Blues rocker Samantha Fish says she “didn’t know what [she] was doing” when she made Girls With Guitars alongside Cassie Taylor and Dani Wilde in 2011. The same might be said of the albums’ producers, who probably should’ve known better by then.
When Wynonna Judd released her hit song of the same name in 1994, the guitars-are-for-boys trope was maybe not so tired. Thirty years later, Fish is part of the reason it’s hopefully ancient history.
Fish will take The Jefferson Theater stage on August 30 in the wake of 2023’s critically acclaimed Death Wish Blues, which earned the artist/singer-songwriter/guitarist her first Grammy nomination earlier this year. A collaboration with punk rocker Jesse Dayton, Death Wish Blues was nominated for Best Contemporary Blues Album and sat at No. 1 on the Billboard blues chart for three straight weeks.
“I really hadn’t collaborated since Girls With Guitars,” Fish says. “Now that I have some experience, coming back and doing this with Jesse … you learn to take ‘no’ out of your vocabulary. Even if it is something that is a complete departure from you as a singular artist, you say, ‘I can try that.’”
Fish grew up in Missouri and began learning the guitar at age 15, essentially teaching herself, with family and friends showing her tricks here and there. Without any formal lessons, she listened to classic rock—AC/DC, Guns N’ Roses, Tom Petty—and learned to pick out the riffs by ear. She began writing songs in her late teens, citing Tom Waits and Leonard Cohen as central influences, and found gigs by cold-calling bars.
“Blues was all of my favorite musicians’ favorite music,” Fish says. “So I was just digging backwards and going through the list of all the great traditional blues artists.”
Fish has produced an album every two years since 2009, when she recorded Live Bait with what was then known as the Samantha Fish Blues Band. The guitarist began attracting high praise in 2019, when she made the first of three albums, Kill or Be Kind, on Rounder Records. Produced by Grammy winner Scott Billington, Kill or Be Kind landed on album review outlet AllMusic’s list of editors’ “Favorite Blues Albums.” Fish’s next solo effort, 2021’s Faster, received similar critical acclaim.
Death Wish Blues was born when, after many years of discussing a side project, Fish and her manager decided to approach Dayton, whose resumé includes recording with Johnny Cash and Waylon Jennings, touring with seminal punk band X, and working with Rob Zombie on horror film soundtracks.
Produced by Jon Spencer of The Jon Spencer Blues Explosion, Death Wish Blues attracted not only the attention of the Grammy committee, but also two of Fish’s idols. Eric Clapton invited her to perform at his 2023 Crossroads Guitar Festival in Los Angeles, and GNR guitarist Slash brought Fish on for a run during his S.E.R.P.E.N.T. tour earlier this year.
Now onto her own Bulletproof tour, Fish says she’s finally able to ruminate on her full career and focus on her growing canon. “This is the first time I’ve been on tour without a new record,” she says. On August 30, that means Charlottesville fans will get to see the musician revisit older material and dig into unique covers, along with adapting songs from Death Wish Blues to arrangements sans Dayton.
“It is weird, your relationship with songs over the years,” Fish says. “I will hear some things that I did and cringe—like, ‘what the fuck was I thinking?’—but then other things will hit differently. Here I am years later, and I’ll find I wrote about something I’m just now experiencing. It’s a refreshing look.”
While Fish shakes up the old and new arrangements, she’s also eyeing her next record; after all, she’s never gone more than two years without recording. If her luck holds, she says she’ll be back in the studio sometime during the Bulletproof tour. “We’re aiming for spring or summer, but every time I verbalize it, it doesn’t happen,” she says.
What that record will be, Fish has yet to decide. She’s come a long way since Girls With Guitars, and she says part of the evolution happens all the way up to the time when she steps into the studio with her band. By way of example, Fish says she and Dayton originally conceived of the decidedly roots-driven Death Wish Blues as a “punk rock side project.”
“Talking about things doesn’t necessarily guarantee what they will be,” she says.
What Fish does know is that she plans to make music for a long time to come. “I don’t know what else I would be doing. I don’t have any other skills,” she laughs. “I love playing music, and there’s a little ecosystem built into what we’re doing. We’ve got the train rolling here.”