He then formed a more rock-oriented band, Johnny Winter And, with former members of The McCoys. He played that same summer at the Newport Jazz Festival, where he jammed with B.B. In August of 1969, Winter performed at Woodstock, although he was not featured in the subsequent, Oscar-winning film documentary about the fabled music festival. His virtuosity on guitar and slide-guitar, and his high-octane delivery struck a resounding chord with many fans. The same year saw at least four Winter albums released, one by Columbia, the others by small labels hoping to cash in by repackaging Winter's earlier recording sessions from Texas. By early 1969, Winter had moved to New York, where he signed a lucrative, $600,000 album contract with Columbia Records. Joplin, by coincidence, was one of his closest friends in music. If you can imagine a hundred and thirty-pound cross-eyed albino with long fleecy hair playing some of the gutsiest fluid blues guitar you have ever heard, then enter Johnny Winter." The article hailed Winter as "the hottest item outside of Janis Joplin. He was invited to New York after being singled out in a late 1969 article about Texas-bred musicians in Rolling Stone, then the nation's leading music publication for young rock fans. The guitar-playing Winter made his first album, the independently released "The Progressive Blues Experiment," in 1968. In 19, he was a member of a band led by singer B.J. Johnny was 15 when he and Edgar recorded and released their first record, "School Day Blues," under the name Johnny & The Jammers. He was still an an infant when his family moved to Beaumont in Texas, where his brother, Edgar, was born in late 1946. "That guy up there onstage - I got to see him up close," Waters once noted of Winter. In the mid-1970s, after Winter had become an international blues-rock star, he produced and played on three of Waters' albums, including the Grammy Award-winning "Hard Again." The two also toured together and their differences - the economy of Waters' guitar work, the furious attack of Winter's six-string attack - couldn't have been more pronounced. "I got a standing ovation, and he took his guitar back." "He gave me his guitar and let me play," Winter recalled years later in an interview. Winter repeatedly asked Waters if he could sit in that night, until the Chicago-based blues giant finally relented.
Winter was not yet 18 when he met one of his idols, blues guitar and vocal icon Muddy Waters, at a Texas club. The fact that both were albinos was much less notable than how well they played and the deep feeling they evinced for music created by African-American artists.
Winter and his brother, multi-instrumental wizard Edgar Winter, grew up in Texas, where they began playing professionally in blues, rock and R&B bands almost before they'd finished junior high school. He was immensely important, because what people heard as blues-rock before then was rock musicians, trying to play the blues, and he was a blues musician who fused rock into his blues." He played updated rocking blues, but certainly in the tradition of the blues. "It was clear he loved Lightnin' Hopkins, Muddy Waters and T-Bone Walker, but he also reveled in the energy of Chuck Berry. "There were a lot of people playing blues-rock when Johnny Winter came to the fore, but what really set him apart was his great respect for tradition," Kinsman said. His musical legacy was hailed Thursday by Michael Kinsman, the producer of the 16-year-old San Diego Blues Festival. In 1988, Winter became the first white musician ever inducted into the Blues Foundation Hall of Fame in Memphis. Johnny Winter, Live in 1970 at the Montreux Jazz Festival
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