“Check this guy out if you dare.” So ran the last line of a profile titled “Johnny Dowd Slithers Onto Music Scene” back in 1999. 

That gives you a pretty decent idea of how Johnny Dowd’s music works — “slither” and “dare” being the key words. Johnny does both. 

In the traditions of Waits or Bukowski, he slithers into places most of us don’t imagine or see. They might be back alleys, back porches, or just a bar down the street, but wherever he goes he dares to sing out what he sees. Will you dare to listen? 

Dowd conjures up characters with bluntness and an eye for telling details — a true writer’s songsmith. Perhaps that’s because he only came to the art after forty years of hard living. 

Even at that age, “I never wanted to be a songwriter,” he says. But when it became a matter of sink or swim, back around 1988, he dived into the deep end.

The group he first led became Neon Baptist, but by 1995 Johnny had gone solo and self-released his debut cassette, Wrong Side of Memphis.

A Dutch TV documentary on Dowd was filmed in 2000, and in early 2001, the New York Times highlighted him as one of four "Country Singers Who Still Display a Country Heart". He continued to release a record every year while touring both the US and Europe, making his major film debut in Jim White’s “Searching for the Wrong-Eyed Jesus”. Record titles like The Pawnbroker's Wife, Cemetery Shoes, or A Drunkard’s Tale seemed to suggest the stories within.  The album Cruel Words, released in 2006, featured Sherwood-Caso on background vocals and The Mekons’ Sally Timms and Jon Langford, with whom Johnny toured, on "Drunk," ultimately winning the Independent Music Award for Best Alternative Country Album the following year. “There isn't a better band out there,” Johnny said of The Mekons at the time. A collaborator with numerous alt-Americana luminaries, he contributed to 2021’s release of “The Wanderer - A Tribute To Jackie Leven”.