Jonny Lang

Jon Gordon Langseth Jr. (born January 29, 1981), known as Jonny Lang, is an American blues, gospel, and rock singer, songwriter, guitarist and recording artist. He has five albums that charted on the top 50 of the Billboard 200 chart and has won a Grammy Award for Turn Around.

Jonny Lang is of Norwegian descent and was born in Fargo, North Dakota. He started playing the guitar at the age of 12. He got his start playing guitar for his friends on the Villagers’ porch at their lake place. He would play everything from modern hits to the classics, even performing an astounding rendition of Jimi Hendrix’s take on the National Anthem. Soon after his father took him to see the Bad Medicine Blues Band, one of the few blues bands in Fargo, Lang started taking guitar lessons from Ted Larsen, the band’s guitar player. Several months after Lang began, he joined the band, which was then renamed Kid Jonny Lang & The Big Bang. Two years later A&M Records, then home of Janet Jackson and Sound garden, was invited to come see him at a live performance at Bunkers Bar in Minneapolis, and he was suddenly the latest in a trend of shockingly young blues-guitar prodigies that included Kenny Wayne Shepherd and Derek Trucks.

At 15, Jonny Lang made a blues album, 1997’s “Lie to Me,” which went platinum and hit No. 1 on Billboard’s New Artist chart. At 17 he made another, “Wander This World,” which earned a Grammy nomination.

The band moved to Minneapolis, Minnesota, and independently released the album Smokin’ when Lang was 14. He was signed to A&M Records in 1996. He released the critically acclaimed multi-platinum Lie to Me on January 28, 1997. The next album, Wander this World, was released on October 20, 1998, and earned a Grammy nomination. This was followed by the more soulful Long Time Coming on October 14, 2003. Lang also made a cover of Edgar Winter’s “Dying to Live”. Lang’s 2006 album, the gospel-influenced Turn Around, won him his first Grammy Award.[citation needed] In his earliest performing years, Lang always performed barefoot on stage, because “it feels good” and once in tribute to Luther Allison, a friend who had recently died. He has since given up that practice, after several near-accidents and electric shocks.

In more than ten years on the road, Lang has toured with the Rolling Stones, Buddy Guy, Aerosmith, B.B. King, Blues Traveler, Jeff Beck and Sting. In 1999, he was invited to play for a White House audience that included President and Mrs. Clinton. Earlier that year he was selected by the newly elected Minnesota Governor Jesse Ventura to perform at his Inaugural Ball. Lang also makes a cameo appearance in the film Blues Brothers 2000 as a janitor. In 2004, Eric Clapton asked Lang to play at the Crossroads Guitar Festival to raise money for the Crossroads Centre Antigua.

Lang also appears regularly as a part of the Experience Hendrix Tour along with many other well-known guitarists to pay tribute to the deceased guitar legend.