Christone "Kingfish" Ingram & Samantha Fish with Mathias Lattin - Gone Fishing Tour

TempleLive, Fort Smith, Arkansas, May 17, 2025; Cain's Ballroom, Tulsa, Oklahoma, May 18, 2025

The territory bands and the venues where they appeared never went away; they just changed names and, sometimes, locations. TempleLive is a new venue franchise using Freemason Temples in Cleveland, Columbus, Wichita, Peoria, and Fort Smith for performances. Each venue has an 1,800 to 2,000 seat capacity, offering smaller bands some fine digs in which to play. Then there are the established venues, like Cain’s Ballroom in Tulsa, OK, which has been active as a music venue since the 1920s. They remain a mainstay for regional music. My wife and I attended the same shows in Fort Smith and, the next night, in Tulsa, following Christone "Kingfish" Ingram, Samantha Fish, and Mathias Lattin on their "Gone Fishin’" Tour of the Midwest.

These artists play music influenced by the blues. Clarksdale, MS-native Kingfish Ingram picks up where B.B. King left off, playing straight 12-bar blues and blues ballads, flowing naturally through Robert Cray and beyond. His arrangements are precise, mixing in just enough funk to almost reach out of rhythm & blues into the proto-hip hop crowd, who are coming back around to their R&B roots. Kansas City-born Samantha Fish plays a brand of blues-rock that she has largely created. Fish has shared an enormous spotlight with other female guitar-slingers like Joanne Shaw Taylor, Ally Venable, Sue Foley, Ana Popović, and others who came before and after her. Her songwriting is solid and her chops sure. Mathias Lattin, the newcomer here, hails from Houston, TX. His blues extend both Ingram and Fish into highly arranged music with fresh riffs and melodies with refined steel.

Lattin opened both shows with brief sets presenting material from his most recent recording, Up Next (VizzTone Records, 2024), a simmering collection of post-Robert Cray meta music, keeping the architecture of the blues while forcing the genre to fill hyper-stylistic spaces not yet realized. His set closer, the only non-original song, was an inventive treatment of Jimi Hendrix’s "Little Wing" from that guitarist’s album Axis: Bold as Love (Reprise Records, 1968). Lattin sings the first verse immediately with no introduction, surrounding the familiar melody and words with new filigree lead-ins and outros. He deftly develops dramatic tension, released in the familiar minor blues scale solo, closing his show on a high note. Kudos to Lattin for not choosing "Voodoo Chile."

Samantha Fish has opened each of the last five shows I have attended with a blistering cover of MC5’s 1969 recording "Kick Out The Jams." It provides the singer a solid position from which to guide her show. She includes three more mainstays: "Bulletproof" (from Kill Or Be Kind (Rounder, 2019)) and "Black Wind Howlin’" (from Black Wind Howlin’ (Ruf Records, 2013)). Fish added a corrosive reading of Screamin’ Jay Hawkins’s "I Put A Spell On You" as a cover (as she has with Black Sabbath’s "War Pigs" and, most recently, Neil Young’s "Don’t Let It Bring You Down"), and it stuck as a showstopper.

The rest of Fish’s set comprised selections from her new recording, Paper Doll (Rounder, 2025). The solid title piece anchors that album and, in concert, parlays into the thunderstorm blues "I’m Done Runnin’" and the sledgehammer rock of "Lose You." "Fortune Teller" brings in the swamp darkness, relieved by the slow-cooked pastoral "Sweet Southern Sound." Fish has fully established her performance ritual, and she aims to follow the direction that brought her to the top of what has become a sizeable list of blues women.

Like the other performers, Christone "Kingfish" Ingram performed the same setlist at both the Fort Smith and Tulsa shows. Kingfish plays a very refined type of blues, an order of magnitude beyond the smooth B.B. King and T-Bone Walker injected into Muddy Waters’ Chicago Mojo. There are bits of Sly and the Family Stone, and War (pre- and post-Eric Burdon). "Fresh Out" is a shiny upgrade to the "…woke-up-this-morning," "…down-on-my-luck" blues, fun and fresh, sporting a hot guitar solo. Ingram’s cover of Michael Burks’s "Empty Promises" proves an effective vehicle for the guitarist mid-set. Ingram ends the evening with Samantha Fish and Mathias Lattin on his barn-burning closer, "Long Distance Woman." It was a great way to start summer.

Setlist

Mathias Lattin: “Cadillac Assembly Line;” “Lose Some Weight;” “Party;” “All On My Own;” “Little Wing.”

Samantha Fish: “Kick Out The Jams;” Paper Doll;” “I’m Done Runnin’;” “I Put A Spell On You?;” “Lose You;” “Sweet Southern Sounds;” “Bulletproof;” “Fortune Teller; ” “Don’t Say It;” “Black Wind Howlin’.”

Christone “Kingfish” Ingram: “Midnight Heat;” “Fresh Out;” “Hard Times;” “Empty Promises;” “Not Gonna Lie;” “Mississippi Night;” “Long Distance Woman.”

Musicians

Mathias Lattin: Mathias Lattin: guitar, vocals; Jesse Gomez: bass; Nick Andres: drums; Shawn Allen: keyboards.

Samantha Fish: Samantha Fish: vocals, guitar; Ron Johnson: bass; Jamie Douglass: drums; Mickey Finn: keyboards.

Christone “Kingfish” Ingram: Christone “Kingfish” Ingram: guitar, vocals; Paul Rogers: bass; Christopher Black: drums; Deshawn Alexander: keyboards.