This week in Texas music history, we meet the woman who made Houston a mecca of rhythm and blues.
Episodes written by Jason Mellard, Alan Schaefer, and Avery Armstrong
The Birth of Evelyn Johnson
Jason Mellard from the Center for Texas Music History at Texas State University
On September 28, 1920, Houston music industry legend Evelyn Johnson was born in Thibodaux, Louisiana. By age six, Johnson had settled with her mother in Houston’s Fifth Ward and would later graduate from Phyllis Wheatley High and the forerunner of Texas Southern University. In 1946 she began working as the office manager of mogul Don Robey’s Bronze Peacock, one of the largest Black-owned nightclubs in the Southwest. Robey, a notorious entrepreneur known for shrewd, sometimes questionable business practices, was also a key figure in Houston’s music industry, and Johnson became his indispensable partner in making the city integral to American rhythm and blues.
In 1949 Robey tasked Johnson with researching the inner workings of the recording industry, leading to their establishment of Peacock Records. Peacock’s first signing was Clarence “Gatemouth” Brown, a guitarist Johnson and Robey first hosted at the club in 1947. Other early Peacock signings included the Dixie Hummingbirds, Willie Mae “Big Mama” Thornton, and Little Richard.
Evelyn Johnson acquired her license to manage union-affiliated artists in 1950, and she founded the Buffalo Booking Agency, one of the few Black-owned booking agencies of the era. In 1952 Robey and Johnson also acquired the Memphis-based Duke label with artists Johnny Ace and Bobby “Blue” Bland, and established subsidiary labels such as Back Beat with Roy Head and Joe Hinton. Don Robey may have been the steely face of these ventures, but Evelyn Johnson was both the brain and the heart. She remained in charge of Robey’s businesses until 1973 when he sold his assets to ABC, and Johnson remained active in the Houston community until her passing in 2005.
On her role in Robey’s various affairs, Evelyn Johnson said, “I was mother, confessor, lawyer, doctor, sister, financier, mother superior, the whole nine yards. What they needed they asked for, and what they asked for they got.”
