Billy Joe Green comes from a good lineage. Charlie Christian, the first great guitar soloist, said something to the effect that it was what you didn’t play that was important, that music had to breathe. The great blues guitarists that followed – Muddy, Lightnin’, B.B. – knew this and played it. Green, an aboriginal out of Northern Ontario, is the next great guitarist who follows the edict that Christian set. His guitar rips across tracks of blues, country and ‘60s rock on this release, and he does so distinctively – applying a Red tinge to the blues. Just listen to the honky-tonk of “Red Road.” As they used to say in the ‘60s, this is good shit, man. Listen.

Published in Volume 63, Number 16 of The Uniter (January 15, 2009)