* Bull Run Concert Series: Samantha Fish

03-22-2014

Have you been following Samantha's career? If not, you should take notice now, she is all over the place, pouring her heart out in her music, her shows, backing her favorites, never forgetting her fans. She is the whole package with icing on the cake. Kansas City-based Samantha Fish has been on a major roll ever since she teamed up with Cassie Taylor and Dani Wilde on Ruf’s 2011 release, Girls with Guitars. Fueled by the trio’s Blues Caravan tour of Europe and the U.S., she created an international buzz in the blues world. Later that same year she recorded "Runaway," her debut on Ruf, which mixed gutsy riff-blues rockers like “Down In The Swamp” with the mellow small-hours jazz of “Feelin’ Alright,” and earned her a string of rave reviews and radio airplay, climaxed by her winning the Blues Music Award (BMA) for “Best New Artist Debut” in 2012. Earlier this year Samantha joined labelmateDevon Allman for a sultry duet of the Tom Petty classic, “Stop Draggin’ My Heart Around.” 
Rather than trying to duplicate her first success, on her latest release, 'Black Wind Howlin',' Samantha re-defines her sound throughout the tracks. She can be brutally rocking on cuts like the tour bus snapshot of “Miles To Go” (“Twelve hours to Reno/ten hours til the next show”), the swaggering “Sucker Born” (“Vegas left me weary, LA bled me dry/skating on fumes as I crossed the Nevada line…”) and the venomous “Go To Hell” (“Oh, this ain’t my first rodeo/You hit yourself a dead end/Your voodoo eyes, ain’t gonna cast a spell/So you can go to hell!”).
It wasn’t that long ago that a teenaged Samantha Fish showed up at her local Kansas City blues club, Knuckleheads Saloon, and began soaking up the sounds of visiting modern blues guitar masters like Mike Zito and Tab Benoit, then going back to ’80s heroes like Stevie Ray Vaughan and following the lineage to the pre-war Delta masters. “I fell in love with it,” she told Premier Guitar of her growing passion for the form, “and started doing my homework by listening to the old guys like Son House and Skip James.” With those influences as her template, Samantha incorporated the sounds of the classic rock of The Rolling Stones, Tom Petty, The Black Crowes and even a tip of the hat to Heart, in putting together a sound that would become her own. “It’s all the sounds I grew up with,” she explained at the time, “with my own spin.”
It's been a wild ride for Samantha Fish and she has proven her staying power every inch of the way. I don't have to tell you to get here early for this one. You already know it will be crazy and fun.