FAIRMONT — If it hadn’t been for the movie, “Hail! Hail! Rock ‘n’ Roll,” Johnnie Johnson likely would have ended his days unheralded in St. Louis, a part-time bus driver who could play a mean boogie-woogie piano when he wanted.
Said title is the 1987 documentary that celebrates both Chuck Berry’s 60th birthday, and the mother-hen efforts of Keith Richards to wrangle the notoriously cranky star for the concert he was staging that served as its centerpiece.
Emerging as the unlikely anchor of that film was the aforementioned Johnnie Johnson.
By the late 1980s, Johnson had largely been forgotten in the world of rock ‘n’ roll — if people ever knew him in the first place.
It was Johnson, a resident of Pennsylvania Avenue in Fairmont until he was 17, who gave Berry the gig that changed the world.
Johnson was Berry’s sideman and chief musical collaborator for 20 years, putting down the chords and driving rhythms that made those classic tunes such as “Johnny B. Goode,” “Maybelline” and “Roll Over, Beethoven,” what they were — and what they remain.
Heck, Berry wrote “Johnny B. Goode,” in honor of Johnnie Johnson.
The song’s signature opening riff that launched a million bands in the basement and garage was created by Johnson and passed along to Berry, who recreated it, on guitar.
Richards, who heard all those tunes on the BBC as a kid in England and ordered the albums directly from Chess Records in Chicago, where those sides were cut, talked about that collaboration during an on-camera interview in the movie.
“He ain’t copying Chuck’s riffs on piano,” the Rolling Stone said.
“Chuck adapted them to guitar and put those great lyrics behind them,” he continued.
“Without someone to give him those riffs, voilà, no song — just a lot of words on paper.”
It all started when Johnson was 4 years old, and his coal-miner dad wheeled a beat-to-hell, upright piano he bought for cheap into the living room of that house on Pennsylvania Avenue.
A toddler with outsized hands was enthralled.
Ear-hand coordination
Music was also outsized in that house.
There were 78 rpm records spinning on the Victrola, to go with what was crackling down from KDKA in Pittsburgh and through the speaker of the family’s Crosley radio.
Johnnie never had a piano lesson.
He was never taught to read music.
But he had an ear that could absorb it all, like ringing a bell.
If he heard it — he could play it.
And if he really liked it, he mastered it.
Barely into his teens, and he was already playing, with authority, the raucous eight-beats-to-the-bar excursions of Meade Lux Lewis — to go with the sophisticated jump-blues of Count Basie.
The above would remain his musical idols and influences, as he found out he could at least make steady weekend money on the bandstand.
It took a tragic death to forge his piano life, even if he didn’t realize it at the time.
Hastings Street
When Johnson was 17, his father died suddenly.
He needed to help support his mother, so he did what most young Blacks of his generation here had to do.
He moved away — for a paycheck.
With family connections he was able to land a factory job in Detroit, which was jumping for the home-front effort in World War II.
The juke joints were jumping, too, and Hastings Street was the epicenter.
John Lee Hooker and T-Bone Walker were holding court in the Motor City bars and clubs lining that street then — and all one had to do was walk in, as they played most every night.
After Johnson joined the military, all he had to do, as it turned out, was audition.
New Year’s Eve
With World War II raging both across the Atlantic and Pacific, the Jim Crow color lines were just beginning to blur.
Johnson enlisted and was one of the first 1,500 soldiers of color to integrate the U.S. Marines.
He shipped out to the South Pacific, where he didn’t see that much combat.
As a military policeman, he broke up bar scuffles while hauling sergeants and lieutenants to the drunk tank.
His weapon in the war had 88 keys, in black and white.
Johnson successfully auditioned for a 22-piece Special Forces jazz band called “The Barracudas.”
It was an all-star assemblage, made up of musicians who played the big bands he would hear on the radio before they wound up in uniform.
“There were some real cats there,” he said.
After the war, he settled back in Detroit.
Another factory job landed him in St. Louis, where he began a side gig as the leader of his Sir John Trio. He played blues and jazz at the Cosmopolitan nightclub in the Ville neighborhood on the North Side.
He had just booked a plum gig, New Year’s Eve 1952, when his saxophone player suddenly fell ill.
Johnson called a guy he knew casually.
A lanky showman who could make up lyrics on the spot while trying to blend country stylings into his blues-playing.
Chuck Berry.
You know the rest.
Reeling and Rocking (with a Rolling Stone)
Johnson hung in with Berry until 1973. When they parted, it wasn’t because of acrimony. Blame it on airplanes.
Berry began booking international tours by then, and Johnson was afraid to fly.
The piano player went back to weekend gigs while driving a bus part-time for a senior center in St. Louis.
Then came the movie — and Keith Richards.
His “rediscovery,” as Johnson told The Dominion Post in 2002, wasn’t all cinematic drama.
Not really.
Berry’s secretary called him at home.
“Johnnie, they’re doing this movie about Chuck. There’s gonna be a concert. The Rolling Stone guy wants you in the band.”
“OK.”
You know the rest of that one, also.
After his star-turn in the movie — the back-and-forth solos with Eric Clapton during “Wee, Wee Hours,” most notably — that piano player hailing from north-central West Virginia wound up in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.
New family
That’s where he made the acquaintance of Bill Stalnaker, a Fairmont blues guitarist and teacher in Marion County Schools who was a longtime fan.
Richards had just inducted Johnson in the hall and Stalnaker wanted to get him back home.
Johnson had an appearance there and the fan drove to Cleveland so he could make the invite in person.
“I was really nervous when I first met him,” Stalnaker remembered.
“He said, ‘Hey, man, why are you nervous? I’m a musician, you’re a musician. I’m from Fairmont, you’re from Fairmont. That makes us family.’ There’s not a day that goes by that I don’t think about him.”
The two stayed friends until Johnson’s death in 2005.
Stalnaker got him back home for a concert at Palatine Park and founded the Johnnie Johnson Blues and Jazz Society in his honor. The concert series has been ongoing ever since.
Johnson was always the main act.
“I’m just happy I’m still here, making music,” he told this reporter in 2002.
You never can tell …
Stalnaker, meanwhile, was one of the first people Johnson’s wife Frances told after her husband’s passing.
“Bill, you know we need you out here for the funeral.”
He was a pallbearer.
People were still feeling the loss at Palatine Park during the 2005 concert.
A piano with its bench unoccupied sat on the bandstand in his honor.
During an after-hours jam session at the now-defunct 110 Club on Merchant Street, Stalnaker’s band was backing up Daryl Davis, Johnson’s godson who is also a boogie-woogie, rock ‘n’ roll piano player.
Davis had headlined the concert earlier.
A drunk and happy wedding party crashed in and took over the dance floor.
When a couple of bridesmaids began making hair-metal requests for Poison and Warrant and the like, Davis grinned and shook his head no.
“I think this one might be more appropriate,” he said.
He counted off “You Never Can Tell,” the Creole-tinged shuffle Berry and Johnson worked on about the teenaged wedding and the old folks wishing the young folks well.
The bridesmaids were converted. The married couple cleared the floor.
The best man let forth with a joyous bellow.
“Whoo, Chuck Berry!”
And, Johnnie Johnson, too.
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