Greater Ozarks Blues Festival 2010
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Grady Champion

The second act Friday is the International Blues Challenge winner, the Grady Champion Band. Grady Champion is a young blues singer and harmonica player from Canton, Mississippi. Grady simply blew away the competition at this year's International Blues Challenge in Memphis, Tennessee. Grady and his band bested over 150 blues bands from all around the world in the annual competition hosted by The Blues Foundation. Grady’s shows at The 930 Club in Jackson, Mississippi are standing room only, and Grady has been a repeat performer at the prestigious Chicago Blues Festival.

He started performing at the age of eight in the Church Choir where his love for music began. In 1994, Grady won the McDonald’s Music Fest with his performance of “Damn Right, I’ve Got the Blues” and brought the audience of 10,000 to their feet. Through the years he has developed into not only a great singer and harmonica player, but also an innovative songwriter and producer.

Grady has been favorably compared to the legendary Sonny Boy Williamson, and people can hear exactly why on his Shanachie debut Payin' for My Sins, which was released back in August 1999. The album included a version of "Don't Start Me to Talkin'" that really shows Grady's high-energy singing and harmonica playing. The album included an update of the traditional blues lament "Goin' Down Slow", this one with an AIDS parable -- a hard-bitten vignette of modern life.

Grady’s revved-up, soulful vocalizing and the charm and insight he brings to his songwriting in numbers like the campy "My Rooster Is King" and the classic-sounding tale of infidelity "You Got Some Explaining to Do" (co-written by his producer Dennis Walker, who helped Robert Cray reach national fame) mark Grady as an important new talent.

In Blues Access, Dave McIntyre wrote “On Saturday's midnight cruise, I was immediately drawn to the upper deck, where I found Hawkeye Herman and T.J. Wheeler, two great pickers, engaged with a younger harpist from Mississippi named Grady Champion, exchanging songs and doing requests. Grady's voice not only made me think of Robert Johnson, but the way he worked the crowd seemed as though Johnson's, or Luther Allison's, fire and raw sense of what the audience needs was being born inside him."

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Bernard Allison    Super Chikan    Grady Champion    Homemade Jamz    Barbara Blue    Marquise Knox   The Bel Airs   Tripwire

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