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Founded in 1848, Clarksdale, Mississippi, soon earned the title “the Golden Buckle on the Cotton Belt”, a place where enslaved Africans and their descendants picked cotton by the tonne. But mechanisation in the 1960s changed things. Today, the small city’s median household income is $35,210, with 40% of the populace living below the poverty line. And 80% of Clarksdale’s 14,400 residents are African American. Just another left-behind town in the poorest state in the Union? This is how Clarksdale appears to many outsiders.
Or it did until one of the biggest movies of 2025 opened with the words: “Clarksdale, Mississippi – October 16, 1932”. Why was Ryan Coogler’s Sinners set in Clarksdale? Because this forgotten settlement is also a blues mecca. The crossroads where Robert Johnson supposedly “sold his soul to the devil” is here. Bessie Smith, shattered after a car crash on Highway 61, drew her last breath in Clarksdale. WC Handy, Muddy Waters, Robert Nighthawk, Junior Parker, Ike Turner and Sam Cooke are just a handful of the celebrated blues and R&B musicians who were either born or based themselves in Clarksdale at some point across the 20th century. Now, after decades of neglect, Clarksdale is using its musical heritage to re-establish its place on the map – and one of the city’s native sons, Christone “Kingfish” Ingram, is bringing the blues back to the centre of American culture.
“The blues has been marginalised for a long time,” says Ingram, “seen as old folks’ music. But I’m noticing people are responding to blues. They’re tired of what I call artificial music. And I’m fortunate to be riding that wave.”
With his debut album, Kingfish, in 2019, the then 20-year-old Ingram immediately raced to the top of the US blues album charts. Two years later, his sophomore effort 662 (named after Clarksdale’s area code) followed suit and won him his first Grammy. The Rolling Stones invited Ingram to open their 2022 Hyde Park concert in London. But 2025 has been his biggest year yet: as well as his latest album, Hard Road, which finds him demonstrating a soulful bent alongside deep blues, he both appeared in and contributed to the soundtrack of Sinners. “Kingfish emerged as a fully formed star,” says Cerys Matthews, host of Radio 2’s Blues Show, “a songwriting, guitar-toting, blues hero for the new generation.”
“Its cool that people like my music,” says Ingram, “but I try not to let the fame thing go to my head. My aim is to sing and play the blues well. It’s like Nina Simone said: ‘Blues is our truth. And I want to share those truths.’”
Shy and softly spoken, Ingram might not appear star material at first glance, but his music commands attention: he sings songs that convey lived authority while his guitar playing blends elements of BB King’s blue notes with Jimi Hendrix’s fierce dynamics and Prince’s funky pulse. “From an early age I loved singing, joining in making music in church,” he says. “It came natural, like breathing.”
Ingram was born into music, singing in a gospel choir from an early age while his mother, Princess Pride, was related to Charley Pride, the pioneering African American country singer. When he was five, his father sat Ingram down to watch a documentary on Muddy Waters then, noting his son’s interest, took him to Clarksdale’s Delta Blues Museum (which, fittingly, opened in 1999, the year of Ingram’s birth).
Here, Ingram engaged with a music education programme and excelled. Aged 14, the teen (who an instructor at the Delta Blues Museum had nicknamed “Kingfish” after a character from the 1950s sitcom Amos ’n’ Andy), was taken to the White House as part of a group of young Mississippi blues musicians. He got to play for Michelle Obama. “I got the same feeling from meeting her as I did when I met BB King,” says Ingram.
Being based in Clarksdale proved a boon for the youngster – live music thrived as blues tourism increased and Morgan Freeman, another Mississippi native, opened a blues club, Ground Zero, in the city. Not that life was easy: Ingram’s parents’ divorce found Princess, Christone and his brother “essentially homeless. We were scuffling between cheap hotels, just trying to hold it together. It wasn’t for that long but, when you don’t have a home to go to, it feels like for ever.”
Hard times pushed Ingram to focus on music, although at school his classmates found his tastes odd. “Everyone was into rap and R&B and, while I didn’t get bullied, they would ask me: ‘Do you really like that old music?’ I’d tell them: ‘Yeah, I do. You should check it out.’ Maybe they now are!” He laughs and adds: “I learned a lot in church as a child – my mom’s side of the family are all church people and gospel is a great teacher.”
Local musicians – “the elders” at the Blues Museum – encouraged him too, and he became involved in the local scene: “Bass was my first instrument and I got work playing bass in bands when I was still a kid – I was learning in the clubs at night and learning other stuff in school during the day!”
Roger Stolle, a blues entrepreneur whose enthusiasm and vision has helped revitalise Clarksdale as a popular destination on the music highway that runs from Nashville to New Orleans, sees Kingfish as a continuation of a long tradition. “The first time I saw Chris he was 11 years old. There’s this kid playing whatever the songs required like he was some old, experienced bluesman.” Stolle adds: “I’ve got to give credit to Kingfish’s mom Princess – she got him to gigs on time and was always at the door to the club or juke joint late at night keeping trouble away from him.”
“She was everything: the bodyguard, the manager, the handler,” Ingram says of his mother, who died aged 49 in 2019. She left her son in good hands with professional management and signed to Alligator Records, the premier US blues label.
Bruce Iglauer, Alligator’s founder, recalls first experiencing 14-year-old Ingram at a Mississippi blues festival and thinking “he overplayed, like young guys often do”. But when Ingram played the Chicago blues festival four years later, Iglauer reconsidered. “It was an amazing performance,” he recalls. “He knew the right notes to play to impact the audience and tell the story. If I closed my eyes I wasn’t hearing a teenager, I was hearing a very mature musician.”
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Indeed, Ingram does appear wise beyond his years. His debut album features Been Here Before (his grandmother having told him “he’d been here before”) while 662’s Too Young to Remember finds him stating: “When you see me play my guitar, you’re looking back a hundred years.” An old soul? So it seems. “I was mentored by older people who helped me with my songwriting and playing,” says Ingram. “And I didn’t want to sing the same old ‘My baby left me’ stuff. Blues allows me plenty of scope to write on all kinds of things.”
Another Life Goes By on 662 cries out for change against racism, police brutality and violence and Mississippi Mix finds Big KRIT (“A great local rapper”) dropping rhymes while Kingfish plays stinging blues licks. “Blues isn’t just a guy with a guitar,” says Ingram, “it’s a feeling, and rap can be blues. See, blues is the foundation of so much American music – jazz and soul and rock and rap – but people tend to narrow it down to a guy with a guitar. I might be a guy with a guitar but it’s more than just this.”
Speaking of guys with guitars, 89-year-old blues great Buddy Guy has mentored Ingram since he was teenager. “Being with Mr Guy is like being with my grandfather – he shares a lot of wisdom.” Fittingly, Sinners finishes with Guy and Ingram playing together, the veteran and the newbie of African American blues providing the film with both a coda and a sense of continuity. “Sinners was a blast,” says Ingram. “It feels like that movie came out at the right time; blues and struggle and Clarksdale.”
If the Kingfish has travelled a long way from Mississippi’s juke joints, he’s determined to take his contemporaries with him, recently launching his own label, Red Zero Records. “There’s always been talent playing blues,” says Ingram, “but often they got the wrong deal – or no deal – so with Red Zero I want to help get them heard.
“Blues today ain’t just me, no sir,” says Ingram. “Plenty of us are out there.”
Hard Road is released on Red Zero Records. Christone “Kingfish” Ingram tours the UK from 18 to 23 November.
