Redefining the genre – The blues innovator is now a staunch advocate for Louisiana music traditions

Growing up surrounded by many Louisiana blues legends and avid blues fans who frequented Tabby’s Blues Box and Heritage Hall—a Baton Rouge mecca for south Louisiana swamp blues run for a quarter-century by his illustrious father, “Rockin’” Tabby Thomas—bluesman Chris Thomas King quite naturally began his music career in open rebellion. He was determined to change and update the sound of Louisiana music traditions that he’d inherited. Crowning a recording career that kicked off in the mid-1980s, the young musical prodigy released 21st Century Blues … From Da Hood in 1995, a milestone recording that combined sampling, rap and hip-hop rhythms with searing electric blues licks to create the first fully realized blues concept album of the electronic era.

But then something unexpected happened. Playing early blues legend Tommy Johnson in the Coen Brothers’ 2000 film O Brother, Where Art Thou?, King was suddenly confronted with mainstream success, appearing on the film’s bestselling soundtrack and performing on related concert tours. Following close on the heels of O Brother, King also portrayed the sidewalk bluesman and preacher Blind Willie Johnson in German director Wim Wenders’ The Soul of a Man and bandleader/R&B pioneer Lowell Fulson in the Ray Charles biopic Ray.

In less than a decade, the rebellious young innovator, forging a career now as musician, actor and film soundtrack composer, had not only established his credentials as a groundbreaking blues musician and cultural innovator, he also began reconsidering the critical role Louisiana’s blues traditions played in both his own achievements and in the evolution of 20th-century blues in general.

Musically, King’s journey can be heard on his most recent release Bona Fide, which mixes a deep respect and appreciation for cultural inheritance with lyrical, gently rendered vocals and the fierce passion of an unrepentant guitar slinger attacking each instrumental performance with full force, drawing on what has now become a broad and subtle palette of acoustic clarity and amplified guitar tones freely colored by electronic distortion. As a whole, Bona Fide serves up a tasty spread of soulful blues spiced with strains of country string bands, pile-driver Chicago blues bands and syncopated Stax-era R&B. The album’s closer, “The Wind Cries Mary” by Jimi Hendrix, sums it all up with driving force and floating delicacy riding on a substantial infrastructure of vocal and instrumental multi-layering.

The next step in his journey includes plans to publish an account of his life and changing perspective on the blues tradition through LSU Press, depicting at length what he considers a more accurate history of the blues that assigns a central role to Louisiana music in general and New Orleans music in particular. Citing the example of Shreveport native Huddie Ledbetter—a 1930s-1940s street singer and expert guitarist better known to music fans as the folk singer and blues originator Leadbelly—King says he believes Louisiana’s contributions to the birth and the evolution of the blues have been greatly undervalued. Instead, the focus is primarily on the Mississippi Delta region as “the home of the blues.”

“Both my research and personal experience tell me,” King explains, “that it’s more likely early jazz and blues migrated upriver from New Orleans to Natchez, Miss., where it was adapted for performance on solo guitar and imported into the Mississippi Delta.”

Following the book’s publication, King also plans to start a nonprofit foundation that will support and further illuminate arguments made in the book while shining a brighter spotlight on Louisiana’s early and ongoing contributions to blues history, marking yet another unexpected chapter in this blues innovator’s singular career.

Find out more about Chris Thomas King and listen to tracks off his latest album at christhomasking.com.