Tab Benoit

electric blues · blues · roots

Tab Benoit is a blues guitarist and singer from Houma, Louisiana, born 17 November 1967. His playing joins Delta blues to the swamp and soul blues of south Louisiana, and his models include Albert Collins, Albert King and Jimi Hendrix. He came up as a teenager sitting in at Tabby Thomas's Blues Box in Baton Rouge alongside players such as Raful Neal, formed his first trio in 1987, and worked Baton Rouge and New Orleans clubs before taking the band national in 1991. His debut, Nice and Warm, appeared on Justice Records in 1992. He recorded for Vanguard in the late 1990s, including These Blues Are All Mine, then for Telarc through the 2000s, a run that produced Wetlands, Whiskey Store, Sea Saint Sessions, Fever for the Bayou and Medicine. Medicine brought three Blues Music Awards in 2012, among them Contemporary Blues Male Artist and Contemporary Blues Album, and he has twice taken the B.B. King Entertainer of the Year award, in 2007 and 2012. He plays a stock 1972 Fender Telecaster Thinline. Louisiana's disappearing coastline is his other long-running subject: he founded Voice of the Wetlands in the early 2000s to campaign for coastal restoration, assembled the Voice of the Wetlands All-Stars from Louisiana musicians, and was named Conservationist of the Year in the 2009 Governor's Awards. He now records for Whiskey Bayou Records, the label he set up in 2017 with his manager Rueben Williams, and runs a studio and music cafe in Houma. I Hear Thunder, released 29 August 2024 and his first new studio album in fourteen years, was produced, mixed and mastered by Benoit at Whiskey Bayou Studios with drummer Terence Higgins and bassist Corey Duplechin, guitarist and co-writer Anders Osborne, and George Porter Jr. of the Meters on three tracks. It reached number one on Billboard's blues chart and won Rock Blues Album at the 2025 Blues Blast Music Awards, where Benoit also took Blues Band, Male Blues Artist and Electric Guitarist of the Year. He tours heavily, at points up to 250 dates a year, currently under the Soul of the Swamp banner.

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