“Those tubes need to be burning. As I put it to the band, I like to smell dinner cooking”: With his gourmet phrasing and R&B hot sauce, D.K. Harrell is the blues hero you need in your life right now

The modern blues scene is full of guitar players who represent the harder, more rocking side of the genre. But Louisiana-bred guitarist and frontman D.K. Harrell comes from a different school of blues, and he’s quick to separate himself from the pack.

“I’m trying to show people that it doesn’t have to be blues rock in order to be contemporary,” says Harrell, whose second album, Talkin’ Heavy, pulls more from the R&B side of the coin than blustery, rockin’ blues.

Just 10 seconds into the album’s lead song, A Little Taste, Harrell makes his mark by wringing every ounce of emotion from a single note before extending the thought with the first of many lyrical guitar solos.

His preference of saying more with less is a vivid reminder of legends like B.B. King, one of Harrell’s biggest heroes, who would have turned 100 in 2025.

“There are so many guitar players these days who shred when it comes to a solo, and then they shred on slow songs, they shred on the mid-tempo songs,” he says. “I thought to myself, ‘What if I just be the type of guitarist who takes his time no matter the tempo or the song?’”

The comparisons to King are inevitable. Harrell’s first paying gig was at a symposium on King in Indianola, Mississippi, where he played King’s crossover hit The Thrill Is Gone on one of the late legend’s iconic Lucille guitars while backed by members of King’s touring band. And in 2022, he won the B.B. King of the Blues Award from the Jus’ Blues Music Foundation.

Backed by a horn ensemble and a stout rhythm section on Talkin’ Heavy, Harrell has the canvas and brushes at his disposal to pepper tunes like the upbeat shuffle Liquor Stores and Legs and the deep grooves of the title cut with slow-burning, well-crafted licks.

Harrell’s love of elders like Elmore James, Albert King and John Lee Hooker is also evident in his playing, but those classic influences are always couched in a modern context.

When it comes to gear, though, Harrell is an unabashed plug-and-play purist with a predilection for vintage Gibson ES-355s and Fender amps – as long as they’re the tube versions. “Those tubes need to be burning,” he says, laughing. “As I put it to the band, I like to smell dinner cooking.”

• Talkin’ Heavy is out now via Alligator.
• This article first appeared in Guitar World. Subscribe and save.

Jim Beaugez has written about music for Rolling Stone, Smithsonian, Guitar World, Guitar Player and many other publications. He created My Life in Five Riffs, a multimedia documentary series for Guitar Player that traces contemporary artists back to their sources of inspiration, and previously spent a decade in the musical instruments industry.