Johnny Winter, courtesy of Columbia Records Johnny Winter (1944----) Birthplace: Leland, Mississippi Edgar Winter (1946----) Birthplace: Beaumont Genre: Blues-Rock Other Sites: The Johnny Winter Story Skyline Music: Johnny Winter

In the late sixties and early seventies, Johnny and Edgar Winter were the quintessential white boys of the blues, their pale faces and white hair contrasting eerily with how completely they had absorbed the idiom of the great black bluesmen. Early in their careers they received praise and attention from East Coast music critics, unlike their Texas compadres, ZZ Top. As Johnny and Edgar both received recording contracts and pursued their separate careers, Johnny overshadowed his younger brother commercially, but both siblings had strong followings among blues-rock aficionados and continue their recording and concert appearances today.

Something of a wunderkind musician, Johnny Winter first played clarinet (his orthodontist objected) before picking up his father's ukulele. On dad's advice he switched to the guitar at the age of eleven. Johnny was introduced to the blues of Muddy Waters and Howlin' Wolf by a Beaumont deejay who befriended him and passed on some blues licks. Soon Johnny began showing up at the black rhythm and blues clubs around Beaumont, sometimes asking to sit in.

In 1959 Johnny formed his first band, Johnny and the Jammers, utilizing the talents of his younger brother Edgar. At local Gulf Coast Recording they recorded a single, "School Day Blues," which had some local airplay, the first of many others under various pseudonyms. Edgar Winter was progressing much along the same track, playing piano and later taking up the saxophone, both instruments essential to the pop, rhythm and blues, and jazz that Edgar would later play as a pro, first with his brother and then on his own. After a brief stint at Lamar Tech in Beaumont, Johnny took off for Chicago to take in life in the big city, listen to the Chicago blues masters, and to play the current "twist" rock in a friend's band called The Gents. But by 1963 he was back in Texas, playing and recording with a series of bands with interesting names like Johnny Winter and the Black Plague, It and Them, Insight, and the Traits, sometimes with his brother Edgar. These years showed steady growth, with Johnny Winter releasing several local hits and appearing in the Houston area as a warmup for national acts. Meanwhile, Edgar opted for college and played with a college jazz band toward the end of the sixties.

The pivotal year for Johnny was 1968, when he was playing regularly with bassist Tommy Shannon (who would later join Stevie Ray Vaughan's Double Trouble) and John Turner in a trio called Winter. Winter recorded a demonstration disc at a studio in Austin that was later released as The Progressive Blues Experiment. After an article in Rolling Stone praised the recording, Johnny received a six-figure contract and released his "debut" album, Johnny Winter, in 1969. Edgar rejoined the band for the spate of appearances that followed. Besides club dates, Johnny was booked into all the major festivals, including Denver, Newport, Atlantic City, even Woodstock (though he didn't appear on the Woodstock albums), and the Texas Pop Festival. His more rock-oriented album, Second Winter, was also issued that year. The seventies opened with Johnny playing with a new lineup, including former members of The McCoys and guitarist Rick Derringer, and was billed as "Johnny Winter And." All the albums were commercial successes.

Edgar Winter was also making a name for himself, impressing audiences with his singing as well as with his sax and keyboard work. By 1970 he, too, had a recording contract, had split from his brother's band, and had produced a first album that carved out a measure of artistic independence, titled Entrance. That album enabled Edgar to form his own touring group, Edgar Winter's White Trash, which resulted in the well-received album of the same name, released in 1971. The next album however, a live album titled Roadwork, was the swan song of White Trash. After the group's breakup, Edgar put together the team that produced the two million-selling They Only Come Out at Night, which contained the hit single "Frankenstein," a perennial crowd-pleaser that appeared in the movie Wayne's World II.

Though at this point both the Winter brothers would have seemed to be doing quite well, Johnny Winter was in fact facing a serious health problem, addiction to heroin. After the 1971 release of Johnny Winter And, Winter took a two-year break to recover before returning with Still Alive and Well. The next several albums wavered noticeably, but an international tour and 1976's Together (with Edgar Winter) put him on the right track. About the same time Johnny took time to help out his old hero Muddy Waters by producing and arranging a series of albums that restored the elder bluesman to the level of his glory days. That exercise seemed to prime Johnny Winter for two of the best albums of his career, Nothing But the Blues (1977) and White Hot and Blue (1978).

After their own glory days in the seventies, both Winter brothers seemed to slow down, putting out fewer albums and touring less. Both found their real strengths in the blues-rock spectrum, with Johnny gravitating toward the blues and Edgar toward rock. Edgar, ever the innovator, was one of the first artists in his genre to use the synthesizer to the fullest, both in his recordings and on the concert stage. Johnny has steadily held to the electric blues-rock style that his fans crave. Among his later albums, 1984's Guitar Slinger and 1991's Let Me In stand out. Edgar Winter's 1996 album, The Real Deal, was his most ambitious in years, bringing together many of the artists with whom he had collaborated throughout his career, including Rick Derringer, Leon Russell, and, of course, brother Johnny Winter.

Both Winters continue to tour today, with loyal fans critiquing the latest concerts on the Internet, voicing concerns about Johnny's health, reassuring each other that the brothers are at the top of their form (or maybe just below), and some making extravagant claims for their heroes. Not bad for a pair of rockers who started out in their early teens and are now well into their fifties.