Delta Bluesman Super Chikan

James "Super Chikan" Johnson plays the blues.

James Johnson says he was into recycling long before the rest of the world knew what recycling was. As MPB's arts reporter Ron Brown tells us, poverty was Johnson's motivation and his inspiration.

If you’re ever looking for James Johnson, you can usually find him working with power tools in the garage at his Clarksdale home. The 58-year-old craftsman has enjoyed making things ever since he can remember, mostly out of necessity.

“Christmas’d be coming. We know it was Christmas and stuff and grandma said "sorry kids we won’t be able to get nothing this Christmas cause we didn’t make a good crop" and all that kind of stuff. So we make our own toys. We’d take wood and carve it out, shoe boxes or we’d take cans… or anything we had we make stuff out of it, and it just stuck with me. And I still do it.”

What James Johnson usually makes in his wood shop these days are musical instruments. They’re called diddley bows, native to the Mississippi delta. The first diddley bows had a single wire string stretched across a wooden board, usually on a porch or barn. To make music, you need a slide, like the neck of a bottle. The music it makes became known as the blues… the delta blues. And James Johnson is a delta blues man.

“I think with my life experience I’m a true delta bluesman. Not a blues artist. It don’t have nothing to do with music, and at the same time it does. But blues is not just all music. Blues has to do with a man’s life. And how his life is constructed and it stays with you. It’s an evil spirit.”

Johnson has been playing the blues ever since he was a young man. He inherited his musical talent from his grandfather Ellis Johnson, a local fiddle player. Since 1997 he has performed and recorded under the stage name of “Super Chikan.” His distinctive slide guitar sound mixes blues with country and rock and roll. His even more distinctive diddley bow guitars, handmade in his garage, are now sought after by the rich and the famous.

“I’m constantly making ‘em. I’ve made ‘em for Steven Seagal, Paul Simon, Morgan Freeman. I love doing it. It brings me joy and peace to be by myself, to be alone doing this. And lots of times I’d just about rather be in the shop making a guitar than doing anything because when the blues spells hit me, I can deal with it alone.”

Johnson says working alone in his garage, he can put his deepest feelings and life experiences into all the guitars he makes and into the songs he plays. As a delta bluesman, he says he really doesn’t have a choice. He was born to interpret the blues.

“I wanted everybody to know that the good times they have off the blues, a true bluesman don't have those good times. But we do bring you good songs and sad stories, good stories, strange stories. But some people really do experience the blues. Blues is nothing nice. If you’re born with the blues, you’re gonna have it.”

Despite the blues, and maybe because of them, James Johnson has been making things all his life. But perhaps his most creative achievement has been himself; Super Chikan is a self-made man.

“On stage I feel a sense of freedom. On stage I’m expressing … I feel like I’m doing what I was chosen to do. But I try to make it joyful and take the sad stories and make ‘em funny stories. And make ‘em joyful stories.”

James Johnson has been creating something out of nothing all his life, beginning with Christmas toys as a child and continuing on up to now, with decades of singing and playing the delta blues. But success is not something he’s taking for granted. If there’s anything James Johnson has learned in his life, it’s this: you don’t count your chickens before they’re hatched.

“I’m gonna keep on smiling, keep on clucking and keep on kickin’ as long as I can. Be a chicken. Laughs… “

For MPB News, I’m Ron Brown