Bunk Johnson

Bunk Johnson was a legendary, semi-mythic figure of early New Orleans music who claimed (disputedly) to have played alongside the young Louis Armstrong. Tracked down in rural Louisiana in 1939, Johnson was brought out of retirement and became central to the New Orleans traditional jazz revival movement of the 1940s. His playing was a direct pipeline to the turn-of-the-century era where ragtime, brass band marches, and raw blues were first blending into jazz.