Larry Schwartz
He was playing an old blues song. When it came to the chorus, he’d hold back and let the audience sing. Buddy Guy’s daughter was in the crowd. She had started work that night at a club he owns in Chicago.
It was the first time she’d seen him perform. “And she cried and she said, ‘How come I don’t know that?’ And I said, ‘Honey, I don’t know.’ You know, I wouldn’t just tell her. I’d have to explain it to her later what’s going on.”
Though he’d enjoyed a first big hit way back in 1960 with his song First Time I Met The Blues, and enjoyed intermittent acclaim since then, Guy says his eight children were unaware of his work until they were old enough to enter a club and watch him play.
“My older kids didn’t know who the hell I was until they turned 21,” he says. “They finally could come to a blues club and all of them cried. They said, ‘Dad, I didn’t know you could do that.'”
It illustrates how marginalised his kind of music is. The kids look at television and see only rock stars or rap stars: “If I’m not exposed on radio or television how are the kids going to know who the hell I am?”
Three Grammy awards in the past decade have probably helped alert his offspring to his stature. Now that they know, a long-awaited rapport has developed. “I’ve got a daughter. She’s recording hip hop and she called me in to help her do her CD. I told her I didn’t know how to play that. She
said, ‘Yes you do, dad. Play blues.”
An extraordinary blues guitarist, if famously erratic – a passionate, frenetic player with a reputation for unrivalled performance one night, dismal the next – Guy was a key figure in the West Side blues style that built on the innovations of older players such as Muddy Waters and Howlin’ Wolf,
who had forged an urban, electric update of the acoustic Mississippi Delta blues.
He has been emulated by younger guitarists, from Hendrix to Clapton, Beck to Cray, and Stevie Ray Vaughan. He met Jimi Hendrix in a New York club in the 1960s. “I didn’t know who he was and when we met he made that comment that he had learned a lot of stuff from me and could he
tape record what I was playing.
“He started taping and somebody got up and had a (camera) and they sent a video to me about eight years ago. I’ve got it at the club now. With him on his knees taping.”
Guy indulged in antics of a kind with which Hendrix would come to be associated. “That’s when I was playing with the guitar behind my back, stomping it and going through all this wild stuff I see a lot of rock guys do now and he was flipping out on that.”
“In his younger days, he (Guy) was the absolute master of guitar theatrics,” Charles Shaar Murray has written, “playing guitar with a handkerchief or a broomstick, using an extra-long cable to play from the middle of the room, or even outside it: the
works. His range stretches from whispers to screams, from needlepoint delicacy to meatcleaver assault.”
Does Guy detect his influence on Hendrix’s guitar playing? “I don’t look at it like that. When he played Voodoo Chile I heard the Muddy Waters thing … He just pumped up his amp and used all these effects and he was a creator, man. He was John Coltrane, man. He was so far ahead of time,
it’s frightening, you know.”
Despite the adulation from the likes even of Hendrix, Guy was overshadowed in a lengthy partnership with the late Junior Wells, blues harp player. He had struggled for several years to secure a recording contract before the release in 1991 of Damn Right I’ve Got The Blues from Silvertone
Records, which has just released a new compilation of highlights from the decade.
Buddy’s Baddest includes duets with the young Johnny Laing on Midnight Train, Jeff Beck (Mustang Sally) and Bonnie Raitt on Feels Like Rain .
Guy is taking the renewed interest in his stride. “We were brought up kind of religious,” he says. “I believe life is set to certain standards for all of us. What’s for you, you’re going to get it and what’s not for you, you never will get.
“I’m just thankful to be around to try and enjoy a little success even though when you’re black, blues is not as exposed as much as it is with any other nationality of people”
It irked him to learn that a disc jockey had declined to play one of his songs because it was “too black” and that radio stations prefer contemporary versions by rock stars to the authentic blues.
“Some of the rock stars record a Muddy Waters tune or a Howlin’ Wolf tune. They will play it on the station but they will not play the original one … And they call it classic … So I’m confused with that. What’s wrong with Muddy’s version or Sonny Boy’s version or Jimmy Roger’s version of that
same song?”
Guy has just celebrated his 63rd birthday. As many as could attended of his eight children, three sisters and a brother, nieces and nephews and grandchildren. (“I’m afraid to tell you the exact number because every time I says something, one pops up with another one.”)
“I celebrated at my club and we got a lot of the cajun dishes and a lot of the boiled stuff, fish and stuff like that. So if you ever come through you can come and taste me out. You might want to come back.”
George “Buddy” Guy says his father nick-named him at birth. He was raised in Letchworth, Louisiana. His parents were sharecroppers. “Year in and year out,” he recalls, “you work from sunup to sundown. And at the end of the year nothing coming but a dusty body. A lot of people worked
at it. Mississippi, Louisiana, Texas, and all of it. We didn’t have the machinery we got now. It was all hand work.”
He’d amuse himself with makeshift guitars he’d create with screen wire or rubber bands. “Whatever I could stretch and get a sound with.”
Guitar was the primary source of entertainment. “In the country, on a farm, when you come home in the evening, there wasn’t nothing else to do. There was no parks and pool or something you could go to with a bunch of guys.
“We played a little baseball and when my blues station would come on for half an hour and play the records, the game had to be halted. I had to listen to my stuff, you know.
“Sometimes it would come on at 9 o’clock and you would be so tired from working in the fields that it was hard to stay awake and listen to it. But I just couldn’t miss it, you know. And when I’d heard that, I could go to sleep a little better.”
The Texan T-Bone Walker was an early influence. The first song Guy learned to play was John Lee Hooker’s Boogie Chillun. But his taste was eclectic.
“When my dad finally got a radio, I could pick up country and western. You know radio stations back then would play all kinds of music. You would hear Lightin Hopkins and then you would hear Mahalia Jackson spiritual and then you would hear country and western.”
He’d frequent a local juke joint. “They had a juke box in there. Nickels was hard to come by but I always dropped my nickel in there.”
It was there that he first heard Lightnin’ Hopkins and Guitar Slim. “Of course, when B.B. King come out with Three O’Clock Blues (1952), we had a radio then, so I could hear him once or twice a day.”
He mentions players he first heard in the late ’40 to mid ’50s. “And that’s when I said, I’ve got to learn this. Because I was so in love with it.”
He was barely in his 20s when he came up to Chicago in 1957, at the tail end of a black migration from the rural south in search of better work and conditions.
“Wasn’t anybody making a decent living,” he says. “Muddy Waters, all the greats was still around. I’m proud to say that I learned so much from them and without them I don’t know if you’d be interviewing me now because those people taught everybody what they know now.”
He was soon backing Willie Dixon, the bassist and prolific songwriter, he recalls as “a big guy, in more ways than one”.
Guitarist Otis Rush helped him along too, alerting him to the fact that the now famous Chess brothers were interested in a few singles he had released for the smaller Cobra label. “When I first arrived in Chicago … Chess was the record company here and they kind of ignored me because
they had the giants there: Walter, Wolf, Muddy Waters, Jimmy Rogers, Sonny Boy.
“It wasn’t easy to get in there. But after I made two 45s with Cobra, they knew me.”
Waters, who became his mentor and of whom he speaks with near reverence, is said to have found him starving after three days without food and forcefed him sandwiches in the back of a Chevrolet.
Guy remembers the day Rush called him onstage at a club. “The owner of the place was on his way out and just as he went out the door, he left word, Hire him. That’s how I got my first gig. It wasn’t paying any money but … the people would tip you pretty good and I could eat pretty good
the next day.”
Having belatedly enjoyed some broader recognition, he intends to keep pushing the industry to pay attention to the blues. “My plan for the rest of my life is fight as hard as I can. Try to find out why you don’t see John Lee Hooker, B.B. King or myself, unless we hook up with some rock stars,
can’t get airplay …
“I would like to know. And then I would probably be more satisfied than I am now.”
The Sunday Age, 22nd of August 1999
Larry Schwartz Writer 