Be it on stage in Chicago, the Bay Area, Europe, or even his native Rhode Island at the swinging Knickerbocker Cafe, and no matter if he’s playing rhythm and blues, Chicago blues or even Texas swing, it’s more than a safe bet to say that while legendary guitarist Johnny Nicholas has lived, traveled, and played the embodiment of a varied career, there’s one place that’s special to him and his style.

“Texas is the ‘bestest,’” Nicholas said in a recent interview with Sound Waves.”(It’s) friendly, soulful, hot, and the music is danceable, uninhibited, and eclectic.”

The 60-year-old Nicholas certainly would know what’s the “bestest,” given his travels through a more than 40-year career chocked full of great, timeless music, starting in his home state of Rhode Island, where a brother tipped him off to rhythm and blues, which started him on a lifelong musical journey apart from the more popular aspects of rock and roll.

“My grandfather played the mandolin. My mother was a piano player and taught music at schools in Pawcatuck and Westerly. My folks always supported me. With that of kind of calling you don’t have much choice,” he said. "My first memories were of Rembetika, a Greek folk music. I remember my grandfather’s 78’s - the soulful moaning. Also, I have an older brother who was a big fan of the Carl Diggins Radio Hour. He was the “hip cat” in Providence. Then there was Murray the K Swingin’ /Soiree in the late 50’s and early 60’s. They would kick the watts up at night."

“I was about 10 when I made my first guitar,” Nicholas recalled.” My grandfather smoked cigars. I took a big wooden cigar box, glued a block of wood onto it for the neck, and used old mandolin strings that were my grandfather’s. I messed up three or four of them. Later, the first guitar that I bought was a Stella that I got for $15 at Shea’s Newstand (in Pawcatuck) from money I got cutting grass.”

A native of Westerly, Johnny’s first band was The Vikings which featured Larry Peduzzi on bass, Howie Sebastian on drums and vocals (a great singer in the tradition of James Brown according to Johnny), Buzzy Goodwin on guitar and Johnny on guitar, harmonica, and vocals. He recalls his first electric guitar “A Guild Starfire 4 played through a Fender bandmaster piggy back amplifier”.

A major highlight of those early years was the “Battle of the Bands” that took place at the Stonington Como around 1965 in which The Vikings defeated a group called The Variations - who featured legendary Westerly natives Duke Robillard and Greg Piccolo. According to Johnny, The Variations were a little slicker than us. We did more of the blues stuff at the time. We were all friends but whenever we played together we tried to kick their butt.” Johnny has a poster from that show - done in the old theatre-like style.

Music formed good friendships back then that last till this day. “Duke always turned me on to new records" Johnny says, "and I would sneak down to New York to see Slim Harpo, Muddy Waters, and Howlin’ Wolf. Or go check out Robert’s Records in New London where all the sailors would frequent."

Whatever Nicholas learned from that combination of sailors and blues records at Robert’s certainly rubbed off well, judging by both the breadth and depth of his career. In 1970, he formed the Black Cat Blues Band, one of the truly underrated bands in American blues history, with, among others, Robillard, Steve Nardella and Fran Christina (who went on to play drums with Roomful and the Fabulous Thunderbirds). After Black Cat broke up, Nicholas & Nardella hopped the fence on Rte. 98 and hitch hiked to Ann Arbor where they formed the Boogie Brothers. While Duke, Fran, Larry and Al Copley joined Greg and Rich Lataille and formed the 1st Roomful of Blues with horns.

After attending the Ann Arbor Blues Festival that year, he made the Michigan college town his home until 1972, when he left for San Francisco, where he joined the legendary Commander Cody and His Lost Planet Airmen. After a relatively short stay there, Nicholas relocated to the blues mecca of Chicago, where he played with Big Walter Horton, Boogie Woogie Red and Robert Jr. Lockwood, and cut his first album, Too Many Bad Habits, for Blind Pig Records in 1974.

Returning to Boston, he formed the Rhythm Rockers, which included Ronnie Earl on guitar. In 1978, Nicholas moved to Austin to join his old Bay Area friends Asleep at the Wheel. When the western swing revivalists weren’t working, he’d be over in Louisiana playing with Cajun great Nathan Abshire. After leaving the Wheel, he fronted Johnny Nicholas and the Ethnic Lovers.

In 1981, Nicholas grew tired of touring and he moved out to the Hill Country of Texas, where he and his wife Brenda bought an abandoned gas station on the Mason Highway just north of Fredericksburg. They dubbed it the Hill Top Café, which was so successful that it grew into one of the Hill Country’s finest and most popular restaurants & music venues. It was there that the couple raised their three sons.

“The Hill Top Café is inconveniently located 10 miles from nowhere, in the hill country near Fredericksburg, Texas,” Nicholas said. “It’s small, soulful, with a piano in the dining room, and full of all kinds of weird memorabilia, pictures of Bonnie Raitt, John Hannon, Lazy Lester, Augie Myers, Snooky Pryor, Johnny Shines, Pine Top Perkins, Steve Riley. The salsa that’s served at the Knickerbocker (in Westerly) came from there. It’s a recipe that my wife brought back with her.

“Brenda’s a great cook, a great mom, and she’s beautiful. And, she helped start Antone’s in Austin. What more could you want?” Nicholas said, laughing. “I tease her that one of the reasons I married her was for her great record collection.”

In that bucolic existence, Nicholas actually retired from touring for some time, from time to time, when the mood struck him, he would entertain customers solo at piano at the Hill Top. In 1991, he went public again, producing and playing guitar on "Back to the Country", with Shines (another of his mentors) and Pryor, and joining them for a two week European tour.

Since then, he’s returned to Europe, where his popularity never tapered off, every two years, while playing selected dates in Texas and at blues festivals around the rest of the country. He and the Texas All-Stars play about 100 nights yearly, offering both long time and new fans the same kind of soulful, down home, rootsy music he’s been playing since the days he first tied a block of wood to his grandfather’s cigar box.

“It’s really more like the things you have to do to survive,” Nicholas said, in looking back at his long career. “I’ve worked plenty of day jobs, sometimes you might have to do something that’s not you. From a deeper perspective, I’ve got to do what I believe in.

“I want to be remembered, “he said, “as somebody who put everything he had into every song he sung.”

Editor Note: You can check out Johnny Nicholas at either his Hill Top Cafe in Texas or his new venture at the fully restored Knickerbocker Cafe in Westerly RI. Or the many gigs he plays in between.