Samantha Fish believes the future of blues guitar is in safe hands — and she can point to five players leading the charge.
The Kansas City guitarist, who was championed by the likes of Joe Bonamassa, Slash and Devon Allman as she emerged from the blues underground, has singled out a handful of contemporaries carrying the blues-rock torch into a new era. At the top of her list are Christone Kingfish Ingram and Derek Trucks.
“I just got off the road with Christone Kingfish Ingram, and he’s pretty amazing,” she tells Guitar World. The pair recently shared the bill on Slash’s S.E.R.P.E.N.T. festival alongside Warren Haynes, Grace Bowers, Larkin Poe, Eric Gales and plenty of others.
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Her praise for Trucks is even stronger.
“I think Derek Trucks is one of the greatest there is,” she says, “not just in blues playing but any playing. He’s an alien.”
Trucks has been performing for almost his entire life. He landed his first paid gig at age 11 and was playing blues clubs with Buddy Guy before his 13th birthday — experiences that, he later revealed, taught him one of his most important lessons about performing.
Fish’s remaining picks are no less enthusiastic.
“I like Gary Clark Jr.,” she says. “He’s very tasteful, and he’s got a great tone.
“Eric Gales is incredible,” she adds. “He just blows everybody away. Luther Dickinson is one of my favorite contemporaries, too. He’s awesome.”
As for Fish herself, she’s credited 10 albums with shaping both her life and her vibrant guitar style. Alongside the more obvious picks — “Who doesn’t have a Rolling Stones record in their top 10?” she asked Guitar Player last year — sits one intriguing outlier: the MC5’s Kick Out the Jams.
“This record came into my life fairly recently,” she explains. “I started getting hip to the Detroit rock and soul scene while I was making the Chills & Fever album. I was going through something of a musical evolution, just taking everything in, and eventually that led me to Kick Out the Jams.
“They were punk in the very early days, and that’s where my heart is. Once you get into them, though, you’re really into them. This record really affected me at a time when I wanted to feel something in a big way.”
She’s also detailed the five most important riffs in her life, saying one R.L. Burnside song shaped her musical upbringing and served as a four-minute masterclass in groove.
I think Derek Trucks is one of the greatest there is, not just in blues playing.”
— Samantha Fish
Fish believes today’s blues players should continue pushing the genre forward rather than treating it as something to preserve unchanged. Speaking to Guitar World last August, she argued that the music has always evolved through artists willing to challenge expectations.
“Even when Muddy Waters and Howlin’ Wolf went electric, which is what we consider to be traditional blues now, they were outsiders. People were saying, ‘This isn’t blues.’ And now it’s our gold standard. It’s the artist’s job to push boundaries and find their voice.
“And, of course, you worry about losing people. You worry about gaining people. That’s the business side of what we do. But at the end of the day, I feel like you have to make art that you can stand by. The rest of it, it kind of sorts itself out.”
