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, ...

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 “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 ...

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, ...

Beloved by its local fans for the past three-quarters of a century, the annual Apple Blossom Festival in Sebastopol is always something special: a grassroots community celebration soaked with ...

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 ...

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 ...