Johnny Winter
(born February 23, 1944)
Best known for his late 1960s and 1970s high-energy blues-rock albums and live performances, Winter also produced three Grammy Award-winning albums for blues legend Muddy Waters: Hard Again (1977), I'm Ready (1978), and Muddy "Mississippi" Waters – Live (1979). Since his time with Waters, Johnny Winter has recorded several Grammy-nominated blues albums and continues to tour extensively. In 1980, Winter was on the cover of the first issue of Guitar World and in 1988, he was inducted into the Blues Foundation Hall of Fame. In 1988, he was inducted into the Blues Foundation Hall of Fame and in 2003, he was ranked 74th in Rolling Stone magazine's list of the "100 Greatest Guitarists of All Time.” Throughout his career, Johnny Winter has been dogged by bootleg recordings and unauthorized re-releases of singles from his early pre-Columbia Records days. According to one biographer, only about fifteen percent of Winter's commercially-available recordings are legitimate, leaving 85 percent that he had no control over. Some of the releases were doctored with later overdubs by other musicians. According to Winters, royalties were not Winter's primary concern. "I just don't want that bullshit out ... It's just bad music."