Joe Bonamassa- Sloe Gin (Early Best)
I readily admit that I was a little late to the Joe Bonamassa party, but quickly became a believer with 2007’s Sloe Gin, already his sixth studio album. Joe Bonamassa may mine a musical vein stretching way back into the field hollers of 19th century African slaves forced to pick cotton in America, but his recording career is pure 21st century. Here is Joe Bonamassa In the Studio.
Just in case you have not been paying attention since the beginning of the twenty-first century- like maybe on an interplanetary mission to Mars and back- let’s catch you up on the dizzying career of Upstate New York guitarist/singer/songwriter Joe Bonamassa. On a Guinness Book record-setting pace since his 2000 debut New Day Yesterday at the tender age of only twenty, Joe Bonamassa recorded and released more than fifteen solo albums. Then there were the two collaborations with singer Beth Hart, plus the three studio albums with Black Country Communion. In his free time Bonamassa toured tirelessly in North America and Europe, resulting in more than half a dozen live albums and an equal number of DVDs, including 2013’s An Acoustic Evening at the Vienna Opera House and the massive Tour de Force: Live in London four-DVD set. 
These live filmed concerts, in particular 2009’s Live from Royal Albert Hall , placed Joe Bonamassa repeatedly on PBS television stations and into the mainstream unlike any since Stevie Ray Vaughan‘s death in 1990. Bonamassa shared the Albert Hall stage with his hero Eric Clapton, who has logged enough hours there to claim it as his “local”, but Bonamassa did so before he turned thirty. By the 2018 baseball All Star break Joe had already released Black Coffee with Beth Hart and British Blues Explosion Live.
In the Studio Joe Bonamassa shares details on his life and heady accomplishments in a modest way, while sharing songs such as “Further on Up the Road” live with Eric Clapton at London’s Royal Albert Hall, Chris Whitley‘s “Ball Peen Hammer”, the epic title song “Sloe Gin”, and a tasty interpretation of Paul Rodger’s “Seagull”. – Redbeard
