Photo by David Fox
Where he wants to be at twenty-three.
“When you come to see me live, expect blues-rock, face melting,” says bluesman Jonathon “Boogie” Long hunched over a burrito on a hot Sunday afternoon. “When you listen to my music from the studio, you’re hearing me as a singer-songwriter.”
For most twenty-three-year-old musicians, these kinds of sentiments have more to do with their dreams than their reality, but Jonathon “Boogie” Long is a living embodiment of the modern state of the blues. “Come start a revolution with me” he optimistically offers on his latest eponymous CD, but he includes a caveat.
“You never learn all you want to learn. You never stop paying dues. You’ll die paying dues. It’s the way it goes.”
Long has been a touring working musician since he dropped out of high school at fourteen, a decision he flatly does not regret. “I’d say if you know you’re blessed, that you know you have a gift, you should hone it the best way you can. I was fortunate that I had supportive parents that didn’t shelter me. They signed over partial custody of me to [Louisiana reggae performer] Henry Turner so I could go into these barrooms. They let me go be who I wanted to be.”
Long took advantage of the relatively easy access to the blues legends that walk among us mortals in Baton Rouge. “I started going to Swamp Mama’s on Third Street. It’s the Roux House now but then it was Swamp Mama’s and they had a Sunday night blues jam. It was a hot spot. I was thirteen years old and would go see Kenny Acosta and Rudy Richard and Henry Gray, James Johnson and so on. Sundanze took over the jam and he brought in that digital rock ‘n’ roll, blues-rock edge. He showed me that when you get a really solid drummer and really good bass player that you’d get this overdrive, this really good gain going. Hold some notes and then hit some licks and you’d get the audience captivated.”
Long did a short stint with Chris Duarte in Austin, but it was Luther Kent that gave him his real break. “Luther came up to me and said ‘You’re that kid.’” Long was invited to sit in with Kent’s 11-piece big band, and within half a year he was Kent’s first-call guitarist.
“Your job there was to make Luther’s job easy,” recalls Long. “He’s the name on the bill and you want to make a situation where he can do his thing. He sings all night, so everybody in the band gets a solo.”
Now, Long has his own name on the bill. In 2010 he won the Guitar Center King of the Blues award, increasing his spotlight. Long has no trouble filling that spotlight. He’s a big guy, decked out in tailored suits, and for a large part of his show, he can be found shredding out a blistering solo in the middle of the crowd, his face screwed into an ecstatic rictus. He is the ringmaster, trapeze artist and human cannonball of a live blues-rock circus.
The Jonathon Boogie Long & the Blues Revolution CD touches the energy and edge of his live sets, better even than the polished Pete Anderson Sessions EP that Long released last year. “I write folk music, bluegrass, country, Americana—it’s some of my favorite music.”
Much of the album is about Long’s journey through the musician’s life; there’s “Bad Day,” “Bad Karma,” “Lonesome Road”—all tap into the slog through bar bands and backstage life.
“I had some rough moments,” says Long of his life in the blues business. “But all in all, I’m not strung out. I’m not in jail. I don’t have twenty kids. I’m pretty stable for twenty-three, considering the life I’ve led. But, I wasn’t on the road with rough people. They were business people. It wasn’t about drugs and partyin’—it was ‘This is the music business and it’s time to pay rent.’”
“Goin’ Somewhere” pushes aside the challenges to making it. “Roll down the window, get the wind in your hair/ not a cloud in the sky all the way there” he offers in this ballad of positivity and believing in oneself. Somber acoustic numbers like “Lonesome Road” and the boogie funk of “Do Right Woman” open up the spectrum of Long’s songcraft. “There is no genre for my CD because everything is on it. I’m a songwriter.“
Details. Details. Details.
Big Heads Tavern
1051 Millerville Road
Baton Rouge, LA
(225) 275-8181
