Johnny Johnson

Musician
Best known for Guitar Bass

Howard G. “Johnny” Johnson was a guitarist in Lester Flatt and Earl Scruggs’s Foggy Mountain Boys in the late 1960s. After the partnership ended in 1969 he stayed with Flatt in the Nashville Grass, where he played both guitar and bass.

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He is on Flatt and Scruggs’s Columbia sessions in Nashville from 1 February 1967, when the band recorded “Nashville Cats” with Grady Martin as the second guitarist, through August 1969. Those years took in the band’s sessions with Don Law and later Bob Johnston producing, alongside Josh Graves on dobro, Paul Warren on fiddle and the young Randy Scruggs on guitar.

With Flatt at RCA Victor from December 1970, under the producer Bob Ferguson, he played guitar on Flatt’s own sessions and on those Flatt made with Mac Wiseman in March and October 1971. By the July 1973 sessions that produced Flatt and Wiseman’s Over the Hills to the Poorhouse he had moved to bass, with the teenage Marty Stuart on mandolin, and he played bass again on Flatt’s sessions that August and September.

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