Delmar Price

Chicago, Illinois · FARA Records

Delmar Price (b. 30 July 1980) is a Chicago blues artist built around one of the oldest functions in the music: someone asks a question, and the guitar answers when nobody else will. Raised in Chicago at the far end of the Great Migration story, his family's history reaches north from the South into the city where Delta-rooted blues became electric, urban and built for clubs — though the exact origins, names and dates are left deliberately unspecified. What matters to him is the continuity: a musical language changed when people changed cities, and the older slide vocabulary stayed alive inside the newer electric one.

He learned on late-night bandstands rather than festival stages — small, half-full rooms still open at one in the morning, upright bass, brushes, piano, horn and guitar, a few people talking until the band makes them stop. A hand-me-down guitar gave him his entry point, and the instrument became a second speaking voice: the slide replies, argues, bends and waits, and sometimes sounds more certain than the singer. That call-and-response is the most persistent part of his artist identity.

His voice is worn without being broken, expressive without being theatrical — short lines, ordinary words, questions that don't turn into conclusions. On Dark Moon, the band builds warmth in the room while the writing keeps the emotional answer outside it: rain on glass, a cold moon, a telephone that doesn't ring, a person who is gone. The moon never replies. The guitar does.

Delmar isn't a 'sad bluesman' character — the warmth is real. He talks to bandmates, waits for the piano player to finish a thought, and can be funny in the quiet way of somebody who has spent years around musicians loading out after closing. His relationship to history is practical rather than nostalgic: he respects the Chicago electric-blues line and the older slide language beneath it, but he lives in the present, as comfortable changing strings at a kitchen table as he is on a smoky bandstand.