In the summer of 2013, a skeptical Buddy Guy called a 24-year-old guitarist from Missouri onto his stage, watched her tear into the strings, and told the crowd that talent like that made him want to play all night. This episode traces how Samantha Fish, born in January 1989 in Kansas City to a church choir director and a guitar-playing father, started out as a drummer, switched to guitar at 15, absorbed Stevie Ray Vaughan, Bonnie Raitt, Tom Petty and the Rolling Stones’ Sticky Fingers, and earned her education sitting in with touring bands at the Knuckleheads Saloon.

We examine the counterintuitive decision to launch her career with the self-produced 2009 live album Live Bait, the Ruf Records Girls with Guitars tour with Cassie Taylor and Dani Wilde, the Mike Zito-produced Runaway and her 2012 Blues Music Award for Best New Artist. Then we follow her restless run through Black Wind Howlin’, Wild Heart, Chills & Fever and Belle of the West, her move to Rounder Records for Kill or Be Kind, the pop-produced Faster featuring Tech N9ne, and the Grammy-nominated albums Death Wish Blues with Jesse Dayton and Paper Doll.

• Why a live album is a resume built on execution in the blues world, even if it would be a mistake in pop
• How years behind a drum kit shaped the driving rhythmic attack of her picking hand
• Using geography as an instrument: Detroit garage grit, Nashville storytelling and Deep South acoustic pockets with Luther Dickinson
• Why a rapid-fire hip-hop verse and a blues guitar riff lock into the same rhythmic pocket on the song Loud
• Back-to-back Grammy nominations for Best Contemporary Blues Album in 2024 and 2026