Clarence Johnson (Columbia/Capitol, US, QRS, Staffnote, Aeolian)

 Clarence 'Jelly' Johnson

B: 18 Apr 1900, Paducah, KY
D: 9 August 1933, Detroit, MI

Clarence Avant Johnson’s exact birth year is debated—his military service records suggest 1897 and his World War I draft card 1898, while his gravestone gives 1900. The 1900 U.S. Census, taken 1 June, lists him as a one-month-old infant born in April, strongly supporting the 1900 date. He was the first child of James Johnson (b. 1877), a bartender, and Eva Johnson (b. 1879).

By 1910, after Eva remarried railroad brakeman T. J. Lewis, the family had moved to Hattiesburg, Mississippi. Clarence’s mother also worked as a seamstress and dressmaker to support the household. During the First World War the family lived at 2509 S. Wabash Ave., Chicago, with Clarence working as a laborer for Wilson & Son meatpacking (41 Ashland Ave.) and naming his mother as his next of kin on his draft registration.

In 1917 Clarence enlisted in the U.S. Army, joining the Illinois 370th Infantry Regiment—one of only a handful of African-American units in World War I and the only one commanded entirely by black officers. Segregation policies kept black troops from fighting alongside white American units, so the 370th served under French command, wearing U.S. uniforms but equipped with French rifles and rations. He was demobilized in 1919.

That same year, Clarence cut his first player-piano rolls for Chicago’s U.S. Music Company. Although many bear his own name, collectors believe he also recorded under the pseudonym “Chet Gordon.”

Around 1925 he relocated to Detroit, where he built a modest career performing on local radio station WJBK and leading small local bands. His broadcasts ceased abruptly in early July 1933 as his health declined. Dr. G. L. Graham, who had attended him since 31 July, certified his death on 9 August 1933 as “acute dilatation” of the heart—today understood as sudden heart failure—precipitated by chronic myocarditis. His wife, Coleather Johnson, served as informant (she mistakenly gave his birthplace as Tennessee and was unaware of his birth parents).

Clarence was laid to rest on 16 August 1933 in Smithland Cemetery, Livingston County, Kentucky, his headstone marked with a harp motif in tribute to his musical life. His mother survived him by more than twenty years, passing away in California in 1956.