Born in a tobacco barn during a thunderstorm after a labor so intense it nearly killed both mother & child, the man now known simply as Joe Con has always done things his own way. The hard way. He refused to make a single sound until his second birthday, when he began speaking in full sentences his parents soon discovered were actually rhyming verses of original songs he claimed had come to him in a dream. At three he started playing harmonica and banging on a toy keyboard that had been salvaged from the local dump, and by five he’d built his first cigar box guitar out of a kit his uncle ordered from a magazine. Age eight found him singing, hollering & preaching the Gospel of Hip Hop at a baptist church outside of town, just across the same railroad tracks that would soon take young Joe to places he could not yet even imagine.  ​ On the road, Joe played and sang for his supper when he had any, and swapped stories with travelers, tramps, and troubadours alike as he crisscrossed the massive breadth of the United States many times over, in search of something that was always just out of reach. Along the way he sowed his oats and honed his chops, slowly building a devoted following and, more importantly, an extensive songbook. He mixed the folk, country, blues, gospel and bluegrass music of his Kentucky roots with the hip-hop, soul & rock n roll he found in the city, and let all that goodness cook down over a slow boil into something delicious and altogether different.