"I've never been happier in my life, and it's the blues that's gotten me all this," Yard Dog told Les Jared of the Grand Rapids (Michigan) Press.

The road to blues success started in Arkansas, where Johnny was born in 1941 on a cotton plantation, the third of 10 children. The next stop was East St. Louis, where he grew up exposed both to the blues his father and his friends listened to -- Robert Johnson, T-Bone Walker and others -- and the gospel music his mother so loved. When he was 7 years old, Johnny's musical career was launched when he began singing in area churches with several of his sisters. He used the proceeds from a portable shoeshine stand to buy his first harmonica when he was 10 years old. An uncle sometimes lent him a guitar, and he soon began performing around town.

At age 13, Johnny started hanging around East St. Louis' blues clubs and was befriended by Albert King and Little Walter Jacobs. After hearing young Johnny sing and play, Little Walter gave him an encouraging gift: a Marine Band harmonica.

Inevitably, the road took Johnny to Chicago at age 18, but in the context of gospel music rather than the blues. He returned to the family gospel group and became a guitarist in The Little Flowers. Some time afterward, he helped formed The Gospel Comforters, also with relatives. Having already earned money by hauling junk for an uncle and doing commercial lettering, during the 1960s, Johnny began to make his living as a welder.