"Strange Creek Fiddling 1947" is the "discovery album" of the season, a field recording by the great John Johnson.

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Braxon County, W.Va., fiddler John Johnson could have been the subject of one of the old tunes he played, for he was a rambling with a restless mind.

Born in 1916, he spent time in the Army, then wandered the country as an itinerant worker. A master of many manual trades, he had an envied reputation as an athlete and a strong man. Johnson also was an accomplished poet and painter as well as a musician.

As John Blissard writes in the notes for the Strange Creek Fiddling 1947 CD, Johnson was rarely in one place for more than a few months and reckoned he had worked in every state in the U.S., as well as hood part of Canada and Mexico -- and that he had been in the jails of most of them.

"He was one of those natural musicians who was able to learn and play the most complex tunes from just one hearing," Blissard writes, "but, as a consequence, set very little store by the music. Indeed, he rarely owned a fiddle despite knowing that he could earn good money with one. On numerous occasions he just walked away from a gig, a job, a car, a wife, a life for no apparent reason, other than a vague wish to be some place else."

Blissard notes that when famed folklorist Louis Chappell finally met him in 1947 for the session that would produce Strange Creek Fiddling 1947, "Johnson was too busy to play for the outsider, but an offer of $200 changed his mind and he'd soon borrowed a fiddle." In one sitting, Johnson reeled off 80 tunes in a row, and a handful of songs.

John Johnson died in 1996.