Jimmie Bratcher picked up his first guitar because of Eric Clapton, fell in love with Albert King and B.B. King, and never looked back. Raised in a big musical family in Kansas City — the kind that had sprawling jam sessions at every get-together — he was the kid who owned both Hendrix’s Axis: Bold As Love and Johnny Cash’s At Folsom Prison.

He played in a string of bands through his teens and twenties. None of them made it. Drugs and alcohol saw to that. They also destroyed his first marriage to Sherri. But the story didn’t end there. Jimmie and Sherri found their way back to each other. When they decided to remarry, a small-town preacher told Jimmie he’d only perform the ceremony if Jimmie put his faith in Jesus. He did. That night changed everything.

What followed was twenty years in the pastoral ministry — and twenty years without the electric guitar. In 1997, his son Jason gave him a Fender Telecaster as a gift. Jimmie wrote an inspirational blues shuffle called “Can’t Get Over It” that’s still in his setlist. He started playing again, but this time he wasn’t learning anyone else’s licks. He developed his own bare-knuckled style — plectrum and fingers, growling tones and clearly articulated notes — and he never looked back.

In 2000, Jimmie transitioned out of the traditional pastorate and hit the road. He took his guitar with him. In 2001, he released his debut album, Honey In the Rock, and discovered something that would define the next quarter century of his life: people in bars, prisons, biker rallies, and churches all responded to the same thing — an honest song, told in the language of the blues, carrying a message they could feel.

“To this day I write in parables,” Jimmie says. “I tell stories. Behind the stories are messages I want people to connect with. And the sound of the blues is so true and comfortable that it helps make that connection.”

Today, Jimmie and Sherri lead Connect Ministries out of Kansas City — what they call “The Ministry of Showin’ Up.” They walk into rooms where most ministers aren’t welcome and bring the same message everywhere: God is for you. He always has been. Christ is in us. Where we go, He goes. And where He goes, stuff happens.

Jimmie has recorded fourteen albums, written seven books — including Granny Paid For Our Divorce, Don’t Take Your Dreams to the Grave, The Little Girl Wins, If God Walked In My Room Would I Feel Safe, and his latest, Waitin’ On The Man: The Heel That Crushed the Head — and toured prisons, churches, music venues, and festivals across the country for over two decades. He and Sherri have been married for nearly fifty years.

All of it — the songs, the books, the sermons, the rooms — comes back to one thing. Connection. That’s what the ministry is named for. That’s what the blues have always been about. And that’s what happens when you show up.

He publishes under Ain’t Skeert Publishing.