His first album, Kingfish, rocketed to the top of Billboard’s Blues Chart. The second album, dubbed 662, the area code of Mississippi’s sultry delta, earned him a Grammy for Best Contemporary Blues Album. With the third – a live album recorded in London – came the honor of Contemporary Blues Male Artist of the Year. As passionate and searing as he is in the studio, NPR declared “He’s even scarier live.”
Christone “Kingfish” Ingram is only 25. And while he has been performing much of his life, the pace of success is something of a surprise.
“National attention – I always felt like it would come in my 30s,” Ingram says with a soft chuckle. “I’m very grateful, though.”
Ingram grew up in Clarksdale, Mississippi. It was a youth infused with gospel, but also one that simmered with the sound of Robert Johnson, B.B. King, Muddy Waters and regular visits to the Delta Blues Museum. For Ingram, gospel and blues are musical salves, and blues is the root of modern storytelling genres.
“It’s all sacred,” he says. But there’s a depth and a reach to blues that seeps through the decades, keeping it alive and relevant. “Blues is the most relatable genre of music. It’s dealing with life. Everyone deals with hardships.”
Ingram was 20 when he released Kingfish in 2019. That album, the two that followed (Live in London came out in 2023), as well as tours and appearances, including at Monterey Jazz Festival, have left audiences gasping.
There’s an authority in his playing, touched by the blues gods, but also informed by Prince, Jimi Hendrix and others, as well as his own relationship with life. His guitar can drip with sweltering heat, weep with unshakable sorrow or shout back at the difficulties of the world. Ingram has been labeled “a generational talent” by Washington Post Magazine. Meanwhile Guitar World noted – without hesitation – that he is the “most exciting blues guitarist in the world.”
Yet Ingram sees himself improving with each album, with each different experience on the road. Perhaps that’s why NPR viewed his talent as frightening. But there has always been a healing capacity in music.
“It’s going to be a lot of blues, a lot of funk,” he says of his show in Carmel. “We’re going to have a good time.”
About The Author
