Billy Joe Green - May/June 2001
Saturday, May 5th, 2001by Jim Kelly
Who: Billy Joe Green
What: Blues with heart and spirit
Where: Edmonton, AB
To Contact: Steve Blackwell, 10411 Fairmount Drive S.E., Calgary, AB, T2J 0S6 (403) 607-0864, FAX (403) 278-5418,
The blues is a funny thing. In its traditional form, it often relies on repeated 12-bar patterns, a pentatonic scale and well-travelled lyrical themes. Sounds about as exciting as stale bread, doesn’t it? But the magic in the blues occurs when individual artists bring their own unique spirit and emotion, and plug that into the form. Billy Joe Green is one such blues artist. Originally from the Lake of the Woods area on the Manitoba-Ontario border, raised in Winnipeg and now based in Edmonton, Green’s second CD, My Ojibway Experience: Strength And Hope, mixes a few covers — Robert Johnson’s “Stop Breakin’ Down” and “Love In Vain” — with originals like “Nightmare Blues”, the down-tempo dedicational “Together, Together/Ka-chi-tay-i-gah Song” and the scorching “Soul Search”, a live-in-the-studio instrumental jam that pays homage to envelope-pushing axemen like Jimi Hendrix and Jeff Beck. Green has the chops, but, more importantly, he has the heart. “It’s all feel for me, and it’s all emotion,” he says. “Sometimes you close your eyes and it takes you somewhere. It’s not just an exercise in playing.” I suppose being from the Kejick Ojibway Nation makes Green rather atypical in the blues world. But in many ways he is the prototypical bluesman, for whom playing the blues was a form of salvation and a way to express his spirit. And that’s what it’s all about. Experience, strength, hope … and some pretty hot chops. All of that comes across in Billy Joe’s playing — the only guy I know who turns the blues Green.