Artist description Songwriter and singer in urban folk & country blues tradition.

Music Style Original Acoustic Folk Blues

Musical Influences Country Blues, Urban Folk

Similar Artists Ray Bonneville, Bob Dylan, Tom Waits, Stefan George, Kelly Joe Phelps

Artist History Born Christopher Andrew Johnson in Chapel Hill, NC; Educated and settled in St. Louis since 1979. " Or, rather, is it not simply that between Piedmont and myself there runs a current of sympathetic impulses, some conscious, some unconscious, which I shape and dramatize as best I can: in image-stories? A relationship that begins with an affinity between one's blood and the climate, the very air, of home, and ends in that wearisome spiritual drift that disturbs me and other Piedmontese? Do I express spiritual things by speaking of material things, and vice-versa? And this labor of substitution, allusion, imagination, how far can it be valued as an indication of that 'allusive and all-pervading essence' of ours?" --Cesare Pavese, 1935

Group Members self

Instruments Gibson J-45, Liberty dobro, Blues Harp, Porchboard

Albums When Orion Calls, Hound Dog, Pieces of the Pye, Piedmont Johnson & Pye-Dog

Press Reviews Named "Best Un-Folkie Coffeehouse Folkie" in 1999 by the Riverfront Times; nominated for a St. Louis Music Award in 2000; Riverfront Times and No Depression writer Roy Kasten wrote: '...Johnson plays well, but his music is rarely pretty: his worn, almost Tom Waitsian voice spades through earthy, witty songs, and his banged-up but beautiful Gibson rings with a raw thwack and sting that may hail from the blues but also sounds like nothing else in town."

Location St. Louis, MO - USA

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