Rev. Johnny L. Jones - Jesus Christ from A to Z

More than a half-century ago, a young country preacher from backwoods Alabama came to the big city and made his name leading one of Atlanta’s largest Baptist congregations. In a great Southern metropolis renowned for its preachers, Rev. Johnny L. Jones stood out for his unique delivery that combined solid theological grounding and moody, explosive flights into a high-turbulence zone between song and speech, earning him a reputation as the Fireball Preacher and more famously, The Hurricane.Before the Rev. Johnny L. Jones earned the nickname "Hurricane" for whipping sermons into a frenzy, before he recorded a string of gospel LPs for Jewel Records, before his church in Atlanta's West End burned in 1973, and long before his records started showing up again in thrift stores to be discovered and bought by a younger generation, Johnny Jones was just a young boy sitting at a tent revival in Marion, Ala. The year was 1949. "I can't think of the man's name, but he played piano and sang," Jones says. "I guess the audience went wild along with me and I sat back there watching him. At 13 my prayer was, 'Lord, let me play a piano just like he's playing it.'" Later that day, Jones told his mother that he could learn to play the piano if she would buy one for him. "She said, 'John, you know we don't have the money to buy a piano. We don't know how well the crops are going to be this year. But if we can raise 21 bales of cotton, the 21st bale will go toward purchasing your piano.' And the Lord blessed us to make 25 bales of cotton. So she bought me a piano and put it in the house. I basically taught myself how to play." Cole Alexander of the Black Lips remembers the time in 2003 when he first heard Jesus Is in Town. "Bradford [Cox] from Deerhunter made me a cassette tape of it. I think he found it in a Marietta thrift store. I used to listen to that tape at the Majestic [Diner]. I was working there as a dishwasher, and I would play it so loud that I could see people out front looking back in, wondering what the hell I was listening to." Years after he heard the tape, Alexander saw the sign for WYZE, a local AM gospel station, while driving down Boulevard and stopped on a whim. Remembering that the LP cover said that Jones was from Atlanta, he asked if anyone had ever heard of him. "Everybody there was really nice and told me that he comes in every Saturday to do a radio show." Alexander, who continued stopping at the station to meet Jones and hear Jones' reel-to-reel tapes, eventually put him in touch with Lance Ledbetter, founder of the Dust-to-Digital record label. Since being introduced, Ledbetter and Jones have worked together, listening to the vast archive of recordings that Jones has never released. Together, they've culled those tapes into Jones' first LP in 31 years, Jesus Christ from A to Z. The collected recordings are striking, loose documents of that Hurricane style: soaring organs, screaming congregants and Jones leading it all in his distinctive moan. The Methodist theologian John Wesley once asked, "Why should the devil have all the good music?" Today, the Rev. Johnny L. Jones is proof that he doesn't. -- Wyatt Williams, December 15, 2009

 

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