Remembering Johnny Jenkins and the often overlooked impact he had on Macon music

As I sit down to write, I’m reminded by my Georgia music calendar (yes, I do have a Georgia music calendar) that the date is a significant one to Macon. Eleven years ago, the day marked the death of Johnny Jenkins, described in his Telegraph obituary as a “musical child prodigy and genius on the guitar.”

Jenkins has always seemed criminally overlooked when it comes to the accepted narrative of the city’s musical development, but to me, he’s a major player hidden just beneath the surface. He brought Otis Redding into his band, the Pinetoppers, telling the young singer that he could “make him sound good.” It was with Jenkins that Redding took his first trip to Memphis, where he would capture the attention of the Stax label and eventually find real success as a singer.

More importantly, Jenkins later symbolized a crucial moment when tides where beginning to shift in the musical landscape of Macon. Jenkins’ career never took off the way that Redding’s had, but Phil Walden, by the late 1960s the leader of the nascent Capricorn Records, was still interested. The label was then still trying to find its footing.

A studio band had been hired under the assumption that they’d be backing singers and composing arrangements for on-staff songwriters, but studio bands were beginning to fall out of style in favor of self-contained acts.

In Macon, that change was represented by the then-unknown Allman Brothers Band, who had just moved to town. The building that would become Capricorn Sound Studios was nothing more than a control room and live room with some paltry acoustic treatment and a soundboard where young musicians could experiment.

It was in this atmosphere that Johnny Jenkins’ “Ton-Ton Macoute!” was recorded and released. In my biased and completely non-objective opinion, it stands out as the best LP that the label ever offered. The base of the record is a series of recordings originally intended as a Duane Allman solo LP that never materialized in Muscle Shoals. Those recordings were filled out by performances from various members of the Allman Brothers Band, who go through a set mostly comprised of swampy covers, like Dr. John’s “I Walk On Gilded Splinters” and Bob Dylan’s “Down Along The Cove,” and it’s topped off with a few originals by Jackie Avery, a Macon songwriter who is sadly also often lost in Macon’s musical history.

“Ton-Ton Macoute!” always sounds to me like an aural portrait of a fleeting moment in time in Macon’s musical history, resembling where it had been and signaling where it would go.

This story was originally published June 29, 2017 at 6:46 AM with the headline "Remembering Johnny Jenkins and the often overlooked impact he had on Macon music."