Down Home Blues - Mr. Johnnie Billington
Johnnie Billington was born in 1935 in Crowder, Mississippi, a small community on the Quitman/Panola county line. His father was a sharecropper and he grew up working on the farm. He first became interested in music through listening to the legendary blues show, King Biscuit Time, which was broadcast from nearby Helena, Arkansas. Billington's father bought him a guitar when he was ten years old and he began teaching himself the instrument by playing along with the King Biscuit performers. By the age of thirteen he was playing in clubs throughout the Delta with a Clarksdale-based group. In the early 1950s the other members of the band migrated to cities in the north. Billington left in 1954, first moving to Arizona, then settling in Chicago in 1959. There he reunited with his Mississippi bandmates and they began playing local clubs. Sometimes they were able to jam with some of the legendary Chicago bluesmen (and fellow Mississippi natives) such as Muddy Waters, Elmore James, and Ear...
