Luther Johnson — They Call Me the Popcorn Man (1975)
Luther “Georgia Boy” Johnson’s They Call Me the Popcorn Man (1975) — a soulful Chicago blues session full of groove, ease, and lived-in charm.
By Rafi Mercer
Some albums feel like they were meant to be played on a slow Sunday, when the world is soft around the edges and you can hear your own breath in the room. Luther “Georgia Boy” Johnson’s They Call Me the Popcorn Man is one of those records — a Chicago blues session that moves with an easy swagger, unhurried, confident, and warmer than the sleeve ever suggests. It’s the kind of album that doesn’t ask for attention; it earns it, one bend, one shuffle, one well-timed grin in the guitar line.
Johnson was part of the great migration of southern players whose sound deepened and toughened in the North. You hear it immediately — the blend of rural ease with big-city grit, the way his guitar carries the Georgia sun even as the band behind him leans into that unmistakable Chicago backbeat. There’s nothing rushed here. Nothing overthought. Just the steady, lived-in cadence of a man who knows the blues not as genre but as everyday language.
The title track is the portal. Popcorn Man rolls in with a playful strut, a groove built not on complexity but on presence. Johnson’s tone is round and forgiving, as if he’s letting you into the joke rather than performing it. It’s blues as camaraderie — the sense that somewhere in a small bar on the South Side, this was a tune that made the whole room smile before the first verse even landed.
But the album’s depth comes in the quieter corners. Tracks like Trying to Find My Baby and Woman Don’t Lie reveal a softness in his playing that often gets overlooked. Johnson wasn’t a showman in the way some of his contemporaries were; he didn’t carve out solos to impress. He played to communicate — phrases shaped like conversations, lines that feel like someone leaning against a bar telling you something true without raising their voice.
The band, as with so many of the Delmark-era recordings, is impeccable. You get that classic Chicago recipe: drums mixed close, bass pulsing with a human heartbeat, piano cutting through like a good friend’s advice. It’s a room sound — honest, imperfect, beautifully human. The whole album carries the feel of a late-night session captured without fuss, the kind of record where you can hear the floorboards if you listen closely enough.
What makes They Call Me the Popcorn Man special is its lack of urgency. Johnson doesn’t hurry his stories. He doesn’t decorate them. He just lets them settle. And in an era where blues can sometimes feel museum-kept or over-polished, this record remains refreshingly alive — a reminder of why the genre mattered, and still matters. It’s the sound of experience told plainly, rhythm first, ego nowhere in sight.
As a listening ritual, the album works best as a full spin — needle down, no skipping, volume just high enough that the warmth wraps the room. It’s a record that meets you where you are. If you want groove, it’s there. If you want feeling, it’s there. If you want the quiet assurance of a musician who never needed to shout to be heard, it’s there too.
And maybe that’s the beauty of Luther Johnson: he belonged to the lineage of players who made the blues feel lived rather than performed. Popcorn Man is his calling card — and forty-plus years later, it still carries the same easy charm, the same generosity, the same sense of a musician playing because he had something honest to say.
A simple record. A grounded record. A quietly brilliant one.
Perfect for a Sunday when the light is soft and time feels unhurried.
Rafi Mercer writes about the spaces where music matters.
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