James ‘Super Chikan’ Johnson
- After debuting at film festivals in 2024, “James ‘Super Chikan’ Johnson: A Life in Blues” is now available on streaming services.
When Canadian musician and filmmaker Mark Rankin brought 74-year-old Clarksdale bluesman James “Super Chikan” Johnson to Vancouver, Canada, to play a few shows with his band in 2018, he expected great music. What he didn’t expect was to find a story that would change the course of his creative life.
“He didn’t sound like anybody else,” says Rankin, who plays guitar in the British Columbia-based Mojo Stars. “There was this mix of country with Delta and Chicago blues, and it came out as something totally his own.”
That trip sparked the idea for a documentary about the music and the man behind the squawk, a creative endeavor that has occupied much of his intervening years. Along with co-director Brian Wilson, Rankin knew they’d stumbled onto something deeper and set out to paint a portrait of an American blues original whose journey had been largely overlooked.
When Rankin and Wilson came to Johnson’s home turf in Mississippi after the Covid pandemic, they spent ten days embedded with him filming not only his performances but the quieter moments that make up his everyday life. The filmmakers found Johnson in his natural element, often behind the wheel of his 18-wheeler, a grounding reminder of how his life continues to intertwine with the road he’s traveled.
What emerged from those conversations and others is “James ‘Super Chikan’ Johnson: A Life in Blues,” a new 80-minute documentary now streaming on Amazon that tells his story from humble beginnings in the northern Mississippi Delta and captures the unfiltered life of a musician whose sound is as vast and varied as his story.
“What resonated with us is that the trajectory of his career has had pitfalls,” Rankin says, alluding to times Johnson has been “ripped off” by shady music-biz operatives. “He just wants to make music.”
As a kid in the Delta, Johnson was surrounded by music. His uncle, Big Jack Johnson, was a local legend, and his grandfather, Ellis Johnson, was first cousins with Robert Johnson, the blues titan tied to the “crossroads” myth. Tradition, though, wasn’t something he clung to, it was something he built on.
“The grown folks didn’t let us kids touch the guitars,” Johnson says in the film.
Instead of grabbing a six-string, he made his own instrument, a diddley bow nailed together from scraps played with a slide. Eventually, his mother showed him a few guitar licks, though, and the lefty learned how to play on a right-handed guitar because that’s all he had. Consequently, he developed an individual style of playing.
“I had to create my own style, my own way of playing,” he says. “And it sounds good to me and feels good when I play it.”
That raw, unpolished approach is reflected in Johnson’s music. His sound blends the fundamentals of Delta blues with the smoothness of country, the spirit of rockabilly, and the grit of Chicago blues. It’s a fusion of everything he’s loved and lived, but it’s never a direct imitation. Johnson takes ownership of his music, carving out a space that’s uniquely his.
“It’s a country blues rock, or rockabilly blues rock,” says Andrew “Shine” Turner, one of Johnson’s Clarksdale contemporaries. “It ain’t blues, it’s his original sound, and I have never heard anybody play that style but him. And he was playing that way when I met him.”
When Johnson covers classics like John Lee Hooker’s “Boom Boom,” then, it doesn’t sound like an imitation; it sounds like Super Chikan. It’s not about staying true to the original, it’s about making the song his own, shaping it with the style and sensibility he’s cultivated over decades.
The film premiered at the Clarksdale Film and Music Festival in January 2024 and has since traveled to festivals across the U.S., including a packed showing at the Oxford Film Festival, where Johnson’s friends and fans turned out to show their support.
Now that the documentary is available to a broad audience, soon to include additional streaming platforms like Tubi, “James ‘Super Chikan’ Johnson: A Life in Blues” is set to reach even wider audiences. This summer, it will travel to the Notodden Blues Festival in Norway, Europe’s largest blues gathering, where Johnson will perform live and introduce the film to a new international audience. There, Rankin aims to treat audiences to the full Super Chikan experience.
“I want to show he’s not the stereotypical Delta blues artist,” Rankin says. “He doesn’t sound like anybody who’s playing in Clarksdale. He has such a love of country music, plus his love of Chicago blues, the Jimmy Reed stuff — he’s a complicated guy.”
Jim Beaugez
