The Johnnys

Bluegrass has had more than its fair share of internecine brawls. Divisions between traditional ‘Bill-Done-It-This-Way’ devotees and the laid-back progressives have grown quite marked over the years and it’s led to some of the meanest, most judgmental muso-backstabbing ever to take place in American music history. No sociologist could ever been able to truly explain the rage and divisive anger that accompanies this nastier side of Bluegrass. 

Led by identical twin brothers Kyle and Stephen Johnny, no band better demonstrates the fierce conservative side of this divide than Massachusetts’ The Johnnys. 

The siblings’ father, Patrick ‘Paddy’ Johnny, a lifelong Amtrak employee, was old enough to be their grandfather and his ‘generational’ views were to inform those of his children. He had grown up in Massachusetts after his family moved there from West Virginia as part of the great migrations in the early 1900s. The Scotch-Irish heritage was keenly felt and travelled north with them, along with the family Victrola and a love for the old-time mountain music. Paddy was forever spinning 78s by Bill Monroe and The Bluegrass Boys, the Stanley Brothers, and Dock Boggs and any time there was a Bluegrass show within a reasonable drive, the whole family would attend, camping for the full three days if it were a festival. Kyle and Stephen Johnny were given as good an education on Bluegrass music as anybody might want, and while Stephen took to it like a duck to a lake, Kyle fought it as best he could. But make no mistake, Kyle loved his father and generally tried to please him. Even so, the old man could be hard to love as he indulged in rage-filled rants attacking anyone and anything to the political left of John Birch, but specifically African-Americans, Mexican-Americans, Asian-Americans, and, basically, anyone the Paddy called a “Goddam ‘Hyphen’ American” wondering aloud “Why ain’t simply ‘American’ good enough for ’em?” 

Patrick Johnny also didn’t much care for the new strains of Bluegrass that emerged in the late 70’s with the likes of Sam Bush, Béla Fleck, and company. In fact, so upset was the elder Johnny that he refused to let his sons attend the sets of these ‘Newgrass’ bands now invariably cropping up on the festival circuit. If he was going to listen to anything of a modern vintage, he preferred what became known as the ‘Dayton School of Bluegrass’ or the music that came out of Ohio made by West Virginia and Kentucky transplants who’d migrated north for work and brought their music with them. He was very fond of The Hotmud Family’s “The Girl On The Greebriar Shore.” As it happens, this was the first song ever performed by the twins during a grade school talent show. The show was less memorable for the music, these were 10-year olds after all, and more for Kyle’s first ever public tantrum. “God-damned piece of shit!” he wailed in front of shocked parents and teachers (and delighted primary-schoolers) when his single-coil Lawrence pick-up picked up some of the CB trucker talk that was blaring off of Interstate 90 just a mile away from the stage.

Traveling came easy to the boys, and Christmas after Christmas they were presented with more and more music, better and better instruments, and more than a few pistols and rifles. Finally, they were granted admission to a few Christian-based “fiddle camps,” where they honed their chops and, by the mid-90s, began writing songs together.

As they grew older, the twins began to consciously adopt the old man’s flat-out racism and ultra-conservative political views. Stephen wasn’t quite as loud about it as his brother Kyle, who was known to drop hate speech at a rate comparable to his father. This was unfortunate, but alas, it also did not hold them back in their field. A chance elevator encounter in Lowell, Massachusetts with their hero Ricky Skaggs only re-enforced these notions. Skaggs happened to mention something about a “dirty Mexican restaurant” next door to the town Shoney’s, suggesting that that was where he was going to have all of his meals while in the city. The brothers elaborately planned every opportunity to stalk Skaggs around Lowell, waiting for more of what they were fond of calling ‘Ricky wisdom’ or ‘Skaggs nuggets’. 

No-one will deny that The Johnnys were capable of decent ‘blood harmony’ singing, as they were indeed twin brothers. In 2006, John Lawless of The Bluegrass Blog noted that pair “could hit the high notes with pride,” but continued that “the songwriting is what you, if you were being generous, might call ‘Traditional’, but is in fact derivative, even mundane.” The first original song of any note was “Grampa’s Tractor.” Though it was actually about their neighbor’s tractor, the pair’s real grandfather having been killed in an Amtrak-related incident long before they were even born, it won them a few slots held open each year for newcomers at the International Bluegrass Musicians Awards in Raleigh, NC. Another tune that caught the ear was “Daddy Drove A Train,” which was also fictional since their father pushed paper around at the Worcester Amtrak Station office, never riding on a locomotive unless it was for a company outing.  

Soon enough, the festival circuit began to keep them busy and they supplemented their income selling homemade cassettes and, in time, CD-Rs. But it was after their appearance at the Black Swamp Festival in Ohio, specifically following a backstage hookup with a girl who got him very high on marijuana, Stephen began to associate less and less with his angry brother. He started to drift towards the ‘rainbow crowd,’ as Kyle like to call anybody who covered a Newgrass song or would take a radio hit and play it in a Bluegrass style. Kyle was adamant that there was no room in The Johnnys for “any of that gay shit. We play Bluegrass, God damn it! We love Jesus, not fucking Justin Timberland or whatever the fuck!” 

Through persistence, the band scored a record deal with Rural Rhythm Records for one cd, and fought their way up the Bluegrass Circuit for a few years before moving to Nashville where they started their own label called Black Boot Records. 

In many ways, things were looking up for the band. Though their refurbed 2010 Bluebird All American Tour Bus crapped out just outside Rosine, Kentucky, where the boys had gone to pay tribute to Bill Monroe’s birthplace, they traded up for a Prevost bus rental. The band spent the majority of their days on the road, but alongside Kyle’s heavy-handed but passable rhythm guitar plating matched with Stephen’s IBMA-winning mandolin chops, there was was a lot of side-musician churn. On any given week, The Johnnys were auditioning new members to sub out the spots for people who had quit because the two brothers had, for various reasons, become increasingly unbearable to be around. The roster of bandmates that the twins burned through during the 14-year period of their recording and traveling life is quite long and included over a dozen upright bass players, 6 banjo players, and at least 14 fiddle players.  

Kyle had taken to showing off one too many pistols in the back of the bus and at one point sent a bandmate to the hospital after shooting him in the foot. And Stephen took to summarily fining the hired hands for bum notes and missed rehearsals, à la James Brown. It was also mandated that everyone in the band attend Sunday mass wherever they were located, and there was always a group prayer on the bus just before each set. 

Kyle would lead these prayer sessions which were more like accusatory chants where he would ask for God to bless the band and protect them from any outside forces such as ‘Democrat’ voters and the like. 

Things came to a head one day in Wheeling, WV when a former local campaign worker for George W. Bush got on the bus and started barking about “towel heads” and going on about how he was at the Atlanta airport recently “where I seen a Quatar Airlines plane on the tarmac and thought, ‘Well now these A-rabs are on the march and we gotta step up our game and defend our country’” to appreciative nods from the twins.

It was just 20 minutes before set time, and a few moments after those words were stated on the bus, the then-current bass player and fiddle player asked Kyle to step outside the bus where they turned in their resignations on the spot. 

“Oh, you’re gonna Jew me out of a set are ya?” Kyle responded.

The bass player, who was Jewish, narrowed his eyes and answered, “That’s right.” With a smile, he took the opportunity to remind Kyle that part of his last name was John, and that the name John named from Yôḥanan, a Jewish man in the Bible, and that the name meant ‘Graced by Yahweh,’ and that Jesus was in fact also Jewish. 

Kyle walked away. He and his brother were quite used to performing as a duo when required. 

Only another year passed before radio stations banned their music, mostly due to a flippant comment that Kyle made live on the air in Vermont about how, “Bernie Sanders is a Communist who does not have American values in his Jew heart.” No worse than other statements he’d made dozens, if not hundreds of times before, it was the proverbial straw that broke the camel’s back and at long last made them unwelcome anywhere, anytime. “Cancel culture,” Stephen was heard to mutter ruefully.

Today, Stephen Johnny teaches mandolin and fiddle at Christian Bluegrass Academy in Elizabethtown, Tennessee. Kyle was repairing buses at Anchor Transportation in Whites Creek, Tennessee, living alone in a rented bungalow just a few miles away. Unsurprizingly, Kyle refused to get immunized against Covid-19, which he referred to as ‘The Hillary Flu,’ so when he inevitably contracted Corona Virus, his symptoms became so acute, so quickly, by the time he called an ambulance to take him to the hospital, it was too late. He died with a Trump sign still in his front yard.

*Presented with matching ukuleles on their 8th birthdays, Kyle had smashed his over his brother’s head two weeks later after Stephen attempted to show him a chord he had learned.