Between 1942 and 1946 he served in the U.S. Army Signal Corps/Air Corps in India, Burma, and China, receiving a Meritorious Service Award and campaign ribbons.
[1] Johnson's Trumpet Tune in D (1962) is the opening and closing theme for the weekly radio show With Heart and Voice, with host Peter DuBois.
[2] Johnson's Trumpet Tune in D was also the first of two processionals used for the 1971 wedding of Richard Nixon's Daughter, Tricia, who was married in the White House Rose Garden with music provided by a string orchestra.
Inspired, in part, by his seeing a solitary white bird while en route by ship (in the early 1940s) from Los Angeles to Bombay, India, hundreds of miles from the nearest land in the middle of the South Pacific.
Haunted by the image of that bird, Johnson later paired an American folk tune, "Prospect" from "The Sacred Harp" (1844), with a 1925 poem by the Rev.