One of the finest contemporary acoustic roots & blues guitarists does not tour or play live, is not signed to a record label, not heard on the radio and still makes a good living, virtually entirely in the internet musical space. It’s a new world in the music business in 2025, and all the old conventions have been upended, from how people listen to music, to the musical mediums, the sound equipment and how and from whom musicians get paid. The new world offers a path to success for some, and with it personal and business emancipation.
Among the greatest success stories of an acoustic roots & blues guitarist on the internet is Justin Johnson (JJ), residing in Nashville, Tennessee, a phenomenal online sensation. Impressively, he has 1.72 million (and growing) subscribers on YouTube, yet you might not even know him because he is truly a guitarist’s guitarist. They are his primary audience as teacher and role model. Be they burgeoning beginners or advanced pickers worldwide, they use JJ’s instructional sessions, and his numerous solo instrumental CDs for playing along and improving their chops. Those colossal user stats make him one of the biggest, most famous influencers on the noble acoustic music scene, bigger than even the highest profile fellow acoustic roots & blues guitarists. As a reference, famous and renowned players like Ry Cooder, Roy Bookbinder, Ed Gerhard, Keb Mo, Mike Dowling, and most other acoustic blues guitarists, all have 100K or less followers. Clearly, musical fame and fortune are attainable in unconventional ways.
As a solo acoustic instrumentalist, JJ is the real deal, a sublime instrumentalist equally skilled as a fingerpicker and slide guitarist. We would expect to see a swift player like him on the world’s concert stages, in major guitar festivals with the greatest acoustic guitarists in any genre, rather than online. The pandemic changed the paradigm. It isolated us and changed our access to the world. Necessity opened new connectivity. Suddenly, we were all more open to the virtual, and JJ was ready with the perfect solution. While other musicians saw their income wiped out, JJ reached people around the world.
Ultimately, it’s all about the music. Anyone with ears will not require much convincing that JJ is a rare virtuoso of perfect, sensitive and impeccable guitar style, who plays as clean as Ed Gerhard and as technically refined as Ry Cooder. Like the best jazz players, he knows how to improvise intelligently by understanding the relationship between chords and melodic lines. He knows how to leave space, to let each note breathe. He beautifully translates lines and phrases with a strong sense of melodicism. His production quality on all that he offers is first class, with refined aesthetic as an artist, teacher and producer. It is a winning combination.
He can lay down some fierce, emotive blues. Like many of the golden age players, he writes his own compositions and sometimes covers popular songs from other blues-based genres and transmutes them to a down-home, country blues style. A famous rock tune is deconstructed and reworked. JJ is never rough-hewn and whatever he touches is always sophisticated, polished and perfectly executed. Yet, in all that stylistic perfection, he somehow manages to carry a deep-rooted emotive feeling, playing gritty and dirty enough to grab you by the bass string of the soul the way only the blues can. It’s a mesmerizing concoction!
The masterly guitarist dresses for the part and carries an old-school rock-n-roll style, sporting attire reminiscent of Stevie Ray Vaughn or Johnny Winter, always with a cool hat, bejeweled and in flashy garb. He is as well-versed in the electric rock arena as he is in acoustic blues.
Making a living as a musician is not easy, especially not for a solo blues instrumental guitarist. Despite the reality of having to make a living as a sole business proprietor, lots of brilliant and renowned musicians, artists, writers and other creatives fail to understand the importance of self-promotion, effective marketing and fundamental business skills. That’s why some of the most talented and famous people unnecessarily end up in a perpetual low-income status. Not Justin Johnson. He and his business-oriented wife Nikki managed their online business well. JJ has the permanent pleasure of working at home, recording in his home studio, making instructional videos and tending to his vast guitar collection, free from record labels, managers, booking agents, publicists, and touring. He does what he loves and gets to stay home and play guitar all day while making a comfortable living. His online store offers his recorded music as CD (some autographed) or digital download, guitar lessons and tabs, instructional DVDs, all professionally produced and recorded. He also builds and markets the Justin Johnson 3-String Shovel Guitar made from tempered steel garden spades as the body, and strung with the A, D, and G strings, and tuned to Open G, with much resonance and sustain, and raw, gritty tone fitting for the blues.
Most top-tier guitarists get some form of endorsement deals from guitar manufacturers and luthiers wishing to promote their instruments, which is best accomplished when seen and heard in the hands of virtuosos. Often that entails extending the “dealer price” discount to the performer, and less frequently a comp-guitar for free. Justin Johnson is such a desirable demonstrator, with wide reaching influence, that the best luthiers send him instruments to showcase their creations to his vast audience. At one time he had a virtual guitar warehouse of 300 guitars in his house, including some by the top tier instrument makers in the world. Guitarists will appreciate his top favorites: National Reso-Phonic Wood-Bodied Triolian Polychrome Resonator; National Reso-Phonic Guitars – Custom Steel-Bodied Scheerhorn S-1; Cort – Gold Passion Acoustic/Electric; Pratley- Premier OM Maple Smoke Burst SC Acoustic/Electric and Martin DR Dreadnaught Acoustic (circa 1990s).
Justin Johnson is originally from Southern California. He spent a few years in Seattle during the ‘90s, when the grunge scene was breaking wide open, which shaped his early musical experiences. Eventually, he moved to coastal North Carolina with his mom, where he spent most of his teenage years and early adulthood. That’s where he first picked up the guitar, and the regional Southern influence had a huge impact on him. The first bands he played in were steeped in Southern Rock, and that naturally pulled him deeper into the blues. He first picked up the guitar late in high school and taught himself for the first couple of years. He minored in Jazz Guitar at the University of North Carolina, Wilmington which gave him a strong foundation in theory, sight reading, improvisation, and arranging—especially for solo guitar. His professor was a big Joe Pass fan, something which comes through in JJ’s style even today.
After college, he spent years as a hired gun, playing lead guitar in a dozen bands at a time, digging into everything from Classic Rock, Southern Rock, Reggae, and Soul, to Hip Hop, Big Band Jazz, Bluegrass, and Country. Often, he’d get a call to play a gig the same night, with no idea what the songs were until he stepped on stage, filling in for someone else, learning the set on the fly, and figuring it out in real time in front of an audience. In his early years he was influenced by guitarists like Hendrix, Stevie Ray Vaughan, Clapton, Billy Gibbons, and Jimmy Page. Those guitarists got him to dig back to the older style of blues, especially R.L. Burnside and Mississippi Fred McDowell.
Thecountryblues caught up with the musico via phone from Nashville on March 31, 2025:
JJ: “I’ve toured for years all over the world. When I first went solo my wife Nikki and I went on the road full-time, traveling all over the U.S., a couple tours in Europe and U.K., and one in Australia. We settled in Nashville, Tennessee, eight years ago. That’s when the internet became the stage. I fully embraced the ability to reach people online. It’s a magical time to be a musician, and to be able to reach people all over the world. After years on the road, working around the clock touring, it was nice to be able to focus on the recording in my home studio, making videos and building an online audience.
I mostly play unaccompanied solo guitar– which is where my style shows itself in the most clarity. I want to create a moment and an emotion more than I want to show off a technique. That’s why I love blues music so much. It’s a genre that allows me to prioritize the performance and the emotion of the moment over the academic aspects of music. I always had the dream of picking up a guitar, whether it’s amplified or not, one guitar, me by myself, and play an entire song: the melody, the chorus, the rhythm, and have that make its own statement, something that could touch you, make you feel a certain way. So that’s what I’m always striving for.
As a guitar player, especially when you’re challenging yourself to become more technically proficient, you can easily get caught in this competition to play faster and play louder and show off. Guitarists like BB King can play one note and it tells much more of a story than someone playing 80 notes. I’m a huge Ry Cooder fan and absolutely love his work. He can tell a story with a few notes, and on the fly – a master.
I am working with a lot of guitar brands and companies. When I get to know their work, designs and ideas will pop into my head of what I would love to see. When I start to play instruments and put videos out, I always get a lot of questions about what that guitar is and where people can get one. It’s a natural way to support the companies I work with, to support myself as a musician, and to inspire my audience who are looking for great instruments. There is lots of cool cross-pollination
I have an uncompromising vision to be honest about the music that I want to put out there and that I want to share with people. That has led me to be the kind of musician I am, and to play and showcase what I do on the Internet right now.
“Don’t be afraid to be different.
Don’t be afraid to think about things on your own.
Don’t wait until someone gives you permission to do something.”
For years I used only standard tuning. I started experimenting with open tunings when I started playing cigar box guitars and one-string diddley bows. Playing these instruments had me coming up with my own tunings, whether it was root-fifth-root or root-major-third-fifth. I applied these tunings to the six-string guitar and started with open D and open E – and realizing those are the same tunings, they’re a whole step apart. The tension of the strings is different. Then came open G and an open A. When I look at the guitar, I think of the three bass strings as one guitar and of the four highest strings as a separate guitar. So, there’s a bass guitar, a rhythm guitar – which is in the three bass strings. I generally think of the four highest strings as the melody, lead and rhythm, like accompaniment part. Sometimes I will have the top four strings in standard tuning, and then the bottom two strings will be tuned to the chord changes in the song. I’ll use a G-sixth tuning, which is D-G – the bass two strings are tuned down a whole step, so the bottom five strings are in open G tuning, and the top four strings are standard. That helped me go off the map with tunings and kind of come up with my own vocabulary.
When I learned slide guitar, I started in standard tuning. When I started open E or open D, Elmore James or Robert Johnson style riffs, it was like I already knew these in standard, but I played them in a totally different way. It was reverse engineering and realizing it would have been way easier to learn if I had started in open tunings, but it probably would have changed the way I play completely.
When I went solo as an instrumental blues guitarist, I had nothing. No reputation, no one knew who I was, and no one was looking to book a solo instrumental blues guitar player. The first five to ten years of my solo career was extremely difficult. I was living on the road pretty much gig to gig, all over the country, barely scraping by. It was years and years and years of that. Me and my wife Nikki were working hard together at creating a network of gigs and places we could play around the country. Right at that period, the Internet started being something we could rely on, at least for marketing through social media. I give my wife Nikki credit for the social media 100 percent because she’s very good at developing newsletters at all the gigs, getting people to sign up for that, getting people to follow us on Facebook. We started filming what I was doing. People started enjoying that story, in addition to the music. It was very grassroots at first. And it was very awesome. When we started posting videos online, people would make fun of me, “That’s not music, that’s not art, that’s not being a musician. putting your videos online.” It’s been a slow process, but I think the pandemic had a lot to do with people’s attitudes about that changing. For us it was “Don’t be afraid to be different. Don’t be afraid to think about things on your own. Don’t wait until someone gives you permission to do something.” Now we have what we have, and we own every bit of it. There’s not a record label taking a percentage. No industry people nickel-and-diming us. We own all our music, videos, and recordings.
It’s about what you prioritize as the most important aspect of a song. What is the most important goal of this song: What is the most important element? When I’m arranging or writing a song for solo guitar, I want to set the mood with it. A good song is something that the listener doesn’t have to struggle to understand. I love all forms of music. It’s all about communication with the audience. I don’t want to lose anyone. I want to win everyone over. Duane Eddy was asked, “How do you sell so many records –you’re not even doing anything fancy?” He said, “I don’t play over people’s heads.” You want them to have the song stuck in their head after they’re done listening to it, even though there’s no words.
Blues, gospel and soul music, taught me that it is the inflection is where all the emotion comes from. This is what I teach a lot in my guitar classes and in my guitar platform.”