[BITList] Peerie Willie

Wed Dec 10 23:15:09 GMT 2014

Just type "Peerie Willie” into youtube...

Here is is playing with Aly Bain on the fiddle….

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6nbOaPN5toM <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6nbOaPN5toM>

And…

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZDCIKxL-hEY&list=PLFSrNWnzRnoJtXmBwHrdeGfM8pAvCvRaK <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZDCIKxL-hEY&list=PLFSrNWnzRnoJtXmBwHrdeGfM8pAvCvRaK>

To read this Life of the Day complete with a picture of the subject,
visit http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/lotw/2014-12-10

Johnson,  William Henry  [Peerie Willie]  (1920-2007), musician, was born on 10 December 1920 at Upperhouse in Bouster, a small valley on Yell, the second largest of the Shetland Islands. Only his mother's name, Divina Johnson (1895-1990), shawl knitter, appeared on his birth certificate when she registered his birth the following February. His sister Evelyn (b. 1942) was from Divina's marriage (subsequently annulled) to Alexander Reid Milne, marine stoker.

As a boy Johnson attended school irregularly because of poor health exacerbated by where he grew up in Lerwick-'two dark damp rented rooms in the rather grandly named "Royal Buildings"'  (Leask, Willie's World)-and lengthy convalescence after scarlet fever. Being short for his age, he acquired the nickname Peerie (meaning little) that stuck with him for the rest of his life. Trapped indoors in isolation and with visitors rationed, he saw a picture of a cowboy playing the ukulele and new vistas of the imagination opened. His mother, who herself played fiddle and melodeon, tracked down a ukulele for 10s. 6d. so he could pass the time. After a while, frustrated by the instrument's limited range, he graduated to guitar. His cousin John Henry Leask, the second of two sons born to Mary, the eldest of his mother's ten siblings, made his first guitar.

Johnson left school without any qualification and seemed set to drift into unskilled work. Indeed for much of his life he was a general labourer. In a Lerwick music shop in 1936, however, he met the innately competitive violinist Tom Anderson, his opposite both in temperament and musically. Always 'a history of love-hate friction and rivalry'  (Clark, 145), theirs was the lengthiest musical relationship of his life. By a quirk of radio reception Johnson had been listening to jazz broadcasts from the other side of the Atlantic, enabling him to discover that the American jazz guitarist Eddie Lang and the violinist Joe Venuti were taking the guitar-hitherto an instrument relegated to supporting, rhythmic roles or, as in Al Bowlly's case, as crooner accompaniment-to new places. The Dundee-based songwriter Michael Marra later turned Johnson's shortwave radio experience into his song 'Schenectady Calling Peerie Willie Johnson' (1994). (In 1979, while touring with the Scottish folk group the Boys of the Lough, Johnson found himself in the very hall in Schenectady from where Venuti and Lang had broadcast.)

With the Nazi occupation of Norway in 1940 Johnson joined the Royal Air Force and was posted as ground crew to the strategically important Sullom Voe airbase on Shetland's Mainland. The base had its own full-time dance band composed of RAF bandsmen, most of whom had been professional or semi-professional musicians before the war. Johnson would sit in and jam, a habit he never lost down the decades. Although he never learned to sight-read, he developed a remarkable skill at playing by ear. After demobilization he resumed playing with Anderson in the Islesburgh Dance Band. On 2 July 1953 at St Columbus manse, Lerwick, he married Ethel Annabel Johnson (1927/8-1997), daughter of Marjory Ann Johnson and stepdaughter of John Armstrong, garage assistant, of Lerwick. There were no children of the marriage.

Johnson's fame soon spread beyond the Shetland Islands. He recorded with the fiddler Willie Hunter at Abbey Road Studios in London in 1958, but most of his recordings were made in the Shetlands. His playing was included in such compilation albums as Scottish Violin Music (1963), Shetland Fiddling (1978), and Silver Bow: the Fiddle Music of Shetland (1995). Some of his performances-'Da North Road' / 'Robertson Crescent' being one example-were preserved on Willie's World (2007).

Self-taught as a guitarist, Johnson devised musical solutions when it came to shaping chords, runs and bass lines from what he heard that bear comparison with the music and achievements of Lang, Venuti, Stephane Grappelli, and Django Reinhardt. He later picked up other instruments, including piano and double bass, in much the same way. His totally unschooled, utterly intuitive mind grasped guitar chords and melded jazz and Shetland folk idioms in ways that would impress generations of musicians, including Humphrey Lyttelton, Archie Fisher, and Martin Taylor. Fisher's memory of Johnson was of him sitting in his favourite haunt, The Lounge [Bar] in Lerwick. It was at a folk festival, and there were guitarists from all around the world. He was holding court with an old, battered acoustic guitar. They were all very good guitarists. They probably knew what all the chords were that he didn't know [the names of]. They were all sitting there like disciples. (The Guardian, 29 June 2007)

To the end of his life Johnson was happier as the soul-of-the-party and a supporting musician, for example, with the Shetland fiddler Aly Bain or the Boys of the Lough. Enormously approachable and open-handed, he would share his knowledge generously and across the generations. In one of his most memorable recordings he collaborated with the fiddler Debbie Scott on The Selkies' Song (made in 1985 and released in 2008). Scott also wrote a tribute to him, 'The Bousters Boy'. He died of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease at Taing House, Lerwick, on 22 May 2007 and was buried with his wife in Knab cemetery, Lerwick, on 30 May. On 22 May 2010 a memorial, provided by his sister Evelyn Leask, commemorating him and the two previous generations of the family, was unveiled in Bouster. Built of stones from his derelict birthplace, it is fashioned in the shape of a 'plantie crub'-a traditional windbreak for sheltering and growing young plants-and included his image and the logotype of the Peerie Willie guitar festival, inaugurated in 2005.

Ken Hunt 

Sources  A. Clark, Aly Bain: fiddler on the loose (1993) + The Herald [Glasgow] (26 May 2007) + The Independent (29 May 2007) + The Scotsman (30 May 2007) + The Guardian (29 June 2007) + The Times (3 July 2007) + D. Gardner, 'Musicians pay fitting tribute to isles' guitar wizard Willie', Shetland Times (28 Sept 2007) + E. Leask, Willie's World, (2007) [CD booklet notes] + E. Leask, 'Fame, family and friends' + private information (2011) [Evelyn Leask, sister; A. Fisher; O. Tierney] + b. cert. + m. cert. + d. cert.
Archives  FILM BFINA, performance footage
Likenesses  B. Fox, photograph, 2006, priv. coll. [see illus.] · C. Reinking, pastel on paper (after C. Reinking, photograph, 1992), repro. in Willie's World · obituary photographs · photograph, repro. in www.tradmusichall.com/PeerieWJohnson.htm · stone memorial, Bouster, Yell, Shetland Islands

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