![]() ![]() But while he isn’t interviewed, Green’s shadow looms large over this section. Visiting Mitchell’s old studio, unchanged since the ‘ 70s, the film talks to the late record producer’s daughters and to labelmate Otis Clay, getting a good feel for the Hi scene and Johnson’s place in it. On Chicago’s Twinight label, he had a deserved if conventional-sounding hit in “Come Sock it To Me,” then created a more magnetic groove on the aching “Is it Because I’m Black.” But a Payola scandal scared him away from the label, into the arms of Willie Mitchell’s Memphis-based Hi Records. Born Sylvester Thompson, the budding musician made his first guitar with baling wire and wood scraps early in his teens he found his way to Chicago, where he would meet Muddy Waters, Howlin‘ Wolf, and be set on a musical career. ![]() Hatch-Miller starts at the beginning, though, taking us to the Mississippi plantation Johnson’s grandfather bought from the family that once enslaved his forebears. ![]()
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