Artist: Lonnie Johnson

Alfonzo "Lonnie" Johnson (February 8, 1894 - June 6, 1970) was a pioneering blues and jazz singer/guitarist born in New Orleans, Louisiana. There is some dispute over the year of his birth, but 1894 is what appears on his passport. He was a pioneer of jazz guitar as the first to play single-string guitar solos. Raised in a family of musicians, Johnson studied violin and guitar as a child, but concentrated on the latter throughout his professional career. A 1917 tour to England with a revue may have saved his life, for he returned to New Orleans in 1919 to find that most of his family had died in the 1918 influenza epidemic.