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Some kinda blues

Guitar legend Buddy Guy discusses his incredible career and explains how his unique sound came about

He’s the guitar legends’ legend: an inspiration to Jimi Hendrix and Eric Clapton and the “missing link” between blues and rock ’n’ roll. Chicago guitar great Buddy Guy explains why, in his 70th year, the blues still makes him holler

BUDDY GUY IS in a buoyant mood. Looking decades short of his 70 years, his eyes shine mischievously as, in his butter-rich Louisiana growl, he offers me a shot of Tennessee moonshine: “You gotta get some of that in your glass, honey. It’s got none of those chemicals in, just pure corn and mountain water. It’s the real, genuine deal.” The same could easily be said of the man before me, leaning back on one of the sofas in his eponymous Buddy Guy’s Legends Chicagoan blues club, his foot jigging up and down to a silent beat. Few of the teen and 20-something fans of Buddy’s oldest daughter (chart-topping rapper Shawnna) would be aware of this soft-talking septuagenarian’s pivotal role in shaping rock ’n’ roll, and indeed its modern day metamorphoses: pop and rap.

Just over 50 years ago, 21-year-old George “Buddy” Guy landed in Chicago, “with a pocket of nickels and one full of the blues”. Part of the great black migration north to the industrialised American cities, Buddy arrived to a city of hangar-sized factories and backstreets pulsating with the raw rhythm of southern blues.

“There were hundreds of blues bars downtown then,” Buddy recalls, “doors thrown open they were so steamed up with bodies. And the stockyard and steel mills worked 24/7, so the bluesmen would play all night and day for the cats getting off work at 7am”.

Buddy had begun singing and mastering blues guitar techniques back home in rural Louisiana on neighbours’ farms and, later, with blues bands in Baton Rouge. Convinced no-one would want to watch him if he didn’t give “a damn good show”, the painfully shy Southern farm boy had perfected his now legendary on-stage showmanship: from playing the guitar with his teeth to slinging his instrument up into the air before catching it to resume a chord. Buddy’s talents soon brought him into the sphere of 1950s Chicago blues greats Muddy Waters and Howlin’ Wolf, but his sound was a radical departure from that of Waters, Wolf and the southern blues canon. Buddy ripped out blues riffs with a (newly adopted) electric Stratocaster guitar, and he played to extremes: with sudden dips from loud to soft, sustained guitar solos jolted out of their reverie, and high, imploring vocals cut off with a rasp. The sound, which came to be labelled “Chicago blues”, presaged the British rock ’n’ roll explosion of the 1960s. “I was on a label from 1959, Leonard Chess’ Chess Records,” Buddy says. “But he just used me as a session guitarist for Muddy, Sonny Boy Walters, Wolf and them others. He didn’t get it until too late.”

One group who did roundly “get it” were the early British and American rock ’n’ rollers. Eric Clapton, Jeff Beck of The Yardbirds and Stevie Ray Vaughn all made pilgrimages to Chicago to catch Buddy’s legendary live shows. “You have to remember that I was playing for a 99.9% black audience those days in the blues clubs,” says Buddy, “so when Jeff Beck and Eric and those boys started coming to the clubs, we’d avoid them – we assumed they were cops, drinking illegally. But I got to know them and we laughed about it later.”

Despite still being unreleased in his native US, in 1965 Buddy travelled to Swinging Sixties London, touring with the Yardbirds and exposing his music to a generation of British musicians eager to soak it up. The tour also nurtured Buddy’s longtime love affair with the artists he calls “the British invaders”, and he remembers the time fondly. “It’s crazy looking back at it. You know, Rod Stewart was my valet – before he was famous, he was just a young kid – and he drove me around the country on tour, in this little raggedy car, to Birmingham or wherever. There was no speed limit back then and he scared me crazy. I’ve been waiting to tease him about it since he got famous, but I don’t get to see him as much as Eric and the others.” Buddy tops up my moonshine, then adds with a fruity chuckle: “Maybe it’s all of them wives keepin’ him occupied? Eric’s been married five times too; just married a girl from Ohio now. What is it with those British cats not holdin’ onto their wives?”

Despite his un-bluesman-like high spirits, Buddy is a little tired today. He’s just returned to Chicago after performing with more of his prolifically British musician pals, The Rolling Stones, on the New York date of their sell-out US tour, one of the 100-plus gigs he still performs worldwide every year. “They say I’m crazy to perform so much but I get tired just thinking about their [The Stones’] tour. They played in an outdoor theatre in Chicago a couple of weeks ago, right on the water, in October! I don’t even drive by there at this time of year. Keith [Richards] was tellin’ me how cold his fingers got, his nose and ears – pheweee.” Not, that is, that Buddy’s advancing years have curbed his own wild guitarmanship. He saves his best for January, when he plays a month at his downtown Chicago club, Buddy Guy’s Legends, with the old crowd-pleasing gusto, perhaps pulling a pretty woman out of the audience to strum one hand of his guitar while he picks out chords with the other, or strolling into the audience while jamming and trailing a long guitar chord in his wake. “But a blues musician never retires,” says Buddy. “They just drop. I was told a very long time ago that blues musicians are like whisky – you gotta wait til you get old before you get good, and I kinda believe it.”

As far as groundbreaking 20th-century popular musicians go, I doubt there’s been a better vintage than Buddy Guy. He brought electricity to the modern music scene in more ways than one. “You know,” he says, ”just before Muddy died, he said: ‘don’t let them goddam blues die on me, Buddy.’

But blues will never die. They used to say to me that ‘white men can’t play the blues’. But the way I see it, there ain’t anyone – white, black, blue, whatever – born with breath in their body that don’t have some kinda blues. I give them the blues, but make them smile. I’d go to the moon to make a man smile. That’s why I still get up on that stage and holler.”

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EVERY SHADE OF BLUES

WHERE TO PAINT THE TOWN BLUE IN MODERN-DAY CHICAGO

BUDDY GUY’S LEGENDS

754 S WABASH AVE, +1 (312) 427 0333 An icon of the local blues scene, with Buddy holding court whenever he’s in town. If you’re lucky, you could catch an impromptu jam of blues standards from The Stones or Buddy’s good pal Eric Clapton.

B.L.U.E.S.

2519 N HALSTED ST, +1 (773) 528 1012 Popular blues club, opened in 1979. Come here for stalwart Chicago blues acts – from Magic Slim to Otis Clay and Jimmy Johnson – and the unrivalled ambience of a dimly lit, postage-stamp-sized venue.

BLUE CHICAGO

736 N CLARK ST, +1 (312) 642 6261 If you like to dance to the blues, this 1920s-style club – and its sister club, “Blue Chicago on Clark” – are a good bet. Getting up (and getting down) to the sounds of the local bluesmen and women, among them Willie Kent and Gloria Hardiman, is actively encouraged here.

KINGSTON MINES

2548 N HALSTED ST, +1 (773) 477 4646 No-frills music house with artists playing on two stages simultaneously. Performers are usually old hands and five-decade blues veterans are not an uncommon sight.