Buffalo Nichols

“When Mississippi’s Fat Possum Records signed Carl “Buffalo” Nichols, the storied label behind the late-career resurgences of R. L. Burnside and Junior Kimbrough hadn’t taken on a new solo blues artist in nearly two decades. But that’s the enthusiasm the Texas-born, Milwaukee-raised Nichols brings to the table. He grew up listening to his parents’ Robert Cray and B. B. King records and started playing guitar at a young age, but it was a trip in his early twenties through West Africa and Europe, where he discovered Ukrainian and Carpathian folk styles, that helped inspire a renewed interest in American blues and folk traditions. “I wanted to reimagine what the blues would sound like if it hadn’t lost its cultural importance for so long,” he says. “It just became less interesting and less progressive, and there’s less risk taken by the artists, and I feel like that’s the part that’s missing.” His self-titled 2021 debut explores his homeland’s country-blues idiom without treating it like a relic or curiosity, but rather as a vital document of life in twenty-first-century America.”
— JB, THE NEW GUITAR GREATS, April-May 2023, Garden and Gun Magazine

Since his earliest infatuations with guitar, Buffalo Nichols has asked himself the same question: How can I bring the blues of the past into the future? After cutting his teeth between a Baptist church and bars in Milwaukee, it was a globetrotting trip through West Africa and Europe during a creative down period that began to reveal the answer.

For Nichols, performing the blues is both a progressive and a traditional effort. He says that traditional acoustic blues and folk/roots music can be made new by using today’s technology – just as bluesmen of the past have used technology to develop new genres such as Chicago blues, or electric blues, which led to rock & roll.

“Music is all about feeling,” according to Nichols. “You can use older forms of the blues but the important thing is to really put your soul into it. That’s what carries it forward. The vast majority of people tend to just go for the surface level, but there’s just so much beyond that.”

While acknowledging the joy, exuberance, and triumph contained in the blues, Nichols looks intently at the genre’s origins, which harken back to complicated and dire circumstances for Black Americans. With this in mind, Nichols says there is a missing link, which he’s often used as a compass: Black stories aren’t being told responsibly in the genre anymore. To begin changing that, Buffalo Nichols tells his own story in the right way.

“Part of my intent, making myself more comfortable with this release (his self-titled debut album), is putting more Black stories into the genres of folk and blues,” Nichols explains. “Listening to this record, I want more Black people to hear themselves in this music that is truly theirs.”