Few 21st century guitarists live and breathe the blues quite like Joe Bonamassa, but he says a rockabilly icon played a crucial role in shaping him into a more rounded musician.
By his own admission, Bonamassa’s musical worldview was singular when he first stepped out onto stages at 11 years of age. He was the blues to the bone. But when Danny Gatton took him under his wing, his world changed for the better, setting the pre-teen Bonamassa on the path he still treads today.
“I met him at the Silver Lake, New York Blues Festival. I was asked to play half a set with the first band, and I was just about to turn 12,” he tells Circle Country. “I was playing with the Cold Shot Blues Band, and I noticed a guy wearing a John Deere hat and some overalls watching me play. just thought it was somebody who worked at the sound company.”
It was Gatton, and he was impressed by what he saw and heard. After the show, he approached the young guitarist.
“He said, ‘Hey, kid, where'd you learn how to play?’ I said, ‘Well, my dad taught me.’ And he goes, ‘You want to see a cool Telecaster?’” Bonamassa recalls. “I was a guitar geek from birth, and he pulls out this ‘53 Tele. I had never seen anything like that.”
It was the start of a heartwarming friendship that showed Bonamassa musical worlds outside the gravitational pull of the blues. It started that day when young Joe watched Gatton’s set at Silver Lake.
“He starts playing, and my mind is blown from the first notes,” he recalls. “I've never heard anyone play American styles that seamlessly, and with real intent. Like, he learned everything. You're hearing Les Paul, and you're hearing Hank Garland. It was really a life-changing moment.
“And he mentored me,” he continues. “I just knew him as ‘Danny with the cool guitar’ who would call the house, and we would do these shows. We would play Johnny D’s in Boston, or the Cat Club in New York, and we would go out on the weekends or in the summer.
“He really set me off on a musical path that makes me the artist who I am today because I love all types of music, not just the blues. At the time I met him, I was just into the blues. That was it. And then after I met Danny, I was like, ‘Oh…’”
Gatton, known for his use of a Gibson ES-295 — alongside his beloved Teles, of course — was often regarded as one of the world's best under-the-radar players. He could even solo with a beer bottle and a towel. The teachings of the Humbler, as he was known, proved invaluable to Bonamassa — as did the rather cutting words of Leslie West when the pair met in the studio while Joe was in his early 20s.
Elsewhere, Bonamassa has revealed the unlikely circumstance that saw Eric Clapton play on his new B.B. King tribute album and hit back at a journalist who claimed that King wasn’t a virtuoso.
