2018 has proven to be the break-out year so long deserved by Samantha Martin and Delta Sugar. In November 2018, it was announced that “Run To Me” has been nominated for 4 Maple Blues Awards at the 2019 edition (Album of The Year, Songwriter of The Year, Entertainer of The Year, and Female Vocalist of The Year). The group’s latest recording, entitled Run to Me, was released in April 2018. Produced by Darcy Yates, the album is a massive step forward for both Martin and Delta Sugar. Over the course of the project’s ten tracks, everyone written by Martin solo or in tandem with Curtis Chaffey or Suzie Vinnick, the album explores the full range of the vicissitudes of love: desire, betrayal and, at times, emotional and sexual satisfaction. As a collective, the songs reflect remarkable growth on Martin’s part as a songwriter. The lyrics are incisive, the melodies are constantly arresting and the harmonies and arrangements call up the best of the soul and blues sounds of Stax Records and such contemporary artists as Leon Bridges, Sharon Jones and Lee Fields. The record is has received massive airplay in North America reaching #2 on Earshot, #1 on Roots Music Report, and #1 on Stingray’s Blues channel radio charts. The album has also crossed overseas and managed to sneak into the UK Blues Radio Top40 charts as well as receiving dozens of rave reviews. With over 500 shows under their belt in the last 4 years, Canadian Independent Music Association (CIMA) has honored Samantha Martin and Delta Sugar with the certification “Road Gold.” CIMA certifies Canadian artists as “Road Gold” when they have sold over 25 thousand tickets to Canadian fans over a twelve-month period.

Samantha Martin and Delta Sugar’s debut release, 2015’s Send the Nightingale, was a stripped down affair consisting of Martin, her two co-singers, and guitarist Mikey McCallum. For Run to Me, Martin elected to record her emotionally wrought material with an expanded band, augmenting the core of Delta Sugar’s gospel-infused harmonies with a full rhythm section, piano, organ and an ever-so- soulful horn section.

Send the Nightingale was a stunning achievement which garnered four Maple Blues nominations in 2016, was regularly featured on the CBC, topped the blues charts on Stingray radio and propelled the group onto the stages of all the major Canadian festivals and clubs coast to coast. Subsequent to the album’s release, Martin has been nominated three years in a row as Female Vocalist of the Year at the Maple Blues Awards. Continuing to build on the group’s steam rolling momentum, in the fall of 2017, Samantha Martin and Delta Sugar were selected by a panel of blues experts to represent Toronto at the International Blues Challenge in Memphis, a platform that has served to launch any number of careers in both Europe and the United States.

Martin is the lead singer, songwriter and focal point of the group. A dynamic front woman, she possesses a stunning voice that is capable of summoning up tidal waves of spine-tingling emotion in one instance while delicately bringing out the nuances of a gut wrenching lyric in the next. A torrid force of nature, night after night she takes audiences to emotional peaks while leaving them stunned with her sheer pin-you-against-the-wall power.

While Martin is a powerhouse unto herself, the vocal alchemy of Delta Sugar is not the work of a single talent. In combination with what she likes to term her “co-vocalists,” Sherie Marshall and Mwansa Mwansa, the vocal blend Delta Sugar produces is pure, unadulterated gospel-tinged, neuron-tingling magic where the sum is even richer than the already soul-melting parts.