My friend and frequent partner in crime, Greg, has long been known for expounding a signature line. With arms crossed tightly over his stomach he’ll begin. “Let me tell you something, (fill-in-the-blank of anyone who happens to be within earshot).” Then, proceeding in his slight Okie drawl, “I only like two kinds of pie” – dramatic pause – “Hot,” and with a growing smirk, “and cold.”

I bring up this example of profundity here because after a recent dive into the musical archives I was hit with a similarly consequential realization: I only like two kinds of blues: slow and fast.

Now, slow 12-bar blues (mostly with an A/A/B lyrical pattern) is what the form is based and built on. And, perhaps to a generalized audience, that deliberate pace and oftentimes somber tone is what’s immediately conjured when one mentions the blues. But that’s merely the musical structure; the blues need not be played slowly, and it sure doesn’t have to be depressing.¹ The blues, to borrow a phrase, don’t have to give you the blues.

We’ve covered this grey area of blues once before, with a brief appraisal of some loud, fast, happy blues, and culminating in a house-rocking playlist entitled Art’s Rocking Blues, a tribute to another blues-appreciating friend of mine.

Many would be familiar with the names of original blues-defining artists, starting all the way back to Robert Johnson and continuing in the ‘60’s and ‘70’s with Hall of Fame stars like B.B. King and Buddy Guy. Years later the blues genre experienced a raucous revival spearheaded by the emergence in 1983 of a phenom named Stevie Ray Vaughan. But since the turn of the century, probably more than any other individual, Joe Bonamassa has been carrying the mantle of the modern blues maestro, after first catapulting to industry prominence with his 2003 tour de force album “Blues Deluxe.”

Some years ago, my friends and I conducted our own quasi-tour, celebrating a shared round-number birthday with a year-long series of events curated by each one around their own peak interests. There were fancy steakhouse dinners, an NFL playoff game, and a paintball competition, among others. Mine was a Joe Bonamassa concert, at NYC’s Beacon Theater, where I proudly hosted nine of my best buds – most completely unfamiliar with the headliner – promising a night of blues guitar virtuosity. And Joe definitely did not disappoint. Bonamassa is no minimalist; some traditionalists might find fault with his “more is more,” playing-as-if-paid-by-the-note frenetic style and occasional swashbuckling theatricality. My fellow attendees and I would scoff at that obvious staid nonsense. Bonamassa is a deftly skilled wonder who simply plays his ass off at every show and on every record. So much so, in fact – crude immaturity coming – that another friend Zing and I regularly refer to the particular guitaring extravagance of Bonamassa as generating Boners-Massive (I did warn you).

So here we’re going to feature a rollicking 2023 blues number – traditionalists be damned – by this modern marvel, from Bonamassa’s most recent album “Blues Deluxe Vol. 2,” recorded as an intentional follow-up (albeit with 12 other studio releases in between) exactly 20 years after the original. This irresistible tune, ‘I Want To Shout About It,’ is actually a cover of a song written by blues legend Ronnie Earl, nee Ronnie Earl Horvath, one-time leader of the now generation-spanning collective known as Roomful of Blues, one of the great blues band traditions of the last 50-plus years, as well as an awesome, underappreciated band name. That would be some idyllic place to be, would it not, in a room just teeming full of nothing but the blues – slow, fast, and anything in between. Well, maybe a little hot and cold pie wouldn’t hurt too.

¹although old-school melancholic blues do have some of the greatest titles imaginable, my favorite being B.B. King’s immortal ‘Nobody Loves Me But My Mother (and She Could Be Jivin’ Too)’