John Magnie
John Magnie is a singer, keyboard player and accordionist who co-founded the Subdudes, the New Orleans roots band whose stripped-down sound set his accordion beside acoustic guitars, a tambourine in place of drums and close harmony singing. With Tommy Malone he was one of the band’s principal songwriters through two runs of albums from 1989 to 2009.
Magnie grew up in Denver and spent time at Colorado State University in Fort Collins before moving to New Orleans in 1974, drawn by the piano playing of Professor Longhair and James Booker. He met both, and became Booker’s driver and caretaker, learning a good deal about the piano from him. In New Orleans he and Malone played together in Little Queenie and the Percolators.
The Subdudes came together in the mid-1980s, with Malone on guitar, Johnny Ray Allen on bass and Steve Amedée on percussion; the other three had grown up in Edgard, a sugar-cane town up the river from New Orleans. For their first gig the four agreed to bring as little equipment as possible, so Magnie brought an accordion instead of a piano and Amedée a tambourine instead of drums, and the band built its sound on harmony singing. It was Magnie who proposed moving to Fort Collins, which the band did in 1987, and soon afterwards it signed with Atlantic Records. The Subdudes (1989) and Lucky (1991) came out on East West, followed by Annunciation (1994) and Primitive Streak (1996) on High Street. The band broke up in 1996.
Magnie played accordion and sang harmony alongside Stuart Duncan, Jerry Douglas and Mark Schatz on Tim O’Brien’s Sugar Hill album Odd Man In (1991), recorded at Nightingale Studios in Nashville. After the Subdudes’ split he and Amedée formed the Colorado quartet Magpie with Tim Cook on bass and Jay Clear on guitar, with Magnie singing lead and playing piano.
The Subdudes regrouped in the early 2000s, with Malone, Magnie and Amedée joined by Cook and Jimmy Messa, and recorded Miracle Mule (2004), Behind the Levee (2006), produced by Keb’ Mo’, Street Symphony (2007) and Flower Petals (2009), made in Magnie’s basement studio. Allen rejoined for a reunion in 2014 and died that August; the band carried on touring with Cook on bass. As of 2026 Magnie was leading a Fort Collins band, the Grocery Story, which grew out of a story-driven musical and includes Amedée on drums.
