He showed versatility as the set went on, working in jazzy chromatic flourishes and switching for a couple of songs to Delta-style acoustic guitar, but the crowd went wildest whenever he built to a climax of blues-rock wailing. He favors physically heavy guitars and the warm sound of humbucker pickups, but the gear doesn’t matter nearly as much as his pillowy hands, mesmerizingly nimble and strong, which seem to engulf the instrument as they extract an astonishing sound from it. Hanging by a strap from his shoulder, his guitar looks like a toy. Kingfish is not tall, but he’s big, and just a couple of years ago he was even bigger - at least 440 pounds - to the point that it was easy to fear for his well-being when he walked onstage. Humane emotion suffuses his playing even at its most musically acrobatic, and he’s almost always telling you a story derived from the song’s lyrics, his own love affair with music, the trials and joys of his young life. Though guitar heroism often feels cold and self-regarding, obsessed with its own intent to blow you away, Kingfish’s command of tone, touch and phrasing comes across as not just confident but also confiding. The visible pleasure he takes in making music for a living offsets a deep substrate of melancholy, a quality of hurt, in that music. Kingfish, who wore faded jeans with colorful patches, a black jacket over a red Big Mad T-shirt, and untied buff-colored work boots, has a round, open face and a disarming stage presence, modest and earnest. The hard life and overlooked brilliance of Zane Campbell Out in the lobby before the show, I had overheard one long-haired dude saying to a fellow cool-nerd, “He’s, like, my age. The Berklee College of Music houses one of the planet’s greatest concentrations of high-end guitar freaks, and they were out in force to hear the 23-year-old phenom from the Mississippi Delta widely hailed as “the future of the blues.” The students in attendance made for a considerably younger turnout than a blues show typically draws. Just seconds into “She Calls Me Kingfish,” the opening song of his set at the Berklee Performance Center in Boston in March, fans were already well on their way up the stairway to guitar-solo heaven, nodding and smiling and shaking their heads in that mmh-mmh-mmm way that guitar freaks fall into when potent stuff starts flowing into their systems through their ears. Eyes shut and head thrown back in the emblematic pose of the guitar hero in ecstasy, he wrung screaming bent high notes and dense, fluid runs from his purple-and-black prototype Kingfish-model Fender.

Christone “Kingfish” Ingram was wailing on guitar.

Blues on the bridge 2021