Born September 27, 1957, in Orange, New Jersey, and raised in nearby West Orange, Johnny Sansone picked up the harmonica at 13 — “trying to be Jimmy Reed in our basement,” as he later recalled — while accompanying himself on guitar. The son of a professional saxophonist, he left New Jersey at 17 in 1975 on a swimming scholarship to a college in Colorado.
By the early 1980s he was a full-time musician, touring as the featured vocalist and harp player with Ronnie Earl’s Broadcasters and working alongside Chicago and Delta bluesmen including John Lee Hooker, Jimmy Rogers, and Robert Lockwood Jr. He led his own regional touring bands, most notably Jumpin’ Johnny & the Blues Party, with whom he recorded Where Y’at (1987) and Mr. Good Thing (1991). After living in Colorado, Austin, Boston, and Chapel Hill, North Carolina, he settled in New Orleans in 1990. Attending Clifton Chenier’s funeral inspired him to take up the accordion, adding a zydeco pulse to his music.
His breakout came with Crescent City Moon, first released on his own label in 1996 and issued by Rounder’s Bullseye Blues in 1997. The album — Chicago blues, swamp boogie, and New Orleans imagery, with Sonny Landreth guesting on slide guitar — won four OffBeat Best of the Beat awards, including Song of the Year. Bullseye followed with Watermelon Patch (1999), featuring Jon Cleary and Joe Krown. In the 2000s Sansone played in an acoustic trio with Krown and John Fohl — their self-titled album came out on his own ShortStack Records in 2004 — joined Tab Benoit’s Voice of the Wetlands Allstars in 2005, and began a long run of albums produced by Anders Osborne: Poor Man’s Paradise (2007), Once It Gets Started (2013), Lady on the Levee (2015), and Hopeland (2018). The title track of The Lord Is Waiting and the Devil Is Too (2011) won Song of the Year at the 2012 Blues Music Awards. His most recent album, the self-produced Into Your Blues (2022), features Little Freddie King and Jason Ricci. A regular presence at the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival and a longtime fixture at clubs including the Maple Leaf Bar, Sansone has spent more than four decades as a working musician in the deepest sense of the word.
