Johnny (and Edgar) were from my hometown of Beaumont, Texas. Beaumont was a 'company' town, a center of the oil refining business, the location of the Spindletop Gusher that started the whole thing. Very blue collar, I often joke that those two guys with the shotguns at the end of 'Easy Rider', I grew up with guys just like that. Not an easy place for you if you were 'different', they faced the same social pressures that Janis Joplin did growing up next door in Port Arthur.
But Texas, and especially East Texas was (still is) a melting pot for so many different musics. Cajun and Zydeco, the great traditions of Texas Blues and Okie country, and deeply entrenched old school R+B. Johnny and Edgar would often see the black touring acts at an all-black ballroom in Port Arthur like Bobby Bland and Lightning Hopkins. They grew up playing that circuit from Houston to Baton Rouge playing places like the Circle Club and the Texas Pelican Club in Vinton, Louisiana, where all of us Texas kids snuck off to party, as the drinking laws in South Louisiana were shall we say, a bit more relaxed . . . where they were influenced by the big white R+B horn bands like the Boogie Kings. If you've ever heard that double LP of Edgar's White Trash band, you get the gist of it. Edgar always steered to that sort of thing and was more jazzy and polished, where Johnny fell to more authentic and hardcore blues, as you see where their careers went over the years.
I came up playing some of the same places, and if you couldn't go from 'Take Me Back to Tulsa' to 'I Feel Good' to 'Blueberry Hill' to 'I'm a Man' just like that, you weren't going to be working a lot. Texas music covers a LOT of ground, and that's where guys like the Winters and the Vaughans and the Reverend Billy G are coming from.
After Johnny signed that huge Columbia deal, he'd come home to see his folks. I saw him and his mom shopping downtown, and here he was, white as a sheet, white pony-tail to his waist, in the most dayglo tye-dyed overalls you ever saw, walking with his Mom: The folks on the sidewalk just parted, as if they'd seen some sort of apparition ! My mom knew his parents, and they were well-respected, and in a funny way, people treated 'those Winter boys' as if they were sort of handicapped with the albinism, that 'bless their hearts' way that Southern folks have.
Since my last name ended in 'W', I used to get a lot of their schoolbooks as I followed them through school (I'm 10 years younger than JW).
Johnny had a continuing battle with chemistry that he fought his entire life in some form or another, and like a lot, had his better days and worse days. I hope he is at peace now.
J o e y
