Buddy Guy Isn’t Done With The Blues
- Roots Magazine
- 2 days ago
- 8 min read
Buddy Guy is one of the most celebrated blues musicians of our time. The 88-year-old Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Inductee has won 8 Grammys, a Lifetime Achievement Grammy, and the most Blues Music Awards of any artist. He received the Presidential National Medal of Arts, a Kennedy Center Honor, and a Billboard Magazine Century Award. He even performed at the White House for President Barack Obama at least twice. On one memorable occasion, he talked the president into singing a few lines of “Sweet Home Chicago.”
If one thing defines Guy’s career, it’s his unwavering dedication to the blues. Recently, he dipped his toe into the world of Hollywood with a cameo in the 2025 film Sinners. In a Variety interview with Chris Willman about Guy’s role in the movie, Guy commented that “anything we can do to help the blues stay alive, I’m for it.” Buddy Guy is the last surviving connection to the Chicago blues masters who taught him and ultimately commissioned him to keep their music alive, a task he has done with single-minded determination.
He learned from Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf, and others when they were at the height of their powers. Guy developed a vocal approach you could hear a mile away, and an explosive guitar style that influenced the most significant guitar players in rock and roll: Jimi Hendrix, Eric Clapton, Jimmy Page, and Jeff Beck.
But Guy went relatively unnoticed for years until he made his commercial breakthrough in 1991 with Damn Right, I’ve Got the Blues, eight years following the passing of Muddy Waters and a scant year after the death of Stevie Ray Vaughan. Guy, who had been a profound influence on Vaughan, emerged into the well-deserved role of elder statesman of the blues, sharing it with B.B. King.
Though he is aware of his status (especially since the passing of King in 2015), he dedicates almost everything, even an interview to promote a horror film, to the mission of keeping the blues alive. And for some time now, he has been sounding the alarm about the state of the blues. Guy worries that too few people are hearing it.
In 2023, Guy told Billboard’s Gary Graff, “Blues is like a stepchild now.” He went on to say that “the big FM stations don’t play blues—if they do, I don’t hear it.” According to Buddy Guy, everyone should get the chance to hear the blues at least once. “It’s like they say about cooking; you don’t know how good the gumbo is in Louisiana until you go down there and taste it. Whether you like it or not is up to you, but at least you tasted it.”
That’s an apt analogy coming from the blues legend. George “Buddy” Guy was born in Lettsworth, Louisiana, on July 30, 1936. Let that sink in for a moment. When people say that Buddy Guy is the last surviving link to the Chicago blues sound, part of what they mean (or should mean) is that Guy was the child of sharecroppers born into Jim Crow South. He was raised in an oppressive culture where the expectation was that white people told black people where they could go and what they could do when they got there. It was in the Mississippi Delta that the miracle that is the blues sprang up, and it was from Mississippi that many of the blues greats would migrate north to Chicago.
Just a few miles south of the Delta, young George Guy grew up hearing Gospel music and the music of Lightnin’ Hopkins, T-Bone Walker, Arthur Crudup, and Robert Johnson. He created a two-string diddley bow using window screen wire and a piece of wood. Later, a stranger bought him a Harmony guitar, and when Guy worked as a janitor in Baton Rouge, he was good enough to play in local bands. In 1957, Guy moved up to Chicago, his adopted city, where he learned the blues from Muddy Waters, Willie Dixon, Little Walter, and the other masters, eventually becoming a session player for Chess Records.
The 1960s were formative for Guy, but his sound didn’t come without a struggle. His early experiments with feedback were frowned upon at Chess until it became a stock-in-trade sound for Hendrix and Cream. Then, according to Guy, Leonard Chess invited the young guitarist to kick him in the butt because he was too dumb to hear Guy’s innovation.
During this time, Guy developed an extroverted stage persona influenced by Guitar Slim. Like Slim, Guy hooked up to his amp with a long guitar cord that enabled him to strut on top of the bar or wander the audience while playing a solo. He also began recording sides as a leader. Short scorchers like “Let Me Love You Baby” showed off Guy’s vocal prowess, while the seven-minute dirty blues “Stone Crazy” was a showcase for Guy’s early guitar sound. But more often, Chess seemed to want to put Guy’s voice in a setting as much influenced by soul as the blues. Guy’s vocals still stand out on these early records. His soft timbre and high range allowed him to access sensitive falsetto tones as well as intense screams.
Then, in 1965, Guy participated in what would become a seminal album from this period. He played guitar as part of harmonica player Junior Wells’ Chicago Blues Band and recorded Hoodoo Man Blues for Delmark Records. Guy’s role was credited to the pseudonym Friendly Chap until it was discovered that his contract with Chess didn’t actually forbid him from playing on the album.
Hoodoo Man Blues is the work of a four-piece band with Jack Myers on bass and Billy Warren on drums. Guy distills the rhythmic and melodic burdens of what normally would have been shared between a piano player and a couple of guitarists. His reliance on deep-pocket blues riffs and his clean sound on the Fender Stratocaster politely give space to Wells’ buoyant singing and harmonica playing while also creating one of the most spare and recognizable contributions to the Chicago sound. As such, Hoodoo Man Blues is on many lists of essential blues records.
In 1967, Guy recorded his first full-length album on the Chess label called, I Left My Blues in San Francisco, which leans heavily into soul. But there are powerful examples of Guy’s sensitive playing and aching vocals, such as “When My Left Eye Jumps” and the strutting “She Suits Me To a Tee.”
After his contract with Chess was fulfilled, Guy moved to Vanguard and recorded A Man and the Blues. That album secures a deeper blues sound, especially on the slower numbers that feature a four-piece unit including the incomparable Otis Spann on piano. Here, Guy’s vocals and guitar are given the space in which to interact and display their shared timbre. His guitar’s clean but edgy sound is like a resonator for his voice, making performances more intimate. When Guy sings about his only companion being a “’leven foot cotton sack” in the gloomy “One Room Country Shack,” you can hear personal experience in his voice (though he didn’t write the song).
But a larger audience was missing out on this connection with the blues. Guy recorded throughout the 1970s but found greater success in Europe than in America. He continued to collaborate with Junior Wells, and the two played at the 1974 Montreux Jazz Festival in Switzerland with Pinetop Perkins on keyboards, Bill Wyman (the Rolling Stones) on bass, and Dallas Taylor (who played with Stephen Stills) on drums, among others. This fantastic set was released as Drinkin’ TNT and Smokin’ Dynamite in 1982.
By the early ‘80s, Guy had all but stopped recording, focusing on touring and playing. However, he did release DJ Play My Blues in 1982, an album that prefigured the sound of his commercial breakthrough as well as his mission to keep the blues alive. On DJ, his guitar is leaner and tougher, like that of Stevie Ray Vaughan’s who famously said, “Without Buddy Guy, there would be no Stevie Ray Vaughan.”
From the power-soul opener, “Girl You’re Nice and Clean,” to the low-down “DJ Play My Blues,” Guy is inspired, a man on a mission despite his relative obscurity. The title track is a lament about the lack of blues on the radio, something Guy would continue to point out. The song may be directed at the DJ, but it’s an elegy, not a rant, as Guy lists bluesmen who were no longer alive at the time he recorded it. About a year after the album was released, Muddy Waters passed away. During Guy’s final phone call with his mentor, he received as formal a commission as anyone was likely to get from the blues man: “[D]on’t let that blues die.”
Finally, in 1991, Guy experienced the commercial breakthrough that had eluded him and gained the platform that he has used to do exactly what Waters told him to do. Damn Right, I’ve Got The Blues isn’t just a blues album, it’s a blues declaration. “You’re damn right I got the blues/ From my head down to my shoes,” Guy sings in the opening line, his high voice sharpened by years of grit. His guitar sound continues to mirror his voice in a way that’s aged and deadly, and his opening solo strikes down all comers. With a guest list that includes Mark Knopfler, Eric Clapton, and Jeff Beck, no one doubts who the master craftsman of the blues is after hearing that opening song.
Just as important, though a tad underrecognized, is an album that Guy and Wells recorded while touring through Europe in 1981, but wasn’t released until 1991. Alone & Acoustic, featuring just Guy and Wells and their instruments, should be required listening. Guy takes a turn alone on “Don’t Leave Me,” proving to anyone who doubted that all he needs is a guitar and his voice to give a powerful blues performance. When stripped of everything else, you clearly hear the dichotomy of muscular and sensitive musicianship that lies at the heart of Guy’s sound.
When Guy’s career took off in 1991, he was around 55, the age when most people think about retiring. He didn’t slow down or rest on his laurels. He toured extensively and recorded regularly, laying down albums that would reassert his vitality and range time and again. This was also the time when Guy began to accumulate Grammys, starting with Damn Right which won the Grammy for Best Contemporary Blues Album.
2001’s Sweet Tea (which was nominated for the above category) is a distortion-laden swampy record where Guy plays some of the dirtiest blues of his career in a setting that, to this writer’s ears, has more to say about North Mississippi hill country blues than Chicago blues. 2010’s Living Proof (another Grammy winner) is a blistering record that explodes with the opener “74 Years Young” and whose title track is ablaze with a testimony of faith. The whole album, like Guy’s whole career, testifies to the power of the blues. He can be forgiven if his later career albums tend to have star-studded guest lists.
Buddy Guy has retired from regular touring but is still active. He plays some festivals and is poised to release another record on July 30, 2025, called Ain’t Done With The Blues. Obviously. Not even a farewell tour severed Guy’s link to this music. If the lead single, “How Blues Is That,” is anything to go by, the master is about to lay another bold album on the table. Incredibly, Guy sounds as vital as ever.
As he has gotten older, he has given more album space to the faith that he credits for keeping him going when the odds were stacked against him. “You went to church in those days,” he told Bluestown Music in 2021 of his upbringing. “Listened to those great singers there. We’d work the farm six days a week then go to church on Sunday, listen to the gospel.” While the blues runs through Guy’s life, it seems as though faith might run deeper. Guy’s underdog story, perseverance, and ongoing creative vitality give credence to the chorus of “Living Proof”: “I’m living proof that bares a way/ I’m living proof, kneel down and pray/ I seen His glory, I know the truth/ I’m living proof.”
Christopher Raley
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