Joe Bonamassa recently did something very good for the music-loving world. He put his clout to work and assembled a massive thirty-two song tribute album to one of his idols, BB King. And it just about blows your socks off.
Wanting to do something to celebrate King’s 100th birthday in September, Bonamassa started asking and building and recording until he had some of the most elite blues masters alive today laying down tracks that celebrated what BB King was all about. From Buddy Guy to Derek Trucks, Eric Clapton to Slash, Kenny Wayne Shepherd to Bobby Rush, Marcus King to Susan Tedeschi, Gary Clark Jr to Kingfish Ingram, George Benson to Paul Rodgers to Jimmie Vaughan. The list is endless.
Deciding to release the tracks in small volumes was how we were first introduced to Blues Summit 100. [Volume III dropped on Friday, November 14th, featuring songs by Guy, Vaughan, Larkin Poe, Eric Gales, Trombone Shorty, and Larry McCray]. Doing it this way, in morsel-sized batches, Bonamassa wanted to give listeners a chance to absorb and breathe in these new interpretations one dose at a time, wanting to prevent a sensory overload that might be quickly forgotten.
Bonamassa knows what he’s talking about. When he was just twelve years old, he opened for the legend, and his career fate was sealed. “He plays one note,” Bonamassa told me during a 2020 interview for Glide. “He just has that knack, had that knack, and he also had that knack to emote, and it’s this emotive thing that not many people ever achieve. It’s that direct connection to everyone’s soul. It could be 2000 people in the audience, or it could be twenty people in the audience; he had a direct conduit.”
It wasn’t an easy task to get all these artists recorded. But Bonamassa put his producer’s cap on, along with Josh Smith, and hit the road to different studios across the country. “I do like producing because I get to exercise my ultimate narcissism. I boss better musicians than myself around. I like bossing people around (laughs),” he told me with his biting wit in full glory. “But I really enjoy producing records for other artists.”
This project was especially dear to his heart and soul: “When BB was alive and active, he was the blues – he was the sun which all planets rotated around,” Bonamassa said in a recent press release. “You only get one shot to do this correctly. And I think we nailed it.”
In other Bonamassa news, the guitar player is still touring behind his most recent album, Breakthrough, an all-originals work of art. “I like to start with lyrics. I like to start with a title, and I like to start with verses or a chorus and then make something out of it. I find those songs turn out better for some reason. It’s just a hard thing to come up with a riff and then sit down and, well, what do I want to say? The possibilities are infinite but then, are they really?” he said in 2020.
But right now, his focus is on BB King and Blues Summit 100 [which releases in it’s entirety on February 6th, 2026] and reminding fans, old and new, just what the master could do not only with his guitar but his voice and stage presence as well. For example, take Marcus King doing a raise of the nerve endings version of “Don’t Answer The Door.” If you’ve never heard this song before, you look up BB’s version and still get blown away, how his subtleties heighten the emotions and the mood, and before you know it, you’re lost in the song. But that song hasn’t been officially released yet so this gives you something to look forward to.
Another prime example is “To Know You Is To Love You.” Susan Tedeschi and Michael McDonald floor you with their duet and harmonies alongside Derek Trucks’ guitar superiority. The chills, baby, just pop up all over your skin.
I recently had a quick little chat with Bonamassa about BB and the blues, the album he so caringly curated, and what he plans for his upcoming future.
In your humble opinion, what makes the blues so freaking cool?
Well, the thing that makes it interesting is the fact that everyone has their own interpretation of it. It’s not like the classical discipline, where everything must be written as it appears on that page, even with nuance. With blues and roots-based music, everyone has the ability to put their own stamp on it. BB King plays different than Albert King, and Freddie King played different than Eric Clapton, but it’s all still part and parcel under the same umbrella. But it’s what’s between the notes. It’s never the same twice, you know what I mean.
If you had to pick out one element that made BB King’s music so special, what would you pick?
He was an ambassador. He had hits on the radio in the fifties and early sixties and then he had his big hit nationally with “The Thrill Is Gone.” But he was an international ambassador to the blues and he absolutely always kept the music fresh, but also was very interested in making sure that it carried on to different generations. It wasn’t just about his fans from the fifties or the sixties or seventies. He had many different parts of his career where his fan base grew and sometimes shrunk and then grew again and then shrunk. But he always kept at it and he always kept the focus on what he was doing. And he never changed.
As a producer of Blues Summit 100, how did you make this album happen?
Well, the first hurdle was, are they willing to participate. Then we had to pick a song. Once we picked the song, we had to pick a key. Then everybody being on tour all the time perpetually, then you’re like, well, okay can you do it by this date, cause we have a deadline. We had to get the first batch of songs out by his birthday in September, which we did. But we started the whole project in January and we were able to deliver it, sans a couple of guests, by September, which was like doing four albums at the same time.
Why are you releasing these songs in batches?
You’re getting a Volume III this week, you’re getting a Volume IV in December. I’ll tell you why. One, the attention span of the consumer has gone down and to release thirty-two tracks all at once would, I think, do a disservice to the project. It’ll all come out eventually but you want to keep it at the forefront of people’s minds, not just something that comes and goes.
You play on every song
Well, I play sometimes a very small role on every song but it’s Josh Smith and myself on guitars and it’s basically my touring band that played on most of the record.
Was there any song that you had never really played before out of all these songs?
There’s a bunch, yeah. There was a bunch we’ve never covered. But we would learn the version that we thought was cool, cause a lot of times there’s different versions of these songs. There are so many different versions of “Night Life,” there’s so many different versions of “The Thrill Is Gone,” there’s so many different versions of “How Blue Can You Get” or “Every Day I Have The Blues.” So you kind of had to make a decision and commit.
What’s one that you rarely have played?
“To Know You Is To Love You,” that one we’d never played. But that song is rarely covered but we have to get to those songs. It was really more of a, is this a proper BB King tribute record if we don’t do this song. And there were only a couple left over that we didn’t get to but they weren’t the big songs.
How often did you switch guitars doing these songs?
You know, we did it in like seven different studios over eight months so sometimes I would just grab a guitar from my touring rig and we would go into a studio in Atlanta or Buffalo, or any of these places, and do that. We did some stuff at Sunset Sound, we did some stuff, you know, everywhere. So it wasn’t a particular guitar, nor was it my soloing or playing that you would notice much on these tracks.
Jack Casady told me a few years back that he was forever chasing tone. What is Joe Bonamassa forever chasing with the guitar?
The thing with sound is that you always want to chase the sound you have in your head. Sometimes it comes out and sometimes it doesn’t. It depends on the room, it depends on the day.
What are your plans going into the new year?
My plan going into the new year is, we have a new solo album that we’re starting on the books, there’s dates booked for next year, but a lot of the stuff that normally my year is taken up with, I’m going to start slowly truncating and stepping back from, cause I’m almost fifty years old and I want to have a life. I don’t want to sit on a tour bus my whole life.
What do you want to do?
I don’t know. I haven’t figured it out yet. But I will let you know, Leslie, as soon as I do. I’d just like to live life, and I’d like to get a dog.
What would you like your legacy to be?
I just hope that my legacy will be that proof of concept: If you work hard enough and you put your mind to something, it will definitely come true if you work hard enough.
And you have worked hard enough
I have worked hard enough for a long time.
Photographs by (BB King) by Leslie Michele Derrough
and Haluk Gurer Birmingham
