Joe Bonamassa started his career opening for BB King in 1989, aged twelve. He’s well connected to the high and mighty in rock, and this album is no exception. It is featuring covers and duets from the likes of John Hiatt, Barbra Streisand and Beth Hart. I bought this record blindly, but I never regretted it. Blues rock with a little country on the side.
On the cover is a version of a photo from 1936 by Arthur Rothstein. It shows father Coble and his two sons returning to their small cottage, barely able to see their surroundings because of the dust storm. The photo is commonly referred to as Dust Bowl Cimarron County, Oklahoma.
County Cimarron in Oklahoma was at the centre of the Dust Bowl, an ecological disaster in big parts of the Midwest of America and parts of Canada. Between 1934 and as late as 1940 prairie land was overused, and the vulnerable top soil removed. The wind took the rest, and the result was a constant sand storm. The area was left barren for decades. While the short term causes of the phenomenon might be easily explained, the long term is less easy.
From the end of the Civil War in 1865 onwards, land to the west was systematically given to new settlers. Starting with soldiers from that war, but later also immigrants from Europe were buying these plots of lands for relatively cheap. And then they had to get back their investment. The land had to yield crops, even though the dry land in the Dust Bowl counties clearly was not cut out for it.