Buddy Guy
Buddy Guy was born in Louisiana in 1936 to a sharecropper’s family and raised on a plantation near the small town of Lettsworth. Guy was all of seven years old when he fashioned his first makeshift "guitar" - a two-string contraption attached to a piece of wood and secured with his mother’s hairpins. It would be nearly another decade, however, before Guy would own an actual guitar - a Harmony acoustic that now proudly sits on display at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland.
By late 1955, his heart and mind were already firmly attached to the guitar and the blues sounds he heard emanating from the radio, but a future in Chicago, at least then, wasn’t in the picture. But by the summer of 1957 a friend who worked in Chicago returned to Louisiana and said Guy should go to Chicago and could do well playing the guitar.
It was September 25, 1957 - a date Guy would cite countless times in interviews over the ensuing decades - when he boarded the 8:14 am train in Hammond, Louisiana, arriving in Chicago just before midnight. In an instant, his world had changed.
Within months, Guy had taken up residency in Chicago’s fabled 708 Club. His first appearance followed a set by Otis Rush. Then Guy met Muddy Waters who’d arrived at the club in a red Chevrolet. It was the first time Guy had ever seen the blues giant, who happened to live nearby. The great Waters was 21 years Guy’s senior, but the younger man quickly earned the respect of the long-established star.
By the early 1960s, Guy was a first-call session man at Chess Records. In addition, he began to cut a considerable catalog of sides under his own name. Many fans and critics have lauded Guy’s singles output from 1960 to 1967. As a session man, he backed the likes of Waters, Howlin’ Wolf, Little Walter and Sonny Boy Williamson.
By the decade’s end Guy was staking out new creative territory, cutting albums like 1967’s I Left My Blues In San Francisco, his last effort for Chess, and 1968’s A Man And The Blues for Vanguard. There were no fewer than 20 releases under Guy’s name during the 1970s and ’80s, the best of them collaborations with the late harp master Junior Wells.
But by the time the Eighties became the Nineties, Guy amazingly didn’t even have a domestic record deal.
But life, as Guy has long since learned, is loaded with unpredictable twists and turns - and Guy’s life was about to enter a new stratosphere of commercial success. His first three albums for Silvertone - the 1991 comeback smash Damn Right, I’ve Got the Blues (reissued in 2005), 1993’s Feels Like Rain and 1994’s Slippin' In - all earned Grammy Awards. Suddenly, it was cool to like Buddy Guy.
Guy’s legend has only grown throughout the Nineties and the early 21st century. Subsequent releases like the eminently satisfying Live: The Real Deal (1996), the daring Heavy Love (1998) and 2001’s Sweet Tea have demonstrated that Guy, while firmly ensconced in his blues roots, has always tried to keep his music looking forward—even at the risk of alienating lovers of traditional blues sounds.
And now, the story continues with Bring ‘Em In, which finds the 69-year old Guy trading licks with the likes of Carlos Santana (I Put a Spell On You) and John Mayer (on the Otis Redding-penned I’ve Got Dreams To Remember). Internationally acclaimed, a Grammy winner and now an inductee of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.
"He was for me what Elvis was probably like for other people," Eric Clapton remembered at Guy’s Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction in 2005. "My course was set, and he was my pilot."
Buddy Guy has firmly cemented a blues legacy that places him squarely in the company of his heroes who came before.