RISING BLUES STAR CHRISTONE ‘KINGFISH’ INGRAM SAYS YESTERDAY MISSISSIPPI, TOMORROW THE WORLD
“The meat and potatoes of everything in Clarksdale is the blues.”
CHRISTONE ‘KINGFISH’ INGRAM
RIGHT NOW, Christone ‘Kingfish’ Ingram is the most explosive new talent in the blues. He speaks through his guitar in long, subtle, articulate lines and delivers his songs with grace and conviction. These are skills most musicians take years to acquire. Ingram is 22.
What distances him from other guitarstrutting 20-somethings on the blues stage is that he knows in his bones where it comes from – its unique geography of place and connection.
Ingram is from Clarksdale, Mississippi, where Muddy Waters, John Lee Hooker, Otis Spann and Ike Turner lived, and Bessie Smith died. Today, it’s the home of legendary blues club Ground Zero and the Delta Blues Museum, a few miles from the crossed-guitars landmark marking the intersection of “blues highways” 49 and 61. The blues hangs over the town like smoke over a barbecue.
“I’ve always been around it,” Ingram says. “The meat and potatoes of everything in Clarksdale is the blues.” As he says in one of his songs, he’s “too young to remember” the town’s past – “but I’m old enough to know.” While other kids at school were absorbed by hip-hop, he was listening further back. “I was into rap,” he says, “but not like they were. Anything that I listened to was old – nine times out of 10 it was someone who had passed on.”
Old blues, old soul – and Ingram was teaching himself to become one. In another song he muses: “I’ve always been different, that’s one thing that’s for sure/I can still hear grandma saying, ‘Child, you been here before.’”
“I wanted to have a career in music since age three, but me fronting my own blues band, that wasn’t even in my goals,” he says. “But I realised that was set in stone when I played my first couple of shows at the Delta Blues Museum, when I was 10 or 11.”
Still in his teens when he went on the road, he cut his first LP, Kingfish, for Alligator in 2019, and followed it two years later with 662 (Clarksdale’s telephone area code), both close collaborations with songwriter and producer Tom Hambridge, both incandescent displays of mature blues skill.
Blues is about storytelling, and Ingram’s central story is his own: how he comes to be where he is now, starting where he started from.
“I’m not just using the blues as a steppingstone,” he explains. “I want to see other young black kids get into this genre of music. And in order to get young people, you have to venture out just a little bit. There’s other stuff that I could do, but it’ll always be rooted in the blues. Because I come from Clarksdale and I’ll always have that in me.”
Tony Russell
Ingram plays Celtic Connections, Glasgow, on January 25 and Islington Assembly Hall, London,on January 27.