Coco Montoya and Tinsley Ellis
Nominated for Blues Rock Artist of the Year and for Blues Rock Album of the year for Winning Hand by the 40th Blues Music Awards in Memphis, Tinsley Ellis won Blues/Rock Album of the Year for Tough Love from the prestigious Blues Blast magazine in 2015. The 1990s was when he separated himself from the pack of guitar slingers. This was in Atlanta, where his band the Heartfixers became nightclub favorites behind his charismatic merger of Texas blues, R&B, and funk. In 2017, he launched a side project titled Tinsley Ellis Blues is Dead. It’s him, doing Grateful Dead blues tunes and other of the blues rockers that were popular during psychedelic San Francisco’s music heyday. Tinsley Ellis, now 61, still favors life on the road. “A musician never got famous,” he once said, “by staying home.”