Album Review- Christone “Kingfish” Ingram

I will follow up last weeks post with another pick from the youth movement- 22 year old Christone “Kingfish” Ingram who released his sophomore album “662” this year. I don’t think my view on the Blues is much different than many Rock fans, but I must say I actually catch the local Blues Radio show quite a bit, and was lucky to see more than a few Blues live shows at the beginning of the century. A lot of modern blues songs have a certain sound that is a bit too slickly produced for my ears. Not that there aren’t a few Blues artists who quite simply are too good to be ignored (Bettye LaVette and Shemekia Copeland to name a couple) and get picked up by Indie Rock media. My ears are drawn to the Pre-Stones/Yardbirds blues artists like Howlin Wolf, John Lee Hooker, BB King and so many more. My idea of the Blues is likely based on my particular time and place, which was the strain of guitar rock (most famously carried through Albert King/Freddie King/Buddy Guy and so on) that made a run on the pop charts in my early teenage years most prominently by Stevie Ray Vaughan, Jeff Healey and Robert Cray. Now that genre never really went away (Kenny Wayne Sheppard, Samantha Fish, Gary Clark Jr and many others) but there’s something about listening to Kingfish that is particularly exciting. His music grabs me as something for FM Rock ears like little else on Blues Radio with few exceptions like The Cash Box Kings and the late Michael Burks. Drawing from all these blues influences I mentioned (both recent, old and inbetween) but young enough to draw in all these normally unrelated influences like Hendrix, Prince, Funkadelic, Living Colour Thin Lizzy, and some punk, funk, country and rap to really doing something interesting and fresh.