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Biography
Born in Florida, where his father was a bootlegger during prohibition, Johnnie was surrounded by music. His mother, sisters and aunts took him to church and surrounded him with gospel spirituals. But in the summer he'd head out to his grandmother's famous fish fries, where the likes of Tampa Red, Arthur ‘Big Boy’ Crudup, Lonnie Johnson and others would set up and play while folks ate and danced. “They were my dad's friends,” Bassett recalls. “He would meet them on the road. I didn't know they were gonna be big names 'til I got to be a teenager and we moved to Michigan. I'd hear them on records when I was 13, 14, 15 years old and go, ‘Hey, these are the same people I heard play when I was just a little kid.’ And dad said, ‘Yeah, that's them.’”
Johnnie started playing guitar himself at that time, “framming around” on an old arched-top instrument of his sister's and taking informal lessons from a neighbor on the front porch at night. “One day he let me take his guitar home, which was just next door,” Bassett remembers. “I'd work at it for three, four hours at a time. That was the start. I just fell in love with it.”
