Tab Benoit

With all of the makings of an American music icon, Tab Benoit has become one of the premier roots stylists of the century. Benoit grew up in Houma, Louisiana. A guitar player since his teenage years, he hung out at the Blues Box, a ramshackle music club and cultural center in nearby Baton Rouge run by guitarist Tabby Thomas. Playing guitar alongside Thomas, Raful Neal, Henry Gray and other high-profile regulars at the club, Benoit learned the blues first-hand from a faculty of living blues legends. He took his show on the road in the early ‘90s and hasn’t stopped since.

Benoit landed a recording contract with the tiny, Texas-based Justice Records and released a series of well-received recordings, beginning in 1992 with Nice and Warm. In 2007, Benoit won the dual awards of B.B. King Entertainer of the Year and Best Contemporary Male Performer at the Blues Music Awards in Memphis (formerly the W.C. Handy Awards). In 2006, he received a GRAMMY nomination for Best Traditional Blues Album for Brother to the Blues, a collaboration with Louisiana’s LeRoux.

His latest release Medicine, is Benoit’s seventh solo release on Telarc International, a division of Concord Music Group. This album showcases a lean, energetic young band, and vibe-wise it’s hipper and groovier than anything Benoit has ever done before.