Mississippi blues guitarist known as Kingfish swimming into Lexington

As our conversation commences, Christone “Kingfish” Ingram is — where else? — on the road. Specifically, the vanguard guitarist is somewhere between Nashville and Memphis.

The night before at Nashville’s famed Ryman Auditorium, Ingram was part of the Tele Town Concert, a star-packed performance honoring the Telecaster guitar. The guest list? Just Brad Paisley, Jack White, Billy F. Gibbons, Tommy Emmanuel, among many others. Ingram established his own brand of soul, funk and pop invested blues by digging into a cover of Prince’s “Cream.”

The destination of Memphis for The Blues Music Awards would prove just as celebratory with Ingram taking home honors (his latest in a long list from the event) for Contemporary Blues Male Artist.

But Ingram, however gracious he is for such attention, remains firmly focused on the road still in front of him.

“The key for me is I’m always growing,” Ingram said by phone during his travels, “I’m always trying to be better. I always try to do better. That’s how my career has been going. As far as my music goes, I always try to be better than the day before.”

In well under a decade, Ingram has become one of the most heralded blues artists of his generation. As a guitarist, he performs with atomic level intensity while utilizing a musical vocabulary that borrows extensively from rock, soul and, on his fourth and newest album, “Hard Road,” generous hints of R&B and even pop. Yet, with his titanic guitar sound, the resulting music remains firmly encased in the blues.

“Definitely,” Ingram concurs. “The blues is the roots. I feel like there are many shades of blues in everything I do. I’m told that from the rock crowd, from the soul lovers. The blues is always going to be there. It’s always the foundation for me.”

Ingram hails from Clarksdale, Miss., one of the Southern epicenters of the blues. The Delta region of Mississippi it encompasses gave the world such blues giants as Muddy Waters, John Lee Hooker and Son House. The region’s inspirations are ripe in Ingram’s music, too. He titled his Grammy-winning 2021 sophomore album “662” after Clarksdale’s area code.

Among the Southern greats who previously followed a similar path as Ingram is guitarist Buddy Guy. Hailing from Louisiana, Guy moved to Chicago in his 20s and became one of the beacons in the city’s booming electric blues scene of the late 1950s.

At 89, Guy stands as one of the last original Chicago blues giants with a career noted for, among many other triumphs, recognizing the potential of younger artists. Among them was Ingram. Guy lent his guitar and vocal vigor to Ingram’s 2019 debut album, “Kingfish.”

“My relationship with Mr. Guy started, I want to say, around 2017. It all started with my first record. He helped me out with that, then I went out on the road with him. He took me under his wing. It’s really been a great experience. I’ve learned so much from him, directly and indirectly. He’s like the grandfather I never had.”

Ingram and Guy teamed again when filmmaker Ryan Coogler enlisted both — along with an all-star lineup of roots music pioneers that included Brittany Howard, Bobby Rush, Rhiannon Giddens and Cedric Burnside — for the soundtrack of his Clarksdale-set horror film “Sinners.” Most of the recruits then brought the “Sinners” music to surreal, cross-generational life in a performance of “I Lied to You” at this year’s Oscars ceremony.

“Number one, it was a great experience,” Ingram said of the “Sinners” association. “It was my first movie situation, Shout out to Ryan Coogler for getting me working on a film about the blues. Whatever keeps the blues going is a great thing.

“Number two was at the Oscars. All that was beautiful, as well, recreating that scene and getting to do it with some of my blues O.G.s, like Bobby Rush, Buddy Guy, Eric Gales and a host of talented creatives. It was a wonderful thing. It was a wonderful thing for the blues.”

Cornerstone artists like Guy aren’t the only artistic inspirations that have helped forge Ingram’s massive musical profile. Featured on his extraordinary 2023 concert album “Live in London” — and, subsequently, in many of his performances since then — is a tune called “Empty Promises” by Michael Burks. The late Arkansas-rooted guitarist possessed a sense of blues dynamics that could shift swiftly from a swelter to a storm (as shown during “Empty Promises.”) He died at age 54 with a devout but modest-sized fanbase.

“Michael Burks ... wow, what can I say? He was a powerhouse, just one of the greatest modern blues guitarists that we had. He didn’t quite cross over, but the ones who knew him knew what kind of a talent he was. He was one of my favorite guitar players in my years of coming up and learning, Sadly, he passed away in 2012 before I was able to make a name for myself and tell him how much he really meant to me. So me covering ‘Empty Promises’ is just my way of telling him I love him and showing my appreciation for him.”

Ingram’s original music (he writes or co-writes most of the songs he records and performs) expanded its stylistic breadth on “Hard Road.” Following three albums for the popular modern blues record label Alligator, “Hard Road” is the first recording for his own Red Zero imprint label. “I was just trying to experiment with that record, just trying to do some different things. I was always told that I had the potential to do other styles of music, that I had the potential to play the blues and add in more modern styles of music together. That was what I was pretty much trying to do with the r&b, the soul vibes while also trying to showcase my voice rather than my guitar playing.”

But Red Zero is not a vanity project. Along with his own music, Ingram hopes to cultivate the talents of younger artists, much in the way Guy did with him. This will be a niftier generational feat for Ingram, though. He is only 27 himself.

“That was pretty much the aim when my manager and I had the idea for the label,” Ingram said. “I’ll look out for myself, for sure, but the main goal was to give an opportunity to lot of overlooked talent in the blues base.”

Projects like “Sinners” and Red Zero, along with an eye to future recordings that may include an acoustic blues album and a gospel work, have taken Ingram far from home. Today, he lives in Los Angeles. But the music and inspirations of the Mississippi Delta and his Clarksdale heritage remain vital.

“I’ll always be a Mississippi boy.”

Christone “Kingfish” Ingram

When: May 13 at 8 p.m.

Where: Manchester Music Hall, 899 Manchester St.

Tickets: $16.12-$32.41 at manchestermusichall.com