About Johnny Dowd
Johnny Dowd is an American alternative country musician from Ithaca, New York. Typical of his style are experimental, noisy breaks in his songs and strong gothic elements in the lyrics as well as in the music. There is also a strong undercurrent of black humor and the absurd in his work.
Although his early albums were most celebrated in the alternative country community, he has never quite fit into any particular genre. As a singer-songwriter, his music is most often compared to that of Tom Waits, Nick Cave and Captain Beefheart.
Born in Fort Worth, Texas in 1948, Dowd's family moved to Memphis, Tennessee in 1950, and then to his father's hometown of Pauls Valley, Oklahoma in 1953. He received a record player for Christmas in 1956 and began buying records at a local appliance store. Although the first LP he owned was by the Ray Conniff Singers, it was the music of Hank Williams, Elvis Presley, Ray Charles and James Brown, that changed his life. He cites James Brown's Live at the Apollo as his lifelong favorite album.
In 1965, along with his mother and sisters, Johnny returned to Memphis after his parents' divorce. After serving in the U.S. Army and living in California he drove across the United States in the early 1970s with longtime friend Dave Hinkle and settled permanently in Ithaca, New York where his mother and sisters had also relocated. Dowd and Hinkle began moving furniture for a living, later naming their business the Zolar Moving Company.
Dowd formed a band in the 1970s named The Jokers, which included Johnny , his sister Jennifer Edmondson and Dave Hinkle . By 1988, the band had become Neon Baptist, who in addition to Dowd included Cally Arthur, Dave Hinkle, Mike Edmondson and Jennifer Edmondson, with Max Ormond and Kim Sherwood-Caso joining the band in later lineups. Neon Baptist was one of the founding acts of the GrassRoots Festival, where Dowd has performed annually since 1991.
By the time Neon Baptist disbanded in 1995, Dowd was recording songs alone in the office of his moving company. These songs first appeared in 1995 on a home-made demo cassette as Wrong Side of Memphis, which credited Dowd as a solo artist and featured Kim Sherwood-Caso on background vocals on two songs. Most of these tracks were either re-mixed or completely re-recorded for the CD version of the same album, which was initially pressed as a self-released CD and then officially released on Chicago's Checkered Past Records label in 1997. The album was also released on Koch Records in early 1998 and then in Europe on Munich Records. Favorable reviews led to some of his first European appearances in 1998.
In the wake of the critical acclaim for Wrong Side of Memphis, Dowd released his second album, Pictures From Life's Other Side, in 1999, also to positive reviews. That year also saw the first of Dowd's US and European tours. After the self-released, experimental Down In The Valley in 2000 came Temporary Shelter. A Dutch television documentary on Dowd was filmed in 2000, and in early 2001, The New York Times highlighted him as one of four "Country Singers Who Still Display a Country Heart".
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