Chicago Fire
BACK IN 2014, Joanna Connor went viral. Which is one thing if you’re, say, a pop singer or the company that created “Baby Shark.” But it’s pretty unusual if you’re an adult woman in a purple dress playing stinging slide guitar on a cover of an almost-century-old blues song.
And yet, there was Connor, onstage at the North Atlantic Blues Festival in Rockland, Maine, tearing through an electrified version of Son House’s “Walking Blues,” with an incendiary solo that fused shredding licks, tapped passages and, yes, plenty of searing slide work, in a show-stopping performance.
As for what pushed the fan-filmed clip into the millions? “Because I look like a middle-aged mom playing like a maniac,” Connor says with a laugh. “So it was like, ‘What the hell is ?’ But I think on the internet, anything that’s a little unusual will catch on.
