The exposure Chris Thomas King had in that environment growing up was invaluable in shaping his career, not only in musical inﬂuence but in understanding the music business. He played and toured with his dad and all the ﬁne musicians on that scene. He comes from a musical family and had the advantage of learning the ropes from his dad, Tabby Thomas, a locally prominent bluesman who owned a club called Tabby’s Blues Box. By now, he is all that and then some, a ﬁne bluesman and successful performer and hardly anyone can still muster the old critiques. Chris Thomas King just kept on rolling unperturbed, paying his dues and working hard.

This writer, a former DJ, distinctly recalls a particularly stinging criticism by an internationally famous bluesman who said “Iʼve got students who can play better than that.” He was marketed as the great young turk of the African-American blues, but his so-called peers didnʼt quite look at him as an equal. DJs and blues writers felt he just didnʼt have the chops yet to hold his own. Everybody recognized that he surely had plenty of talent and potential, but the widespread feeling was that he was too-soon-out-the-gate. When the young New Orleans bluesman ﬁrst appeared on the scene in the late 1980s, and through much of his early career in the 1990s, he was unceremoniously panned by the harsh blues world.

The Blues by Chris Thomas King