Bio for Jean Johnson on The Bluegrass Mix

Email Jean

I was born in Houlton, Maine to a factory worker/farmer and a stay-at-home Mom. When I was five years old we moved to a small farm in Linneus, Maine where my dad continued to work in the potato factory while he built up his herd of Jersey cattle.
Many evenings, when my dad was working my Mom would sit down with her guitar and play and sing for my oldest brother and me. Sometimes she would pop pop-corn on the wood stove and we would sing with her and that was our entertainment. Bluegrass music was the only music back then. I remember the first time Daddy brought home a radio for us to listen to and when Mom turned it on Grandpa Jones was on the air. That is a memory I will always cherish.
When I was about ten years old Mom and Dad bought me my very first guitar, (Roy Rogers) with the understanding if I learned to play they would help me get a better one. I would sit in front of Mom night after night and watch her play and follow along with her, but never had the faith in myself that I could play until one night the lights went out and when they came back on I was in the same chord as my mom….I’ve been playing ever since.
Like I said, I was raised on Bluegrass music either through Mom singing or the wind-up victrola we had. There was always music around as that was our entertainment. Even as I grew older and moved away from home Bluegrass music was not far from my reach.
After graduating from high school I went to work as a secretary, married and moved to Texas. Even though you would think that Texas was full of bluegrass music, it wasn’t back then. Any festivals that we saw advertised were always quite a distance from where we lived. We did attend some of the festivals, but not as many as we have since moving to Maine.
Every summer, the last week in August, my husband and I would come home to Maine and attend the Salty Dog Festival in Cambridge, Maine with my mom and dad. I am told that at one time there were more bluegrass pickers in Cambridge, Maine than there were in Louisville, KY. We made many friends at the Maine festival.
After my husband retired we moved back to Maine and really got involved in the bluegrass scene. I became Secretary of the Bluegrass Music Association of Maine and my husband served on the board from 2001 until 2006 when he became ill. He also got involved with emceeing festivals and bluegrass shows and we also were the promoters of a bluegrass festival in Detroit, Maine for five years, until my husband’s illness. It was really funny promoting the festival in Detroit, Maine, when we were asking the Hunger Mountain Boys about performing at the festival; they thought it was Detroit, Michigan. Our festival was dubbed “The Biggest Little Festival in Maine”.
Over the years I have accumulated bluegrass music on LP, cassettes, and now CDs. Every time we would attend a festival we always came home with an armload of tapes and later, CDs. We have kept up with the “popular” bluegrass artists as well as many locals. Everywhere we went, even on vacation stops in different places we would pick up more tapes and CDs, many of them being local bluegrassers from that particular area we were in.
I am now in the process of recording my tapes to CDs so I will have them to play on my bluegrass shows. I also have about 200 LPs that will also be converted eventually to CDs; plus my library of over 500 CDs. I have so many CDs, that since my computer was hacked back in December, I have not gotten them all downloaded to my external hard drive, but working on it daily. I make these statements so that you don’t think that I want to become one of your DJs just to get more music. I have more of my own than I can handle right now.
My husband and I got involved with a “public” radio station at Colby College out of Waterville, Maine and had two bluegrass shows a week there. The station wasn’t very powerful, but we enjoyed spinning bluegrass music and the friends we met while there. Of course, we had to give up the shows when my husband got ill as I couldn’t keep up with his needs and do the radio show 25 miles from home.
When my husband got so ill, but had started to recover somewhat, he was in bed most of the time, I was longing for a bluegrass connection. One of the board members of the Bluegrass Music Association of Maine told me about internet broadcasting, so I checked into it to see what it was all about and became an internet DJ in April of 2008.
The rest is history in the making, so they say. I love bluegrass music, what it stands for and it will always be a big part of my life.

Jean