Biography

“She’s a bad mother on the guitar, she’s got riffs that’ll rip your heart!” So goes one of the liveliest tracks on Joanna Connor's new album, Rise. And nobody who's heard Connor play-- either in her many club dates, or the videos that have made her a viral superstar-- is about to argue with that one.

No getting around it: Blazing licks are Joanna Connor’s stock in trade. Blues insiders have known for years that her Chicago club dates are not to be missed, and word really got out via a couple of videos that have now been shared worldwide. “I’m that middle aged lady with the scorching guitar,” she laughs. “It freaks people out, but that’s me, it’s the core of how I play, And when I try something different people always say, ‘Oh, she does that too?”

You’ll probably say that a few times listening to Rise, her first album in three years. Not to worry about the scorching guitar, there’s still plenty of that: It’s there on Sly Stone’s “If You Want Me to Stay,” the latest of her classic soul covers, on the raunchy “Mutha” quoted above, and in “Flip,” the lusty original that opens the disc. But Connor also takes the occasion to stretch herself musically, a process that began with her M.C second release “Six String Stories” in 2016. This time she goes even further, touching on jazz, Celtic music and even hip-hop. And the presence of a new backup band-- drummer Tyrone Mitchell and Cameron Lewis, bassist Joewaun Jay Red Scott and keyboardist Delby Littlejohn-- adds some fresh energy. “The whole record is me and a bunch of younger men,” she says. “So there was some kind of power coming through them to me.”

A poignant moment comes on the acoustic guitar solo “My Irish Father.” Though she’d recorded it earlier, the Celtic-styled piece took on special significance in her life. “I did the ancestry.com thing and found my birth father, It turns out he was an NBA player-- That really unlocked a key for me because all the women in my family are five-foot-two and I’m so tall. And I’ve always loved Irish traditional music, so maybe I have a kindred thing for it. So, in some ways, it’s been a heavy few years.”

At the other extreme is “Dear America,” a daring track on two counts: It’s her first topical piece since 2002 and one of her first ventures toward rap (the link was provided by her son, a DJ who introduced her to featured rapper Alphonso BuggZ Dinero). As she explains, it began as a rewrite of “When the Levee Breaks” and then took its own course to address the current climate. “What Alphonso says on that track is super powerful, and it was something that needed to be said.”

It’s no coincidence that Connor did most of the writing herself this time around, coming up with one of her most personal statements. “It’s all about rising in life, rising to know yourself, rising to meet the challenge of exploring yourself deeper. Putting it out there.”