On tour
Every date the ticketer lists, worldwide · venue time
TicketsMusic · CAChristone Kingfish Ingram the Hard Road TourMassey Hall · TorontoTicketsMusic · USChristone IngramElectric City · BuffaloTicketsMusic · USChristone "Kingfish" Ingram - The Hard Road TourRoxian Theatre Presented By Citizens · McKees RocksTicketsMusic · USChristone IngramIntersection - Elevation · Grand RapidsTicketsMusic · USChristone IngramTurner Hall Ballroom · MilwaukeeTicketsMusic · USChristone "Kingfish" Ingram: The Hard Road TourThe Ritz Ybor · TampaTicketsMusic · USChristone "Kingfish" Ingram- The Hard Road TourSeminole Center · ImmokaleeTicketsMusic · USChristone 'Kingfish' Ingram - The Hard Road TourCulture Room · Ft LauderdaleTicketsMusic · USChristone IngramRadio Room · GreenvilleTicketsMusic · USChristone “Kingfish” Ingram - The Hard Road TourThe Signal - Concert Hall · Chattanoogafrom USD 0Music · USChristone IngramManchester Music Hall · LexingtonTicketsMusic · USChristone “Kingfish” Ingram - The Hard Road TourManchester Music Hall · Lexingtonfrom USD 50.82Music · USChristone IngramVariety Playhouse · AtlantaTicketsListen
Top tracks on Spotify · SoundCloud
The profile · researched 9 October 2026
Kingfish at 27: the Clarksdale kid who now runs the label
Christone "Kingfish" Ingram came out of the Delta Blues Museum's classroom, won a Grammy at 22, and now releases his own records on his own imprint. Hard Road Extended lands on 16 October 2026 while his touring year runs to Brazil in November.
Clarksdale, and the museum down the road
Christone Ingram was born in Clarksdale, Mississippi on 19 January 1999, into a family that already had a professional musician in it — his mother is a first cousin of Charley Pride. The blues reached him through a television set rather than a record collection: at around five he watched a PBS documentary about Muddy Waters with his father, and the interest stuck. The nickname arrived from a character in The Amos 'n' Andy Show.
What followed was unusually formal for a blues player of his generation. He went through the Delta Blues Museum's education programme in Clarksdale, taught by Bill "Howl-N-Mad" Perry and Richard "Daddy Rich" Crisman. He started on drums at six, moved to bass, then to guitar, and was already taking paid gigs by seventh grade. That grounding explains a lot about how he plays now — the time feel of someone who sat behind a kit first, and a vocabulary learned in a room where the local lineage was the syllabus.
He left Mississippi for Los Angeles around 2022, and has been direct about the trade-off involved. "Sometimes I miss the simplicity of Mississippi," he told Premier Guitar in November 2025. "But out here in California I definitely have more resources, more opportunities."
Debut, Grammy, and a live record from a London basement
His debut, Kingfish, came out on Alligator Records in 2019 and went to number one on Billboard's blues chart, taking three Blues Music Awards with it. The follow-up, 662, arrived in 2021 and won Best Contemporary Blues Album at the Grammys in 2022, when he was 22. In the same stretch he played alongside Buddy Guy and the Tedeschi Trucks Band, and opened for the Rolling Stones in Hyde Park in 2022.
The third release was the one that showed what the band could actually do without studio help. Live in London was recorded at The Garage in north London on 6 June 2023 — 17 tracks running to one hour and 47 minutes, produced, recorded and mixed by Zach Allen. It reached streaming on 15 September 2023, CD on 13 October and vinyl on 10 November, again through Alligator, and was nominated for Best Contemporary Blues Album at the 66th Grammy Awards. The band that night was Deshawn Alexander on keyboards, Paul Rogers on bass and Christopher Black on drums. AllMusic called it a "beautifully recorded, incendiary gig"; Blues Blast Magazine described him as "one of the saviors of the blues".
Two of those players — Alexander and Black — are still with him three years later, which is part of why the current show sounds rehearsed rather than assembled.
Red Zero, and the record he was nervous about
In October 2024 Ingram launched his own label, Red Zero Records, in partnership with Exceleration Music, with himself as chief executive. He set it up with his manager, Ric Whitney, using Sam Cooke's SAR Records as the template, and the first signings were younger players rather than himself: Mathias Lattin and Dylan Triplett. "The bigger picture was just shining a light on a lot of young and old and middle-aged talent," he said.
Hard Road, released on 26 September 2025, was the first studio album to come out on it — and his first new studio set since 662 four years earlier. Eleven songs, 42 minutes and 46 seconds, all written or co-written by him, cut across three separate production camps: Tom Hambridge in Nashville handled five tracks, Patrick "GuitarBoy" Hayes in Los Angeles four, and Nick Goldston in Memphis two. By his own count the project involved 11 songwriters, 12 musicians and 11 studios in two states. "I was a little scared, making a project with all these different genres," he said, naming the vocal range and the writing as what he wanted on display.
The reception picked up on exactly that shift. Glide Magazine wrote that his guitar "still does plenty of talking, but we hear his true voice more than previously". Blues Rock Review pointed to the way he "seamlessly crosses" funk, soul, hip-hop, pop and jazz with more attention than before on singing. The lead single was "Voodoo Charm".
Where he stands in October 2026
At the Blues Music Awards in Memphis on 7 May 2026 he won Contemporary Blues Male Artist, beating a field that included Chris Cain, D.K. Harrell, Brandon Santini and Castro Coleman.
The commercial follow-through on Hard Road comes on 16 October 2026, when Red Zero issues Hard Road Extended — the original album plus four previously unreleased tracks: "The Chase", "Train", "(Still) Nothin' But Your Love" and "Two. Four. Eight", the last featuring drummer Yussef Dayes. "The Chase" went out first, in September. Ingram framed the whole record plainly: "This record comes from real-life reflection. I've been balancing fame, heartbreak, love, and relationships while trying to stay grounded." He appeared on CBS Saturday Morning's Saturday Sessions on 10 October.
The touring year around it has been long and mostly without a break. The Hard Road run opened in Australia on 25 February 2026 at The Triffid in Brisbane, with Ash Grunwald supporting, and took in Tyagarah, Canberra, Melbourne's Forum, his first-ever Adelaide show at Hindley Street Music Hall and the Enmore Theatre in Sydney by 6 March. North America has occupied the autumn: two nights at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York on 2 and 3 October, then Montréal, Ottawa, Massey Hall in Toronto on 10 October, Buffalo, McKees Rocks, Grand Rapids and Milwaukee. November runs through Florida, Greenville, Chattanooga, Lexington and Variety Playhouse in Atlanta on the 15th, before the Best of Blues and Rock festival in São Paulo on 21 November on a bill with Eddie Vedder, Roger Daltrey and Chris Isaak. The Legendary Rhythm & Blues Cruise follows on 31 January 2027, and Big Blues Bender in Las Vegas in September.
The stage, and what has changed on it
The Hard Road set has settled into a fixed shape. Across the 38 full setlists logged from the tour's 83 shows, the pattern is 11 songs and one encore: "Midnight Heat" has opened 34 of them, "662" has closed the main set 28 times, and "Long Distance Woman" has taken the encore slot 26 times. In between sit "Fresh Out", "Voodoo Charm", "Not Gonna Lie", "Mississippi Night", "Rock & Roll", "Bad Like Me" and "Outside of This Town", with Michael Burks's "Empty Promises" the one regular cover. Solos are not mapped out — "as far as soloing goes, it's all improv," he said in 2025 — so the running order is stable while the length of any given night is not.
The staging is a four-piece and no more: Ingram on a signature Fender Telecaster Deluxe or a Gibson ES-335, Deshawn Alexander on keys, Christopher Black on drums, Randy Stevens on bass. No horns, no screens, nothing to hide behind.
What reviewers have noted in 2026 is the talking. At the Celebrity Theatre in Phoenix on 17 September, Fred Kuhlman counted 13 songs over nearly two hours and several standing ovations, with Ingram telling stories between numbers, running a call-and-response on one tune and playing part of another from inside the audience — at one point sitting down next to a punter. Kuhlman compared his phrasing to B.B. King's and reckoned the live "Bad Like Me" "sounded so much better live than the album cut". Support that night was the local band The Sugar Thieves, fronted by Meridith Moore; local openers rather than a fixed touring act have been the norm across the North American leg.
The show, now
A Hard Road show in 2026 is a four-piece doing 11 songs and an encore, typically running a little under two hours — 13 songs across nearly two at the Celebrity Theatre in Phoenix on 17 September. It opens almost every night with "Midnight Heat", closes the main set on "662" and encores on "Long Distance Woman", with Michael Burks's "Empty Promises" the standing cover and the solos improvised rather than arranged, so the running order is fixed while the running time is not. Staging is minimal: Ingram on a signature Telecaster Deluxe or an ES-335, Deshawn Alexander on keys, Christopher Black on drums, Randy Stevens on bass, no horns and no video. The change recent reviews keep flagging is how much he now talks — stories between songs, a call-and-response, and a walk out into the seats to play from among the audience. Openers are mostly local: The Sugar Thieves in Phoenix, Ash Grunwald across the Australian dates in February and March 2026.
Researched from en.wikipedia.org · en.wikipedia.org · en.wikipedia.org · premierguitar.com · gratefulweb.com · bluesrockreview.com · bluesrockreview.com · beneathadesertsky.com
Pictures
Photographs from Wikimedia Commons, credited
Rory Doyle · CC BY-SA 4.0
Paul Natkin · CC BY-SA 4.0
