Vasti Jackson is a world-renowned guitarist and vocalist, a multiple Grammy nominee, a 2019 Polar Music Award honoree with Playing For Change, a 2019 Arts Trail Marker honoree, a 2017 Arts Ambassador, a 2016 Grammy nominee for The Soul of Jimmie Rogers, a 2015 Albert King Lifetime Guitar Award recipient, a 2014 cultural ambassador, a 2012 Mississippi Musicians Hall of Fame inductee, and a 2011 Mississippi Living Blues Legend Award recipient. Pronounced Vast-Eye, Jackson is a performer, guitarist, vocalist, composer, arranger, producer, actor, and educator whose career carried him from churches and juke joints in McComb, Mississippi, to festivals, concerts, and theaters around the world. He moves across blues, soul, jazz, gospel, funk, country, and beyond. As an actor, he co-stars as Ike Turner in the international musical Simply The Best, The Tina Turner Story, performs the lead role as Robert Johnson in Robert Johnson: The Man The Myth The Music, plays Old Lucas in Hell and High Water while serving as its musical director and composer, and appears as Hobo Bill in the stage play Jimmie Rodgers: Americas' Blue Yodeler. He is also a guest artist and composer with the Memphis Symphony Orchestra presentation of Stravinsky's A Soldier's Tale. As an educator, he works with enthusiasm, compassion, patience, and an ability to meet his audience at their needs. With the Playing For Change Foundation, he has helped develop fifteen music schools in twelve countries serving more than two thousand students. Jackson has been featured in publications including Guitar Player, Living Blues, Back To The Roots, Nothing But The Blues, Juke Blues of England, Blues Revue, Jefferson Blues magazine, and Blues Matters, and he has performed on Dan Akroyd's House of Blues Radio Hour, the Starz Encore Network, WGN-TV in Chicago, and PBS. He has also performed, written, produced, and recorded music for HBO, VH1, Mississippi Educational Television, the British Broadcasting Corp. (BBC), and radio and television programs in Australia, Uraguay, Finland, and Canada. He is the only Mississippian to have two recordings nominated for the Grammy Award in the same year, in the same category, with one win.