Jimmy Johnson, the revered Muscle Shoals guitarist who worked with Aretha Franklin, Paul Simon, Wilson Pickett and Lynyrd Skynyrd, among hundreds of others, has died at 76
“The mighty Jimmy Johnson has passed,” Jason Isbell, who grew up in the Shoals area,Growing up in the South in the 1950s, Johnson was drawn to the blooming sounds of rock, R&B and the electric blues. “I guess you’d say my inspiration was Chuck Berry,” he said
earlier this year. “My parents always tried to get me to play country music and I just didn’t like it that much.”Johnson began to study the guitar-playing of artists like Berry, Jimmy Reed and Bo Diddley. After gigging in the Northwest Alabama area as a teenager, Johnson began working at Rick Hall’s FAME studios in Muscle Shoals in the early Sixties, where he eventually began playing on sessions by R&B greats like Aretha Franklin, Etta James, and Clarence Carter.
In 1969, Johnson, alongside FAME backup musicians Roger Hawkins, Barry Beckett, and David Hood, left Hall to found the Muscle Shoals Sound Studio. Over the next decade, everyone from Paul Simon and Bob Dylan to Cher and Jimmy Cliff would record at the studio, using the Swampers as their backup band.
Despite being a member of one of the most foundational session groups in American musical history, Johnson was a humble musician who was never eager for attention. “The best way to put it is we consider ourselves backup players,”In later years, Johnson remained active in the Shoals’ music community, producing and engineering records at his own Swamper Sound Studio and serving as a member of the board for the Alabama Music Hall of Fame.
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