Who’s gonna fill his shoes?

Buddy Guy is stickin’ around but the legend isn’t sure about the future of the blues, writes Larry Schwartz.
BUDDY Guy recently revisited the Louisiana town where he was raised in a sharecropping family, playing makeshift guitars on screen wire or rubber bands after toiling in the fields.
“I was out there Christmas Day and they invited me back to the parish where I was born,” the veteran bluesman says. “They said they wanted somebody to come and speak to the children because they can’t remember nobody became famous from there but me.”
Almost 74 — “I’m not a baby any more,” he says — he has no plans to lay down his celebrated blues guitar.
“Well, I don’t know,” says Guy, who played in Mashantucket, Connecticut, during a 14-date tour with octogenarian B.B. King the night before we speak.
“I don’t recall any blues guy off the top of my head … who just quit. We just play ’til we drop.”
A flamboyant showman in his heyday whose on-stage antics, as much as his explosive playing, inspired the likes of Jimi Hendrix, Guy has visited Australia on several occasions since the early 1970s. He was last here two years ago.
Now, he is back with the eclectic Taj Mahal with whom he first played on the same bill in the 1960s, when he would accompany blues harpist Junior Wells, who died in early 1998.
Guy had a special guest at his recent performance with B.B. King. Boston-based Quinn Sullivan, who has just celebrated his 11th birthday, solos on the track, Who’s Gonna Fill Those Shoes, on his latest album Skin Deep.
“I’ve been trying to get him recorded,” Guy says of the diminutive player. “I think I’m just going to take him in and record him myself. He is amazing.”
He invited Sullivan on stage after the youngster approached him at a Massachusetts gig and asked if he would sign his guitar. “I wanted to expose him because he was the kind of person that can probably give the blues the lift that it needs,” Guy says. “Like the British did in the ’60s when white America didn’t know who Muddy Waters or Howlin’ Wolf or all those people was.”
Guy’s playing on Waters’ Champagne and Reefer is a highlight of Martin Scorsese’s film on the Rolling Stones, Shine a Light. “To be honest with you, those guys have done more for the blues than any radio station,” he says, recalling the Stones’ visit to Chess Records in Chicago early in their career.
George “Buddy” Guy was raised in Lettsworth, Louisiana. “Year in and year out,” he recalled when we last spoke a decade ago, “you work from sun-up to sundown. And at the end of the year, nothing coming but a dusty body.”
He came to Chicago in 1957, towards the end of a period of black migration from the rural south. Muddy Waters is said to have found him starving after three days without food and force-fed him sandwiches in the back of a Chevrolet. Guitarist Otis Rush helped to put him in touch with the Chess brothers.
He has received five Grammy Awards, a record 23 W.C. Handy Blues Awards, the Billboard magazine Century Award for distinguished artistic achievement and the Presidential National Medal of Arts.
But he doesn’t believe blues music gets the attention it deserves. “A lot of young people know nothing about the blues because it’s not being heard like it used to be,” he says.
“Sometimes I wonder what did we do for the blues to be treated the way it has.”

The Age 26-Mar-2010