Happy 56th Birthday to Jo Dee Messina! (She’s now as old as me) Jo Dee was one of the first country shows I had ever been to and it was amazing. She has such an energy to her. She would go from singing an uptempo song where everyone was singing along to a slow song that had everyone in tears. During one song, she grabbed a saxophone and belted out one of the coolest solos. That blew me away!
She was also one of the first country singers I got to meet backstage. She couldn’t have been nicer. She was so gracious with her time and signed all the radio station stuff I brought for St. Jude auctions. The only photo I have of us is the one below. Those early digital camera were not that great!
She continues to tour and has a brand new album out – Bridges.
It is fantastic. Her website states:
Most albums reflect a season. Jo Dee Messina’s new album, Bridges, is 10 years worth of seasons rolled up into one. The love, the life, the pain, the fight, the learning — and the living through it all.“It’s not about a full transformation,” Messina says. “It’s about what I’ve gone through and how I’ve gotten through it all. But I’m not done living yet. There’s still a lot more to learn.”
In celebrating her today, I’ll do something I used to do on the air when I was in radio. Jo Dee’s Latest and Greatest:
Latest: A fantastic song called Some Bridges
Greatest: I’m Alright was written by Phil Vassar and was released in 1998. It was the title track of her album and her second single. It would shoot strait to the top of the Billboard Country Chart and spend three weeks at #1.
Happiest birthday wishes to you, Jo Dee! One day, I hope to catch up at a show and get a better picture.
Various Ramblings of a Nostalgic Italian 
Nice! It’s so cool you got to meet and interview so many country stars. A sax in country – that’s a bit different, right?
Early digital cameras – yep. I worked in that field for close to 20 years and when they first hit the scene, I thought ‘these are useless and will never catch on’. So low res, pixelated and the cameras themselves, bulky. Even by about 2000 when they were getting better all around, and selling well, I didn’t think they’d really replace film . But by about 2003, they’d caught up in every way and when I left the business around 2008, they offered clearly better results than film counterparts by and large. The shop owner I worked for around then still didn’t really accept that so not surprisingly, their business didn’t last all that much longer
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