The unexpected guitarist blues guitar hero Christone “Kingfish” Ingram calls a “prophet”
With his pioneering of Chicago-based soul music in the 1960s and ‘70s, Christone “Kingfish” Ingram would go as far as to call Curtis Mayfield a “prophet”.
Born in 1942, Mayfield first found success with vocal group The Impressions, before embarking on a solo career which would later spawn albums like his debut Curtis (1970), and the soundtrack to the 1972 movie Super Fly.
READ MORE: The iconic rock band Wolfgang Van Halen thinks should have their own “Mount Rushmore”
And it’s the latter which Kingfish cites as one of the six blues albums which influenced him most.
“Curtis Mayfield has to be here,” he tells Guitar.com in an interview. “Super Fly is an important album. I always say that Curtis Mayfield was a prophet. History repeats itself and he really prophesied a lot of what we are seeing today for sure man.
“Not only that but his black piano key tuning and his whole approach opening up the guitar to his melody and rhythm work. This record belongs here for sure. The title track says it all.”
And Kingfish isn’t the only one to rank Super Fly high on his list of top albums. In 2003, Rolling Stone placed the soundtrack at no. 72 in its 500 Greatest Albums of All Time list.
Curtis Mayfield suffered an accident in August 1990, in which lighting equipment fell on him during a live performance, leaving him paralysed from the neck down. He continued to compose and record, and later released his final album, New World Order, in 1996.
Prior to his death in 1999, Mayfield was the recipient of two Grammy awards, and was a double inductee into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.
While deeply rooted in the blues, Kingfish wouldn’t regard himself as a blues purist, he explains.
“I’ve always had a love/hate relationship with ‘purists’ of the genre,” he says. “And that’s simply because I jump back and forth – one day I’ll play traditional blues, the next I’m all rocked up and rocking out.
“But here’s the thing, I will play whatever the hell I want to play, how I want to play it. And not only that, I feel that it’s cool to showcase the influence of the blues as much as the language itself.”
He continues: “We all know that the blues is the roots – all these other sub-genres like soul, blues rock, rock ‘n’ roll, they’re all the branches. Ain’t nothing wrong with showing what the blues has influenced.
“I feel like the more I go out the box musically people will always be able to hear the foundation of the blues in my music because I will always have that no matter what I do. Even if I’m doing a pop record it’s going to have some blues in there somewhere because that’s where I come from.”
The post The unexpected guitarist blues guitar hero Christone “Kingfish” Ingram calls a “prophet” appeared first on Guitar.com | All Things Guitar.
Source: www.guitar-bass.net
