
Johnny Dodds began his musical career as a kid playing clarinet on New Orleans’ streets. Before long, he was recording music with Louis Armstrong and Jelly Roll Morton.
His playing style was described as having a “moving low register vibrato and piercing upper register.”
“His was probably the fullest and roundest tone ever produced on the clarinet,” said jazz writer Bill Russell. “Johnny never needed a microphone to be heard — even with the loudest of New Orleans’ great cornetists blasting against him.”
According to the Martin Freres Company, Dodds’ lower register gave “his melodies a rich, grounded quality. Picture yourself in a smoky club, those tones swirling around you — it’s bound to give you goosebumps.
“Dodds had a remarkable ability to convey emotion in every note. His sound wasn’t just a technical exercise — it told stories,” Martin Freres said
. “By immersing himself in the blues, his clarinet seemed to cry, laugh, and lament all at once.”
Born in Waveland, Miss., in 1892, Dodds began playing clarinet at 17. He studied under clarinetists Lorenzo Tio and Charlie McCurdy. He played with Frankie Duson and Kid Ory before moving to Chicago to play with Joe “King” Oliver’s Creole Jazz Band. Dodds also recorded with his own band, Johnny Dodds’ Black Bottom Stompers.
According to the Syncopated Times, Dodds was one of the greatest clarinetists of the 1920s. Faced with health challenges, he did not record much after 1930. He died in Chicago in 1940.
“Johnny Dodds was one of the most original and talented of all the clarinetists to emerge from New Orleans,” states an essay, “Melancholy Blues: Clarinetist Johnny Dodds.” “Had he lived past 1940, he would almost certainly have been celebrated in the traditional jazz revival as an icon of the movement.”
In 1987, Dodds was inducted into the Jazz Hall of Fame.
For more tales from New Orleans history, visit the Back in the Day archives.