The Friday Peace: The Man They Call 'Kingfish'

Five years ago, Kingfish told me where he was headed. He was right. Here's your one quiet piece for the end of the week.

Christone Ingram is in guitar class at the Delta Blues Museum in Clarksdale when his teacher, Bill “Howl-N-Mad” Perry, decides on a name for him.

“My name was Kingfish because I reminded him of a character from an old sitcom,” Ingram recalled. “It wasn’t too much to be proud of.”

The character was George “Kingfish” Stevens, from The Amos ‘n’ Andy Show. The NAACP protested it after its television premiere for its crude distortion of Black culture. The name wasn’t meant as flattery. Ingram kept it anyway.

“’King’ was a nod to B.B.,” he said.

He takes the Amphitheater stage Sunday at 2 p.m. as part of the 49th Saratoga Jazz Festival at SPAC. In October 2021, when he was 22 and 662 had just come out, he talked about what the blues meant, why his friends could never understand why he’d chosen it, and whether the old guard had given him their blessing. The answers have since arrived.