David Johnson

Year Inducted: 2023

With family roots reaching back five generations into the history of Millers Creek, talented multi-instrumentalist David Ray Johnson was born in Wilkes County on February 11,1954 to Billie Ray and Elizabeth Caudill Johnson. David comes from two musical families.  His grandfather, Bill Johnson played clawhammer-style banjo and made guitars, banjos and fiddles. David’s father played guitar with the Foggy River Boys on WKBC Radio in North Wilkesboro and later formed the Rocky Road Boys. David’s mother, Elizabeth (Betty), also played the guitar. His maternal uncles also played on WKBC Radio in North Wilkesboro.

David Johnson’s musical interests were evident when he began playing his father’s Gibson guitar at the age of four. Two years later he received a Kay acoustic guitar as a gift from his father.  Just as his grandfather taught his father, David’s father, in turn, taught him how to play musical instruments.

By age ten David was playing in his father’s square dance band, the Country Ramblers. He soon developed performance abilities on the banjo and fiddle and, in 1968, began learning the pedal steel guitar to play in Marshall Craven’s regional band, the Country Cousins. Johnson played with the Country Cousins for twelve years, making connections that would lead to a two-year stint of weekly television work on WBTV with future U.S. congressman, Bill Hefner. This in turn led to a close friendship plus more television appearances on PBS with multi-instrumentalist Arthur Smith (writer of Dueling Banjos and Guitar Boogie), as well as singers Tommy Faile and George Hamilton IV.  Johnson would eventually work with Hamilton on the Grand Ole Opry in Nashville, Tennessee.

At the age of twenty, David traveled to Nashville for a short time, curious if he would like living there to pursue his musical trade.  He quickly decided that Wilkes County was the only place he could call home, so he returned and put his whole heart into making a musical living traveling out of the same community into which he was born. 

On January 1, 1981, Johnson helped to form Dixie Dawn, his own regional group that became popular as the house band at Shadrack’s in Boone and at Jubilee Junction in Wilkesboro. 

David began recording as a sideman at the age of fifteen when he helped produce the soundtrack for a Les Blank documentary film about Holly Farms Foods (now Tyson Foods) in North Wilkesboro. That recording session led to a full-time job in audio recording encompassing gospel, country, bluegrass and top 40 music for both regional and national artists.

David Johnson still works full time as a session musician for numerous studios over a four-state area, and serves as a musician and arranger for Crossroads Music, a gospel music label in Asheville, North Carolina. 

He is most thankful for his salvation and his faith, his wife Anne and his son Nathan, and his church, Arbor Grove Methodist. David has always, and hopes to continue to, call Wilkes County and western North Carolina his home.