Article Contributed by Mountain Home Music Company
Published on 2026-03-07
When acclaimed guitarist Bryan Sutton announced his From Roots to Branches guitar duets series, he identified three themes: nodding to the past with previously unreleased tracks featuring mentors; uplifting bluegrass and related colleagues both young and old; and ranging more broadly with guitar friends and heroes from beyond the genre. Previous releases in the series, from the Doc Watson duet, “Working Man Blues” to the most recent, a reading of “Crazy Creek” with Jake Stargel, have delved into the first two of those. Now, Sutton turns his attention to the third with a mesmerizing take on a bluegrass classic, “Blue Night,” that finds him exchanging licks with blues master Joe Bonamassa.
“I couldn’t be more thrilled to have Joe Bonamassa on this duets project,” enthuses Sutton. “I’ve been a fan of his for a long time. I wasn’t sure what he would play when we cut this song, because all of this was acoustic. I love that he played electric guitar.”
Opening with a free-form exchange between Sutton’s vintage Martin dreadnought and Bonamassa’s Fender Stratocaster, “Blue Night” — a bluegrass standard written in the 1960s by old-time musician Kirk McGee and conscripted into the genre by its founder, Bill Monroe — settles into a syncopated, funky groove that gives the two plenty of opportunities to explore their instruments’ different timbres between verses that lament a relationship’s downfall in vivid terms:
Blue night ’cause I’m all alone
I used to call you on the telephone
I used to call and it made you glad
Now I call and it makes you mad
Blue night ’cause I’m all alone
“I love the fact that it’s a different kind of song for this record,” Sutton adds, “and being able to interpret an old Bill Monroe song like this was just really, really fun.”
“Blue Night” is streaming in Dolby Atmos spatial audio on Apple Music, Amazon Music and TIDAL. Listen to it HERE.
