JP has had an outstanding career as perhaps the most important white country blues player of the last 30 years, recording dozens of albums for Vanguard, Atlantic, Columbia, Capricorn, Rounder and now Point Blank. Highlights include Country Blues ('64), I Can Tell ('67), Live ('83); and more recently, Trouble No More ('93) and Found True Love ('95) where he proves his mettle with the electric guitar and as a bandleader.

John Paul Hammond has quietly shown his own light and cleared a space within the monumental shadow of his father and is deserving of respect and admiration for having done so.

John Henry Hammond Jr.
John Hammond is the most important non-performer in 20th Century popular music. The names of the artists he produced or championed attest to the remarkable reach of his long, long arm: Fletcher Henderson, Bessie Smith, Benny Goodman, Billie Holiday, Count Basie, Charlie Christian, Bob Dylan, Aretha Franklin, George Benson, Bruce Springsteen, Stevie Ray Vaughan.

Perhaps Hammond's single greatest and most enduring achievement is the From Spirituals to Swing concert at Carnegie Hall in December of 1938 that clarified the evolution of black music from Africa, through country blues and gospel, and on to jazz for a white urban audience. The importance of this concert can't be overstated from a musical, cultural, or political standpoint; in retrospect it was the moment of conception for the integration of blacks into the American mainstream.

Though the process continues to this day, the differences between the America of the late-'30s and now begin with Hammond and his musical emissaries.

John Henry Hammond Jr. was born December 15, 1910, the fifth child and first son of a prominent lawyer and the granddaughter of Cornelius Vanderbilt. The family lived in the lap of luxury in a six-story house on 91st Street in New York City with 15 servants, according to Hammond's autobiography (with Irving Townsend) John Hammond On Record.

His mother played classical piano and had a box at the New York Philharmonic; young John was exposed to the fine arts, attending concerts and taking piano lessons from the age of 4. He switched to violin at 8, played duets with his mother for social gatherings, and was the darling of her circle.

Meanwhile, this scion of wealth and privilege was joining the servants to listen to popular music on their Columbia Grafanola whenever he could sneak away. He began collecting records of his own at age 10. He loved the boogie woogie piano of black players like James P. Johnson (who wrote the original "Charleston").

Hammond began reading Variety at 13 and went away to the Hotchkiss School in Connecticut at age 14. A religious young man who neither smoked nor drank, Hammond was granted the unprecedented liberty of traveling alone to New York every other weekend for violin lessons, and took the opportunity to explore Harlem and meet the musicians who made the music he loved.

In 1927, the formerly white Alhambra Theater "went black," and as Hammond walked by he read the sign: "This week in person the Empress of the Blues, Bessie Smith." Hammond went to the show that night and saw Smith at the peak of her career; he called it "the biggest thrill of my life." Hammond deemed Smith to be the "greatest vocalist to come out of the blues tradition"; an opinion he held for the rest of his life.