Buddy Guy

Any discussion of Buddy Guy invariably involves a recitation of his colossal musical resume and hard-earned accolades. He’s a Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inductee, a chief guitar influence to rock titans like Hendrix, Clapton, Beck and Vaughan, a pioneer of Chicago’s fabled West Side sound, and a living link to that city’s halcyon days of electric blues. Buddy was all of seven years old, he recalls, 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 Buddy would own an actual guitar—a Harmony acoustic that now proudly sits on display at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland.

It was September 25, 1957—a date Guy would cite countless times in interviews over the ensuing decades—when he boarded the 8:14 a.m. train in Hammond, Louisiana, arriving in Chicago just before midnight. In an instant, his world had changed. Gone was the rural landscape of Louisiana; in its place was the thriving urban sprawl of a metropolis. It may as well have been a foreign country. “I just got off the train at 63rd and Dorchester, looked up at the moon and said, ‘Which way should I go?’”

Within months, Guy had taken up residency in Chicago’s fabled 708 Club. By the decade’s end, Guy was staking out new creative territory, cutting albums like 1967’s I Left My Blues in San Francisco, and 1968’s A Man and the Blues. In the process, Guy, the purveyor of a stinging, attacking electric guitar style and wild, impassioned vocals, was capturing the minds of a growing number of rock musicians.

“He was for me what Elvis was probably like for other people,” Clapton remembered at Guy’s Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction in 2005.

There were no fewer than 20 releases under Guy’s name during the 1970s and 1980s, the best of them collaborations with the late harp master Junior Wells. By the time the eighties became the nineties, Guy was internationally acclaimed, a Grammy winner and an inductee of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Guy has firmly cemented a blues legacy that places him squarely in the company of his heroes who came before.

“This all reminds me of something my mother used to tell me,” Guy says of his current-day status as a music icon. “She said, ‘If you got the flowers for me, son, give ‘em to me now so I can smell ‘em, ‘cause I’m not gonna smell ‘em when you put ‘em on the casket.’ I’m gettin’ to smell a few now.” – Buddy Guy