guitarist; blues musician; business owner
Personal Information
Born on July 30, 1936, in Lettsworth, LA; parents: Sam (a sharecropper) and Isabell Guy.
Career
Blues guitarist. Went to Chicago, 1957; signed with Cobra Records and cut two singles, 1958; signed with Chess Records where he recorded numerous singles, including "Stone Crazy" which became a number 12 R&B record; became a valued session musician for Chess artists such as Muddy Waters, Sonny Boy Williamson, Little Walter, and Howlin' Wolf among others, 1960-67; released one album, A Man and His Blues, 1968; began a long association with harmonica player Junior Wells, 1970s; owner of a blues club, the Checkerboard Lounge, 1972-83; released breakthrough album, Damn Right I've Got The Blues, 1990; owner of another blues club, Legends, 1989 to present.
Life's Work
George "Buddy" Guy, hailed by Eric Clapton in Musician magazine as "the greatest guitar player alive," Guy remains as one of the last links to a blues tradition that began before Robert Johnson and continued most notably through Muddy Waters and other Chicago blues players. Though the legendary bluesman is internationally famous today, he began his life as a sharecropper's son. Today Guy owns a mansion outside of Chicago where he presides over his own blues club in his adopted home town, but the middle child of the five children of Sam and Isabell Guy began his life picking cotton.
Guy was born in Lettsworth, Louisiana on July 30, 1936. Life was difficult in rural Louisiana especially when the weather did not cooperate and the cotton harvest was poor. To help feed his family Guy fished and hunted raccoon, muskrat, and possum. His mother had a vegetable garden and grew food for the family in the summer and made it last all the way through the winter. Guy worked on his family's farm, but on Saturdays he would pick cotton for a half day to earn money for himself.
From the beginning Guy spent his hard-earned money on the blues by sending away for old 78s of Howlin' Wolf, Muddy Waters, and John Lee Hooker. Guy made his first guitar out of old paint cans and wire from the front screen door. When his father got tired of all the mosquitoes that came into the house, he bought his son an old acoustic guitar with only two strings on it. Soon Guy was able to pick out a passable version of Hooker's "Boogie Chillen." The first time he heard an electric guitar occurred when a man who was passing through town playing for change plugged in his amp in front of a local store. Guy threw the man his 35 cents allowance and the rest was history.
As many kids his age were forced to do in his circumstances, Guy quit high school to work--pumping gas and washing cars in Baton Rouge. It was at the gas station that Guy got his introduction to show business. A local bandleader, John "Big Poppa" Tilley, heard of a young man who was changing tires at the local service station who could play guitar. The 300-pound Tilley brought his guitar and amp to the pumps, and Guy got an audition right there. Guy roared through a rendition of Eddie "Guitar Slim" Jones's version of "Things I Used To Do." Not only did the playing attract a crowd of people who wanted to buy gas, but Tilley hired Guy on the spot.
After a dubious beginning in which Tilley fired the shy, nervous young player because he would not face the crowd, Guy became a regular with the band. By this time he had secured a job as a custodian at Louisiana State University. He had all but given up on the idea of being a professional musician. His mother, however, disagreed with her son's assessment of his abilities. Isabell, who was recovering from a stroke, regained her ability to speak and told him that he was good enough to be a professional but that Baton Rouge was not the place where he could follow his dream. With the help of a local disc jockey, Guy made two demos--"The Way You've Been Treating Me" and "Baby, Don't You Wanna Come Home." Guy sent them to the preeminent blues label of the day, Chess Records in Chicago, sure that he would be a star.
On to Chicago
On September 27, 1957 with his two recordings in hand, his Gibson Les Paul guitar, and $500, Guy bought a one-way train ticket to Chicago to find Leonard Chess, owner of Chess Records. He knew a friend of his sisters in Chicago but spent most of his time wandering the streets day and night, trying to work up the courage to make an appearance at Chess Records. When he finally did show up, he found that no one had listened to the demos he had sent and that an unknown guitarist could not just walk in off the street for a meeting with Leonard or his brother Phil Chess.
After spending another few months in Chicago unsuccessfully looking for work or an opportunity to play, Guy was down to his last dime ready to call home for train fare back to Louisiana. He met a man purely by chance who guided him to the 708 Club, a local blues hot spot. When the young man with the guitar walked in, he found none other than Chicago blues legend Otis Rush presiding over a jam session. Rush brought him up on the stage and Guy, near swooning from hunger, plugged in his guitar and released all of his frustration and loneliness. After a short but spectacular set, which included "Things I Used To Do" and "Further On Up The Road," Guy walked off the stage and out of the bar certain that he had performed his swan song in Chicago.
But word of his performance had spread. Several days later a man approached him on the street and introduced himself as "Mud." Guy was dumbfounded, because the man turned out to be blues icon Muddy Waters. Waters had heard about the young guitarist's epic impromptu performance; besides feeding the starving young man, Waters introduced him to some of the most important people on the Chicago blues scene.
Guy was suddenly appearing in top flight blues guitar competitions with other young guitarists such as Earl Hooker, Magic Sam, and even B. B. King in which first prize was a bottle of whiskey. With such talent, Guy knew he had to find a way to distinguish himself. He found his trademark one night at the Blue Flame club while Otis Rush and Magic Sam were on stage. Guy told Timothy White of Billboard what happened: "I got a new extra-long cord, and I told this fella who was with me to take the wire, unroll it, and bring his end all the way to the stage where Magic and Otis were. I would hide in the bathroom, and when they call my name, he'd jump up and plug me in!"
Guy was introduced, but instead of appearing on stage he came out of the back of the club ripping through his solo at maximum volume. He walked through the stunned crowd, out the front door of the Blue Flame, and then back up to the stage to join the other musicians. The stunt worked so well that Guy made his stroll through the crowd a mainstay of his show for the next forty years.
Signed with Chess
In 1958 Guy signed with Cobra Record and cut two singles. The next year Cobra went under, and this time it was Chess Records that came looking for him. He signed with Leonard Chess in 1960 and became a noted session musician while recording his own singles. Besides such singles as "Stone Crazy" which became a number 12 Billboard R&B record, Guy played with Sonny Boy Williamson, Little Walter, Howlin' Wolf, Koko Taylor and others.
In an interview conducted with John Lee Hooker with Jas Obrecht of Guitar Player, Guy talked about his attitude when playing as a session musician with some of the masters: "When I got to Chicago, there were so many great guitarists around that I went to work a regular job. When I saw these people play, I just knew that there was no way I had a chance. I just wanted to meet these great musicians, and I woke up and they was askin' me to play with them. One thing helped me a lot was I was a good listener, and if they would ask me to play with them, I didn't go tell John Lee or Muddy Waters or the Howlin' Wolf or Walter what to play ... When I went into the studio with them, I got in the corner and said, 'I'm at school now. It's time for me to learn my lesson, not teach.'"
Guy even appeared on an acoustic record of Muddy Waters,Folk Singer. When Leonard Chess objected to the electric guitarist being included on an acoustic album, Waters told the record label owner to "shut up and sit down." Guy stayed with Chess until 1967, but the company released only one album, A Man & His Blues, in 1968.
Though Guy received a measure of success and notoriety in Chicago, few outside the blues capital of the world knew about him. But those that did know his style were devoted and influential. Jimi Hendrix used to tape Guy's concerts, and in trips to England he first met Clapton and Jeff Beck in the sixties. Clapton coproduced Guy's collaboration with harmonica legend Junior Wells in 1972, Buddy Guy and Junior Wells Play the Blues, and the artist was instrumental in Guy's later ascent to stardom. Guy continued to tour, most of the time without a recording contract, though he did release a live album, Stone Crazy, of a performance in France in 1978. In 1972 he opened a blues club in Chicago, the Checkerboard Lounge, which he ran until 1983. His days as a club owner resumed when he opened another Chicago blues club, Legends, in 1989.
A Breakthrough Year
In 1990 Guy was invited by Clapton to be part of his historic string of London's Royal Albert Hall concerts. The concerts were recorded on Clapton's 24 Nights album, and suddenly everyone wanted to know who Buddy Guy was. After the appearance in England, Guy returned there in 1990 with a new recording contract with Silvertone to record "Damn Right, I've Got The Blues."
After all those years of playing in anonymity Guy wanted this album to be just right. He was resolved to capture the Buddy Guy live sound that he was never able to or allowed to capture before. He told Ed Enright of Downbeat about the negotiations leading up to the groundbreaking recording: "They told me, 'We'd like to sign you, and we would want to support you.' And I said, 'Well, I really want to play Buddy Guy, because I never had the chance to play Buddy Guy before. I want you to hear that, because I'm a Johnny Come Later now; everybody else says these are Buddy Guy licks, and Buddy Guy has never played them himself.' They said, 'We're not going to tell you what to play, just give you a good supporting band. Won't you come to London and make this session?' And I said, "Thank you, I'll sign."
Damn Right I've Got The Blues included guest appearances from Clapton, Beck, and Mark Knopfler and went on to receive a Grammy. The album reached gold record status in Canada, New Zealand, and in England, and made Guy a star on the international blues scene. A book with the same title quickly followed which featured interviews with Wells, Clapton, Beck, Willy Dixon, Robert Cray, and Stevie Ray Vaughn.
Guy followed up his hit record with Feels Like Rain in 1992. For his new album Guy wanted to make more of an ambitious statement. He told Jim Washburn of The Los Angeles Times that he wanted a wider audience: "We got down in the alley on it, but also we were trying to get some of the bigger radio stations that do not play Muddy Waters or Howlin' Wolf to hopefully feel that maybe some of it would fit on their station... .I told myself if I get slick enough, they might play it on this big rock station. Then, if a kid buys the album, he'll find (Waters') "Nineteen Years Old" right next to that song."
Guy repeated the success of his previous album including the Grammy Award for Best Blues Album of the Year. The following year Billboard presented Guy with its highest honor, the Century Award for lifetime achievement. The man who went almost thirteen years without a recording contract was now recording soundtracks and going on tour with the Saturday Night Live Band. His club, Legends, which he had struggled at times to keep open as so many other blues clubs closed, was finally secured as a place where new blues talent could develop just as the master did. Though he recorded another successful album, Slippin In, and continues to tour around the world, Guy never strays far from his Chicago home and Legends, often popping in to the bar to mingle with the crowd and see the local talent. Guy told Enright of Downbeat that he will always remember where he came from: "Sometimes entertainers get so big, they have to isolate themselves. Please believe me, I don't ever want to get like that. I think that's the time I would start thinkin' maybe I should quit playin'. Because I would miss people."
Awards
Grammy Award for Best Blues Album of the Year for "Damn Right I've Got The Blues," 1990, and for "Feels Like Rain," 1992; Billboard's Century Award for lifetime achievement, 1993.
Further Reading
Book
- Contemporary Musicians, Volume 4. Gale Research, 1990.
- Billboard, December 4, 1993.
- Downbeat, February 1995.
- Guitar Player, June 1996.
- The Los Angeles Times, April 22, 1993.
- Biography Resource Center, Gale, 2001, http://www.galenet.com/servlet/BioRC.
— Michael J. Watkins
