Theodore “Ted” Johnson, an instructor at the Old Town School of Folk Music since the day it opened in 1957, died Saturday. He was 98.
Johnson was an ongoing presence at the legendary music school throughout his life, first as an instructor for more than 40 years and then returning as a student for nearly 20 more years. He was a “role model” for the school, said Michael Miles, banjoist and a longtime Old Town School teacher.
“He was very unassuming, quick with a smile, with lots of appreciation for everything and everybody around him. That sort of thing is what makes the Old Town School vital for so many people,” Miles said. “You’re coming here to take lessons but you’re coming back for the interpersonal experience you have with the people you meet there. It’s a countercultural place like no other, and Ted was a big part of that for all these years.”
Born in 1928, Johnson grew up in Evanston. While he earned his doctorate in American Literature at Northwestern University and taught at Michigan State, Indiana University, and Loyola University, his academic career was a cover for his ultimate passion: singing and performing music with others.
“He was a man made of music,” said Kate Thomas, his daughter. “My dad was curious his whole life. He was never disengaged. He was a lifelong learner in the whole sense. One of the things he loved learning was music. It was a whole language for him.”
Johnson sang in the high school choir. After graduation he frequented Downtown Chicago’s Gate of Horn, the first nightclub for folk music in the country. There he met folk stars of the era, from Odetta and Josh White and Theodore Bikel to Peggy Seeger and Frank Hamilton, the school’s first teacher and Gate of Horn house guitarist, and Ella Jenkins. Many became lifelong friends.
After a girlfriend gifted him with a guitar, he joined them. Soon enough he found himself teaching guitar in the living room of Oak Park resident Dawn Greening. Those sessions would serve as the inspiration for the school to open on the second floor of a labor hall in Old Town.
On opening night, Dec. 1, 1957, Hamilton demonstrated the unique teaching methodology to a group of Chicago notables, including Studs Terkel and notorious 43rd Ward alderman Paddy Bauler. Onstage was folk star Big Bill Broonzy, who performed bits of music that Hamilton would then notate on a blackboard.
Until then, learning an instrument meant having one-on-one instruction at a conservatory. What made the Old Town School’s method groundbreaking was that it was intentionally designed to make learning accessible to anyone, no matter their background or aptitude.
“A couple of minutes later, we played the riff. Transmitting this supposedly arcane thing for these ordinary people who had never done that before — it was really dramatic,” Johnson later told this writer.
After Hamilton, Johnson became the Old Town School’s second teacher. He taught guitar, banjo and, in the late 1990s, even yodeling after singers like Jewel and LeAnn Rimes re-introduced the vocal flourish to the pop charts. Johnson told the Chicago Tribune in 1998 that he learned how to yodel from his brother on a ski trip. “One thing about skiing is that you can get on the chair lift, practice yodeling, and no one can get at you,” he joked to the Tribune.
Johnson long credited the Old Town School for giving him a life outside music, too. He met his wife Marcia there in 1963. Their first date: singing together at the Drake Hotel where he had a gig. The couple would marry in 1966 and have two children; their son, John, died in 1978.
While raising their children in Uptown, Johnson participated in many of the school’s programming in the neighborhoods including Project Upbeat, which in 1970 gave free guitars and instruction to 50 children in Old Town. Thomas remembered many folk luminaries staying in their apartment during her childhood, including Appalachian folk singer and guitarist Doc Watson.
“My dad really wanted people anywhere to pick up an instrument and play it, he didn’t think anyone needed classical training or needed to read music. He didn’t see music or music education as an enclave of the elite. He felt it should be open to people,” said Thomas. “The idea of getting together and playing an instrument was very important to him.”
Once Johnson retired from teaching, he decided to return to the Old Town School as a student. He studied Irish fiddle so he could join his two grandchildren in learning the instrument. He was also fundamental to helping popularize Shape Note, or Sacred Harp, singing throughout Chicago. The a cappella style of choral music is now performed throughout the city by different singing groups.
Johnson died Saturday at Rainbow Hospice located at Resurrection Hospital in Chicago. In the days before he passed, musicians visited to talk, listen or perform. A group of nearly two dozen Sacred Harp singers performed a final concert at his bedside. On another night, Miles played his banjo. To the very end, Johnson was curious, asking him about fingerpicking techniques.
Music was “magic,” Johnson said years earlier in an interview for the nonprofit oral history group StoryCorps. “There’s something indescribable about it … Picking and singing and just jamming — every minute spent doing that will add a minute to your life.”
Johnson is survived by his wife, Marcia, his daughter, Kate, and two grandchildren. A memorial service will take place in January.