Jan Johansson (bluegrass musician)


Jan Peder Johansson, born 1958 in Ursviken, Skellefteå kommun, Västerbottens län. Swedish-born acoustic musician, composer, producer and pedagogue. Residing in Cary, North Carolina, and active in the US since 1986.
His original music draws from several genres including traditional and contemporary Swedish, Bluegrass, Classical and Blues. He is the founder of Johansson's Acoustic Music Studio which provides music instruction in Bluegrass and other acoustic music. His formal education is the field of the Humanities and he received a Cand. Phil. degree in General Linguistics and Scandinavian languages from Umeå University, in Umeå, Sweden. He has done doctoral candidate studies at Stockholm's University and University of California at Los Angeles.
His interest for Bluegrass and old blues music started around 1972 shortly after receiving a Landola classical guitar from his grandparents over the Easter Holidays that year.
Living in Northern Sweden made it difficult to find bluegrass records and the main source for recorded music was mail order companies like County Sales in Virginia.
Johansson recalls "The first album I ever bought was one by blues-man Bill Williams on the Blue Goose label. My second LP was Alabama Blues on Yazoo Records. I found both albums at the department store Tempo in Skellefteå."

Discography

Jan Johansson is the host of the online radio show "The Old Numbers", a presentation of great artists in the bluegrass field who never received the attention they deserved.
He is also the producer of the bluegrass music history series Bluegrass Timeline which airs as a segment of Ray Ulan's show The Bluegrass Experiment on Raleigh Little Radio on Sundays 04:00 – 06:00 PM EST/16:00 – 18:00

Compositions