Keith Johnson

Glen Allan, MS

Keith Johnson is the Prince of the Delta Blues. Hailing from Glen Allan, MS, he is the great-nephew of blues legend Muddy Waters and an accomplished bluesman in his own right. 

“Growing up here, the name Muddy Waters really didn’t mean much to me,” said Johnson. 

In the sixth grade, Johnson saw a picture of Muddy Waters in a textbook, but the name––to him––signified nothing. After all, he himself was from the Delta: “I live this life,” he explained. “The same cotton fields, you know, the same hot Delta sun, the same struggle.” What seemed exciting to others was merely quotidian to Johnson in his youth. 

Johnson’s paternal grandmother, a gospel singer with her own quartet and radio show, influenced him to focus more intently on gospel music.

Still, “gospel and blues kind of goes hand-in-hand,” Johnson said. “Being in church here at eight, nine years old, I would hear those sounds and I wanted to play [them].”

One day, when Johnson was fifteen, the church needed an extra singer for the choir. So his mother struck a deal with him: if he sang, she would buy him a guitar. “I never considered myself to be a singer, a performer, never,” he said. Nonetheless, he sang.

With his new guitar, Johnson learned to play gospel music and eventually also soul music. He practiced songs by The Temptations, Wilson Pickett, and Stevie Wonder religiously. 

But the blues were never far from Johnson. “We don’t know what came first, the chicken or the egg, blues or gospel,” he said. Regardless, it was “the same spirit that [African-Americans] sang with [and] communicated with the tribes.” He added: “I have that same spirit within me.” While gospel music serves to “uplift” one from certain feelings, Johnson explained, the blues allow one to experience them in their totality.

Upon attending Delta State University in 2011, instructors and peers learned of Johnson’s relationship to Muddy Waters, as well as his ability to play the guitar. “Can you play a Muddy Waters song?” they asked him, time and time again. “Is it true?” 

In response, he played Hoochie Coochie Man: of course, it was true. He joined a number of bands at college, honing his talents and practicing the blues more than ever before. 

In 2015, Delta State University sent a select group of students, Johnson among them, to Los Angeles, CA for Mississippi Grammy Week. They performed Hoochie Coochie Man. It was the moment Johnson knew he was in the right place, doing what he loved––but now he wanted to fly solo as Keith Johnson, the soi-disant “Prince of the Delta Blues.” 

Johnson graduated from Delta State University with a bachelor’s degree in Audio Engineering and a Master of Business Administration in Human Resource Management. He then worked full-time at Churchill Downs Incorporated as an HR business partner whilst managing his career as a blues musician. 

On Friday nights and over the weekends, “tired of HR stuff, personnel [and] casino business,” Johnson played at various local churches, building his career with each performance. As a graduate assistant and later consultant at the Delta Center for Culture and Learning at Delta State University, he took advantage of opportunities like the International Conference on the Blues to network and develop his career. He listened to the greats: Howlin’ Wolf, Muddy Waters, B.B. King, John Lee Hooker, Robert Johnson. 

“Everyone has their own story, and they have their own blues,” said Johnson. While the blues remain specific to the context in which they were invented––that of struggle and resistance, of African-Americans in the U.S.––their overtones may be universally felt. It can take place, according to Johnson, in a myriad of ways, whether that be through music, interviews, or the spoken word. The influence of the blues has permeated the lifeblood of American music, past, present, and future. 

“If you [listen to] Michael Jackson singing Man in the Mirror, you enjoy the blues,” Johnson claimed. “…If you enjoy gangster rap, you enjoy the blues. Any pop song, you enjoy the blues.” 

In time, Johnson had established himself as a blues musician, performing nationally at the Chicago Blues Festival and the Mississippi Delta Blues Festival, and internationally, in France, Brazil, Italy, and Switzerland. Now that he was a working bluesman, his relation to Muddy Waters meant “a lot.” While Waters’ three sons worked to carry his legacy forward, one is now deceased and two others are in their late sixties or seventies. 

“I’m 31 years old,” Johnson observed. “…So it’s up to me to continue that legacy and commit to it, study it, work with it, refine it.”

Of course, Muddy Waters was not the only musician in the family: Johnson’s great-great-grandfather played the guitar, for instance, as did his grandfather. Johnson’s uncles play the guitar and the harmonica, and he has cousins who are opera singers. 

“The music is in our family,” Johnson emphasized. “This is not only the Muddy Waters legacy, but the Morganfield family legacy.” His heritage is that of Mississippi, too, and the state itself possesses more Grammys than all of the other forty-nine states combined, a fact that Johnson recites from memory with pride. 

In addition to performing regularly, Johnson currently works at Minnie’s School of Music, teaching students to play instruments ranging from the guitar to the harmonica, vocals to the drums. He hopes to start a school of his own, expanding across the Delta to Cleveland, Clarksdale, and Greenville, where the blues and gospel were born. “We need more musicians in this area,” he said. 

“I’m honored to be in a position where I can play the blues,” Johnson said, leaning forward as he spoke. “I don’t take it for granted that I’m in a position…to carry on, to be a part of the bluesman legacy.” 

One moment at the Chicago Blues Festival in 2016 affected Johnson deeply. That day, he performed Stormy Monday and sang with conviction: “Lord have mercy/ Lord have mercy on me.” When he left the stage, an audience member approached him, crying. 

“He said, ‘I’m not a spiritual person,’” Johnson recalled. “‘But when you were singing that, all I could do was cry, because I felt what you were singing.’” 

Whereas many African-Americans, according to Johnson, “look at blues music as old music, slave music, sharecropping music” and “don’t want to be reminded of that,” the stories “should be appreciated,” he said. The encounter with the overcome audience member struck him as emblematic of both the specificity and universality of the blues. 

“Soul music changed, pop music changed, gangster rap changed,” Johnson pointed out. “…But what has remained the same…is the blues.” And the blues, as he proudly sang in his debut album Come to Mississippi, chose Johnson. 

As both a blues musician and a teacher of the blues, Johnson foretold a bright future for the genre. He spoke tenderly of contemporary singers performing in the tradition of the blues, and of the nine-year-old blues singer he was mentoring. 

“I think the blues have a great place,” Johnson asserted. “It will never go away: it’s something you can’t get rid of.”