Johnny Otis - drums, piano, bandleader, producer, composer, R&B Legend! Johnny Otis was born December 28, 1921 in Vallejo, California. He grew up in a predominantly black neighborhood in Berkeley, ...

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - Johnny Otis, singer of the 1958 hit "Willie and the Hand Jive", has died in California at the age of 90. Otis died on Tuesday in the Los Angeles suburb of Altadena, his friend ...

In a new biography titled "Midnight at the Barrelhouse –– The Johnny Otis Story" (University of Minnesota Press, 2010), George Lipsitz, professor of Black Studies and sociology at UC Santa Barbara, ...

Otis, who died in 2012, started out leading a big band. Later, as a talent scout, he discovered such performers as Big Mama Thornton, Esther Phillips and Etta James. Originally broadcast in 1989. This ...

Johnny Otis, the “godfather of rhythm and blues” who wrote and recorded the R&B classic “Willie and the Hand Jive” and for decades evangelized black music to white audiences as a bandleader and radio ...

Johnny Otis, an R&B renaissance man and visionary whose passion for the blues, the back beat and racial equality helped ignite a West Coast music style in the late-1940s that made rock and roll ...

Johnny Otis, the bandleader, pioneering producer, singer, songwriter and radio host who was at the forefront of the rhythm and blues movement, died at his home in the Los Angeles suburb of Altadena on ...

LOS ANGELES (AP) -- Johnny Otis, the "godfather of rhythm and blues" who wrote and recorded the R&B classic "Willie and the Hand Jive" and for decades evangelized black music to white audiences as a ...

JOHNNY OTIS: Well, this goes back to the mid '40s, and it was my first record date with my own band, as I recall. And we did three things. I went to the producer after we had completed the third one ...

This is FRESH AIR. (SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC) GROSS: This is FRESH AIR. Let's get back to my 1989 interview with the late Johnny Otis, an R&B musician, producer, nightclub owner and talent scout who ...