Black Joe Lewis & The Honeybears

Black Joe Lewis is the realest motherfucker there is. When Covid sidelined his touring, hestarted laying concrete to help support his baby mama and his kid. That’s fuckin’ real. When Joeand his band, the Honeybears, popped onto the national stage over adecade ago, many criticsembraced him but still, there were some that maintained that they hadn’t paid their dues. Joe’sstill here. Still going. Still cashing checks and snapping necks. The dues of hard work; thedelirious heights of the industry as wellas the disappointments and low hanging fruit. Throughthis all, Joe’s only honed his mastery over gut bucket blues guitar and his true voice. It’s a vitaland distinctly American voice that never anticipated the attention he wound up receiving, neverwentlooking for it either. It just started happening. The garage, the blues, the propulsive andsynergistic live performances that inhabit the spaces of James Brown, Lightnin’ Hopkins, andthe MC5…those things happened naturally from the very beginning and could only beaccurately communicated in the live experience, not a press release or a slick brand campaign.Sharon Jones, Charles Bradley, Cedric Burnside and Lightnin Malcolm, The Dirtbombs, DetroitCobras, the Strange Boys; these are some of the artists that Black Joe Lewis and theHoneybears shared countless bills with; almost a roll call of the most influential soul and garagebands of the last twenty five years. Has the soul blues garage explosion from that era beencommodified or worked into the overalltemplate of pop rock? Sure. But the ground floor was avital space for people that like guitars and grease and at this point Black Joe Lewis is one of thelast standing that was there. Last of a dying breed. Or maybe a missing link. Does this makehim a throwback? A throwback to a throwback? It’d be tempting and easy for Joe to go alongwith that but nah, we don’t think so. We know that Joe Lewis is genuinely doing his thing andthat he’d do it regardless of what’s coming down the pipe. A stone cold original and a veteran atthat. If you like whistling in your music and some floppy hat, quaky kneed dudes cloyinglysinging at you, then you might not “get it” but whatever…there are enough intrepid, degenerateweirdos that do. Those are the folks Joe cares about. Not the glad handing set. Not the fair-weather friend set getting down with the flavor of the month. Like the title of his last album says,“the difference between me and you” is Joe defining for himself that there’s the belaboredwannabes and then there’s dudes that actually “HAVE the blues”…whatever the hell THAT is!Joe’s concrete pouring boss is going to miss him.