Photograph by Diwang Valdez
If Friday or Saturday night finds you near a radio, do yourself a favor and turn the dial to 90.1. There you’ll hear the voice of H. Johnson, warm and gravelly, as he queues up tracks and opines on the meaning of music during his two long-running shows on WABE, Blues Classics (Fridays, 10 p.m. to 2 a.m.) and Jazz Classics (Saturdays, 8 p.m. to 2 a.m.).
Johnson, a transplant from Asbury Park, New Jersey, has been riffing on WABE since 1978, when a manager heard his jazz show on another station, Radio Free Georgia, and offered him a job. “I asked, ‘What’s the difference?’” Johnson recalls. “He said, ‘We’ll pay you!’ The pay was miniscule, but it was something—and I felt like I could get paid for doing what
I love to do.”
He has been hosting that show, Jazz Classics with H. Johnson, continuously for going on 50 years. The show was so popular that in 2013, WABE gave him Blues Classic with H. Johnson, allowing more elbow room for his expansive musical tastes. His long tenure has kept Johnson adapting to the ever-changing technology of radio music.
“I would play vinyl, cassettes—you remember cassettes?—DAT tapes, whatever materials I could find,” Johnson says. “Some stuff you could only find on old reel-to-reel.” For decades, Johnson recorded live, banging around the WABE studios in the wee hours of the weekend, letting his loose, off-the-cuff style inspire his music selections in real time.
“It was musical improvising, just like the artists I was playing,” he says. “When I went down to the studio, I didn’t know what I was going to play.”
The Covid-19 pandemic changed things: WABE set him up with a home studio, and Johnson now lays out his playlists ahead of time and records his sections during the week. His longtime producer, Micah Middleton, sources the songs from wherever she can find, whether vinyl, Spotify, or even YouTube. “People love H. because he’s so relatable, he’s humble,” Middleton says. “He knows what he’s talking about, but he doesn’t push it in your face.”
“I like edumicating people,” Johnson adds goofily; after decades on the air, he has mastered the art of radio-friendly humor. (“I don’t do blue,” he says. “I just find humor in almost everything going on around me.”) With an omnivorous range of favorites, he’s careful not to pander to any one group of jazz or blues fans, instead selecting from a broad spectrum of artists, with a wide audience in mind. “Marian Anderson was a great opera singer, Charley Pride was an award-winning country and Western singer, and Ray Charles—well, Ray Charles did it all.”
Rather than dictate his listeners’ tastes, Johnson likes to explain what he appreciates about a song or an artist and let the music work its own magic. “I feel this way about a piece of music, but if you don’t, let me show you something in the music that you should listen to,” he says. “Nine times out of 10, I’m successful doing it that way.”
Back to 21 Reasons We Love Atlanta.
This article appears in our February 2025 issue.
