From gospel to the blues and a little bit of TV stardom, as well

Castro Coleman, aka Mr. Sipp The Mississippi Blues Child, started playing the guitar at age 6. After 22 years as a successful gospel musician, the McComb, Mississippi, native decided to take a new route and sink his teeth into the blues.

In 2012, he began his new life as Mr. Sipp and since then has won several music awards and even played the young B.B. King in the CMT series Sun Records. The show tells the story of the famed Memphis recording studio of the same name, and Coleman played the legendary blues man and one of his idols on three episodes.

We talked to Mr. Sipp ahead of his scheduled performance at the Baton Rouge Blues Festival.

How did you decide to make the switch from playing gospel music for so long to playing the blues?

I came off the road doing gospel music, and I had felt like I had done everything there and had been everywhere. I was starting to see the same thing over and over and over. I had peaked out. So I took two years off and realized how much I was a road rat, but I didn’t want to go back [to] doing the same thing. Blues was the closest thing to gospel that I could really feel.

Who were some of the blues influences that shaped your sound?

I call my sound the Mississippi River blues, which is my own style. You’ll hear B.B. [King], you’ll hear some Stevie Ray [Vaughan], Muddy Waters. I started perfecting me and my feelings and my style based off of what I learned from these guys. It comes from my heart so it can reach the heart. My music is joyful … and has a lot of humor. Music gives me life, so I dance. It’s like when you’re in school and you wait all day for recess to play—that’s what performing on stage is for me. My recess.

How would you describe the difference between Louisiana swamp blues, Mississippi blues and your own style?

Louisiana swamp blues is a mix of the second line, the zydeco vibrations, and I so love it. I didn’t know anything about zydeco until I started playing blues and it blew my mind. There’s a song on my new album … that has that zydeco bounce to it, and I’m going to play it for the festival. I had always felt like I didn’t know where I had been missing it, but being on the gospel side of things for so long I had never been exposed. As for Mississippi blues, it’s more straight ahead, more ‘Delta.’ Big sounds from the drums and horns that fill a room. What I’ve done is I’ve merged the happy New Orleans, the bouncy Louisiana sound with the Delta Mississippi sounds and call it the Mississippi River blues. You know, the river separates us, but the water from Louisiana flows into the water from Mississippi. It’s a connection of some kind, and I’m just a little fish swimming in that water.

This article was originally published in the April 2017 issue of 225 Magazine.