About Blind Joe

The rowdy, non-stop rebel soul that is Blind Joe is as infectious as a night of Jack Daniels and a few Hank Williams songs on the jukebox.

Joe's story started with a fight. He was born three months premature, with a 2% chance of survival. He came through it totally blind, but by the grace of God, nothing else was wrong. Joe loves Jesus Christ, and that's who he gives the credit to, for that and everything since.

The music started with Joe's Grandpa Bob. Bob was one heck of an accordion player, and he raised Joe on Hank Williams and Merle Haggard. Joe kept hounding him to teach him, until Bob finally bought him a $20 guitar from Sears and Roebuck and showed him how to play flat top with a slide. Joe was just three years old. The two of them jammed for hours in his parents' basement, everything from Hank and Haggard to old-school polkas, ballads, two-steps and waltzes. As a teenager, Joe taught himself to play in standard tuning, because he and his buddies were into punk and metal, and he figured you couldn't be a rock star playing with a slide.

After high school, Joe headed to college in Arkansas and played the honky-tonks for spending money. He got bored with covers fast and started writing his own songs, and people loved them. Back home in the Dakotas, he played every bar that would have him and hit the road hard. His first big tour came in 2008, on the road with David Allan Coe. From there he opened for John Anderson, John Hiatt, Jamey Johnson, Travis Tritt, Steve Perry, Craig Morgan, Buddy Guy, Bret Michaels and many, many more. One night he even got to sing "The Whiskey Ain't Workin'" right alongside his lifelong inspiration and hero, Travis Tritt.

In 2015, Joe stepped onto NBC's The Voice and sang "If It Hadn't Been for Love." All four coaches turned their chairs, and he earned big praise from Gwen Stefani, Pharrell Williams, Adam Levine and Blake Shelton. He picked Team Blake, impressed battle advisor Brad Paisley, and won his battle round singing "Old Time Rock and Roll," making it all the way to the Knockouts.

In 2019, Joe packed up for Nashville and spent three years playing the honky-tonks, including Tootsie's Orchid Lounge, Nudie's Honky Tonk and Ole Red. It wasn't easy, and he nearly packed it in, until Craig Wilson pulled together a crew of Nashville pickers to play on his songs. Joe co-produces his music with Brent McCullough, keyboard player for Trace Adkins, recording on his own terms and keeping the rights to every song. Music Row wanted something other than real country, so Joe did it his way.

In 2021, his anthem "I Will Not Comply" struck a nerve. Within days of hitting YouTube, the video was racking up views by the tens of thousands. Then YouTube pulled it down, calling it medical misinformation. They deleted it three times, but that didn't stop the song's momentum. In fact, it did quite the opposite.

Soon after the takedown, controversial UK radio host Richie Allen invited Joe onto The Richie Allen Show, one of the biggest independent radio talk shows in the world, and the song became a viral sensation. When YouTube took it down, a fan in Germany put it right back up on his own channel, with Joe's permission, where it garnered hundreds of thousands more views. That fighting spirit is how Joe's fans became the Rowdy Rebels. The song spread from Australia to Europe, Canadian truckers took it up as an anthem during their convoy, people recorded their own covers, and a few different groups of fans even made up dance routines for it. Joe owes Richie a debt of gratitude he'll never forget.

His toughest fight was the bottle. Joe will tell you he's beaten it, by the grace of God.

Through all of it, Joe has had his rock and his muse, his wife Liann. She's the reason he wrote "Light of Her Love," a country rock banger he calls his autobiographical Jesus jam. These days the two of them are back home in Minnesota near family, and Joe is still writing, recording and playing shows all over the country, with more than 200,000 fans following along online, including over 136,000 on TikTok.

Coming up next, Joe is planning a gospel record, a bluegrass record, a Hank and Haggard covers album, and of course more of that no-holds-barred truth music the Rowdy Rebels have come to know and love.

And in case you're wondering: yes, he really is blind.