Gary Clark Jr. is a Black American guitarist, singer and songwriter from Austin, Texas. His major-label debut, Blak and Blu, appeared in 2012, followed by The Story of Sonny Boy Slim in 2015 and This Land in 2019. His first Grammy came in 2014, when "Please Come Home" from Blak and Blu won Best Traditional R&B Performance.
The path to that debut ran through Austin's club scene and a career-changing invitation. In 2010, Eric Clapton selected Clark to perform at the Crossroads Guitar Festival, and the video release of that show helped lead to his recording contract. Blak and Blu brought his first two Grammy nominations, one of which became a win.
In a 2019 interview, Clark described a musical background that reached beyond the blues and rock labels often attached to his guitar playing. R&B, funk, soul and hip-hop also shaped his listening, and he wanted room to express those influences in his own work. Songwriting, he explained, was a way to work through changing emotions, from love to frustration, and his aim was to make music he could still feel proud of years later.
This Land brought personal experience into that wider musical vocabulary. Clark linked its title song to his account of a neighbor questioning whether he belonged at his own home. His response became a song about race, belonging and the right to claim a place in American life, and it put the perspective of a Black landowner in modern Texas at the center of a blues-rock record. The album won the Grammy for Best Contemporary Blues Album at the 2020 ceremony, and its title track took Best Rock Song and Best Rock Performance the same night.
The album's reach carried him onto festival main stages and kept him grouped with a younger generation of guitarists, but the music itself kept pulling in several directions at once, by his own description: part blues tradition, part soul and hip-hop listening history, part whatever a given day called for.
