Blues Profile
Joanna Connor
by Ray Stiles
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1999 KBA Award Winner
Achievement for Blues on the Internet
Presented by the Blues Foundation
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From Brooklyn, where she was born in 1962 to Massachusetts, where she was raised and got her first exposure to the blues from her mother’s Taj Mahal and Jimi Hendrix albums, Joanna Connor has been a devout blues student. Although she got her first guitar at age 7 and started playing professionally 12 years later, it wasn’t until she stepped off the greyhound bus in Chicago in 1984 that her "real" blues education began. First teaming up with slide guitar great Johnny Littlejohn, she began tearing up the local club circuit with her searing slide guitar. The Chicago Sun-Times called her "a powerhouse guitarist with a sense of rock dynamics - her playing has a fire that is free of self-indulgence." In 1985 she joined guitarist Dion Payton and his popular 43rd Street Blues Band. Connor set the town’s hallowed blues bars on fire with her slashing lead guitar work, her passionate slide solos, and incendiary vocals. Musicians that Joanna idolized when she was growing up, artists such as Buddy Guy, Otis Rush, and James Cotton, began to take notice. Joanna’s reputation continued to grow as she formed her own band in 1987 and released her critically acclaimed debut album on Blind Pig in 1989 called "Believe It!" With the release of her newest album, "Slidetime," Connor continues to display her ferocious slide guitar intensity, ripping off scorching guitar solos with a passion that makes the blues as compelling as ever. Connor, with her fleet fingers and razor-sharp tone, is a truly amazing guitarist and one of the new breed of talented blues women who are electrifying blues audiences all around the world.
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