Alonzo “Lonnie” Johnson (February 8, 1899 – June 16, 1970) was an American blues and jazz singer, guitarist, violinist and songwriter. He was a pioneer of jazz guitar and jazz violin and is recognized as the first to play an electrically amplified violin.

Johnson was born in New Orleans, Louisiana, and raised in a family of musicians. He studied violin, piano and guitar as a child and learned to play various other instruments, including the mandolin, but he concentrated on the guitar throughout his professional career. “There was music all around us,” he recalled, “and in my family you’d better play something, even if you just banged on a tin can.”

Johnson pioneered the single-string solo guitar styles that have become customary in modern rock, blues and jazz music.

By his late teens, he was playing guitar and violin in his father’s family band at banquets and weddings, alongside his brother James “Steady Roll” Johnson. He also worked with the jazz trumpeter Punch Miller in the Storyville district of New Orleans.

In 1917, Johnson joined a revue that toured England, returning home in 1919 to find that all of his family, except his brother James, had died in the 1918 influenza epidemic.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ePPHj5Ujo0Q