of ASCAP in 1926.

Johnson's Yamekraw, a Negro Rhapsody was first played in 1928. It was named after a black community in Savannah, Georgia. William Grant Still arranged the music, and Fats Waller played the piano. Johnson had to conduct his and Waller's hit Broadway show Keep Shufflin at the time. His Harlem Symphony, written in the 1930s, was performed at Carnegie Hall in 1945. Johnson played the piano, and Joseph Cherniavsky conducted. He also worked with Langston Hughes on a short opera called De Organizer.

Pianist

James P. Johnson, along with Fats Waller and Willie 'The Lion' Smith (known as 'The Big Three'), and Luckey Roberts, created the Harlem Stride piano style. This style grew from East Coast ragtime and added parts of the blues. His song "Carolina Shout" was a standard test for every pianist of his time. Duke Ellington learned it note for note from Johnson's 1921 piano roll. Johnson taught Fats Waller and helped him get his first piano roll and recording jobs.

Harlem Stride is different from ragtime in several key ways. Ragtime brought steady syncopation (off-beat rhythms) to piano music. But stride pianists made their music swing more freely. They would play the melody hand slightly before the bass hand. This created a feeling of tension and release. Stride music also uses more blues elements and more complex harmonies than classic ragtime. Also, ragtime was mostly written music, like marches. But pianists like Waller and Johnson added their own rhythms, harmonies, and melodies to their performances. Sometimes, they even improvised on the spot.

Legacy

Johnson can be seen as the last important pianist of the classic ragtime era and the first important jazz pianist. Because of this, he is considered a vital link between ragtime and jazz. Johnson's musical legacy also lives on in the work of his student, Thomas "Fats" Waller. Many other pianists were influenced by him, including Art Tatum, Donald Lambert, Louis Mazetier, Pat Flowers, Cliff Jackson, Hank Duncan, Claude Hopkins, Duke Ellington, Count Basie, Don Ewell, Johnny Guarnieri, Dick Hyman, Dick Wellstood, Ralph Sutton, Joe Turner, Neville Dickie, Mike Lipskin, and Butch Thompson.

Honors and recognitions

Two paintings by Romare Bearden are named after Johnson's songs: Carolina Shout and Snow(y) Morning.

On September 16, 1995, the U.S. Post Office released a James P. Johnson 32-cent postage stamp.

Johnson is buried at Mount Olivet Cemetery in Maspeth, Queens County, New York. His grave was unmarked since his death in 1955. In 2009, a headstone was placed there. It was paid for with money raised by an event organized by the James P. Johnson Foundation, Spike Wilner, and Dr. Scott Brown.

In 2020, Johnson's song "Carolina Shout" was added to the Grammy Hall of Fame.

Film scores

Johnson's songs were used as film scores in many movies. These were songs he had written before. Here is a partial list:

Recordings

James P. Johnson made many recordings throughout his career. His albums include Jazz, Vol. 1: South (1950) and The Original James P. Johnson (1973), both released by Folkways Records. Later, Smithsonian Folkways re-released many of his works, such as The Original James P. Johnson: 1942–1945, Piano Solos (1996).

Many of Johnson's recordings have been re-released on CDs. Father of the Stride Piano includes some of his best recordings from the 1920s and 1930s. This includes "Carolina Shout" and "Worried and Lonesome Blues". The French Classics series has eight discs dedicated to Johnson's music from 1921 to 1947. The Decca CD, Snowy Morning Blues, features 20 songs recorded between 1930 and 1944. It also includes a tribute to Fats Waller. Johnson's complete Blue Note recordings were released in a collection by Mosaic Records. Many of his approximately 60 piano rolls, recorded between 1917 and 1927, have also been released on CD.

See also

In Spanish: James P. Johnson para niños