Buddy Guy, who just turned 88, will be officially retired from the road by early fall. Only, before that happens, before the Chicago legend slows, a few facts demand context. For one, retirement doesn’t mean he’ll never play again. Just less often. Also, though his current tour is billed as his farewell to the touring life, he could tour again. Who knows? Depends on how he feels. Bluesmen, those around him like to repeat, never really retire. They just don’t do sound-check anymore.
Guy does not do a sound-check anymore. His guitar tech does it. These days he arrives at a venue and does not hang around. When home in Illinois, he’s eager to get back to his 14 acres in Orland Park. The older he’s become, the more naturally impatient he’s become, albeit paired with a twinkly smile. When a show is over, he walks from the stage to a waiting car and leaves. He will not talk much on a show day. He doesn’t want to risk his voice. Besides, he knows — everyone who knows him knows — he can talk.
The morning after he headlined the Chicago Blues Festival earlier this summer, he woke at 3:30 a.m. and was at Legends, his South Loop blues club, by 9 a.m., already talking. When he talks about himself, he says he grew up on a farm, where his habits were set.
He’s a believer in old habits, and a vessel of tales retold.
“You know I have been living out here in Chicago for 67 years now,” he said, sort of asking, sort of telling. “But on a farm see, you rise with the sun. We didn’t have a clock. The sun came down, you went home. The sun rose, you were out there in the field. You know, I have been trying to break that habit since I moved here? Doesn’t matter how late I get home from a show, I know I will be up, like, three, four o’clock in the morning.”
He remembers everything.
He’s told his band to warn him if he is ever about to play a song he played 10 minutes earlier. He fears this. He’s heard the stories about his friend B.B. King, how before King died nine years ago he’d play “You Are My Sunshine” five times in a single concert, the band unwilling to correct the boss. That is not Buddy Guy. He remembers the cost of a drink 60 years ago, the color of a guitar 70 years ago, the rhythms of a night in his 20s.
“Some stuff follows me my whole life,” he said.
George “Buddy” Guy, who arrived in Chicago near the end of the Great Migration. Buddy Guy, who became one of Chicago’s great bluesmen, and one of the greatest guitarists ever. Buddy Guy, keeper of an American art form, the music from which all American music flows. Buddy Guy, a one-man chamber of commerce and embodiment of the blues. Buddy Guy, still in the business of playing the Legend Buddy Guy. Buddy Guy, a living storybook to reread once again — a Midwestern life of such cultural consequence and ingrained mythology, it begs a little clarity.
He was born July 30, 1936, in rural Louisiana, and grew up on a farm. He made $2.50 for every 100 pounds of cotton that he picked. He left home at 21 and came to Chicago on Sept. 25, 1957 — which is his other birthday, he likes to tell people. He’s made 19 records under his own name and many others with friends and collaborators. He’s won eight Grammys, and he never took a single guitar lesson.
In fact, he made his first guitar.
But depending on who’s telling that tale, as a child, he made the guitar out of rubber bands or wood or his mother’s hairpins. When I asked about that guitar, he replied: “OK, in the South, we got mosquitos that will take you out of bed! I used to go fishing, they suck your blood, you hit them and the blood runs. We had this chemical to use on them and when the can was empty, it was like an old cigar box. I’d seen a guitar in a magazine I couldn’t afford, so I took two tacks and made a little guitar neck with wire screen wires. Which you could never finger like a guitar. The strings would break. First time I learned to play a real guitar, I walked three miles playing, just for someone to see me. I saw a cousin. I yelled ‘Look at this!’ He said, ‘You got it!’ I said, ‘Don’t stop me or I’ll lose it!’”
His stories start one place and end elsewhere. He can sound so apocryphal at times. Even his son Greg Guy said: “All of them stories of his, I was in doubt myself, but they’re real.”
He bunches up stray facts as if not to waste time. He prefers to condense. On the other hand, he also doesn’t want to be rushed. Not long ago, at a show with the Foo Fighters and other bands, he was performing on a stage that rotated so each act could be cycled on and off stage quickly, but when the stage began rotating to signal the end of his set, Guy stepped off of the disc and continued to play on the non-rotating part. He’s still full of fight and contradiction. One reason he created the Checkerboard Lounge, his famed, long-gone South Side club, was to tour less and spend more time at home with his kids. And that was 50 years ago — as late as 2022, he was still averaging about 130 concerts a year. Everyone who knows him knows he can’t stop, won’t stop. He slips into conversation that he’s never been the equal of the greats who inspired him, those names you know even if you don’t listen to the blues — Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf. He says this minutes before a show. He says that he’ll try his best but who knows if it’ll be any good. Then within seconds, he’s killing, aiming his guitar neck into his audience.
Like a flamethrower, Carlos Santana described it.
Guy is a Chicagoan via Louisiana, a mash of the Delta branch of the blues and the urban blues pioneered in Illinois. He’s an upholder of tradition whose hook became unpredictability. He might wander off a stage and into bathrooms, playing guitar. He still wanders off the stage at nearly every show, still playing. I asked about this. He said:
“When I don’t do that, somebody will say you must not be feeling good. I got that from the late Guitar Slim in Louisiana. He’d play in Baton Rouge, where I’d moved. Clubs wouldn’t let bands play then until they sold a lot of whiskey. If a band started, they didn’t sell no more, people too busy watching. So they’d tell Slim, ‘Wait another 45 minutes.’ Anyway I’m in front of the stage and his band plays two numbers, then ‘Ladies and gentleman, Guitar Slim!’ But I don’t see nobody. They’re full of (expletive), I think. Then this heavy guy walks in the club holding Slim on his shoulders, like a baby in the park. Slim had this 150-foot cord, red and white hair. He was brought to the stage, climbed off those shoulders then started singing: The things I used to do… House goes crazy. I said to myself if I ever learn the guitar, I want to play like B.B. but act like Slim. When I first got to Chicago, blues guys sat in chairs on stage! Muddy’d be in a chair, like you to me.”
Nobody’d fault him for sitting at 88.
“Yeah, but look — his last years, B.B. sat in a chair. Big airports, I get a wheelchair now. But I’m not happy sitting down. My family was Baptist, and if you get happy, you shout, you get up. That’s what I thought I could bring to blues. The little tricks do get attention.”
That unpredictability is more predictable these days. Guy at 88 has become a comforting figure for those who worry about the future of the blues; he’s arguably the last thread connecting Chicago to the first generation of greats, coming out of the rural Southern poverty that defined early blues. And yet he’s also long past wanting for much. That’s the irony of having a legacy: You’re expected to represent the past even when you’re not that person anymore. Writer Albert Murray once decried American’s understanding of the blues as a “simpleminded expression of frustration and despair,” loved less for its art and craft and sound than as a kind of “therapeutic compensation” for being Black in America. Guy’s last 30 years have played like a period to that thought, brushing off decades of neglect and embracing the joy of the music, not only the pain.
But even Buddy Guy knows to stop, or semi-stop.
“The average person expects you still give them what you gave as a 20- or 30-year-old. The truth is, I might try, but it’s getting harder when you’re damned closer to 100.”
By the time Buddy Guy took the stage at Blues Fest, Millennium Park was past capacity. People were being turned away. Backstage, in the bowels of Pritzker Pavilion, musicians heard about fans jumping fences to get in. They shook heads, flattered to hear the excitement for a free annual festival, but keenly aware a lot of that excitement was for Guy: He was history, and, everyone heard, he was going away. Backstage was hectic, loud, like an airport terminal where everyone’s hauling guitars. Except for where Guy waited. He sat in the corner of a couch in his dressing room, flanked by water and chips, surrounded by his children and nephews and their children. Occasionally, a cheer from the huge crowd would penetrate this bunker and Guy would look up, impressed.
“Everyone keeps asking how I’m doing,” he said. “As if I have a choice but play! What’s 88 minus 6? I’ve been working, uh … 82 years. I’m going to try and enjoy what’s left.”
www.chicagotribune.com
Guy does not do a sound-check anymore. His guitar tech does it. These days he arrives at a venue and does not hang around. When home in Illinois, he’s eager to get back to his 14 acres in Orland Park. The older he’s become, the more naturally impatient he’s become, albeit paired with a twinkly smile. When a show is over, he walks from the stage to a waiting car and leaves. He will not talk much on a show day. He doesn’t want to risk his voice. Besides, he knows — everyone who knows him knows — he can talk.
The morning after he headlined the Chicago Blues Festival earlier this summer, he woke at 3:30 a.m. and was at Legends, his South Loop blues club, by 9 a.m., already talking. When he talks about himself, he says he grew up on a farm, where his habits were set.
He’s a believer in old habits, and a vessel of tales retold.
“You know I have been living out here in Chicago for 67 years now,” he said, sort of asking, sort of telling. “But on a farm see, you rise with the sun. We didn’t have a clock. The sun came down, you went home. The sun rose, you were out there in the field. You know, I have been trying to break that habit since I moved here? Doesn’t matter how late I get home from a show, I know I will be up, like, three, four o’clock in the morning.”
He remembers everything.
He’s told his band to warn him if he is ever about to play a song he played 10 minutes earlier. He fears this. He’s heard the stories about his friend B.B. King, how before King died nine years ago he’d play “You Are My Sunshine” five times in a single concert, the band unwilling to correct the boss. That is not Buddy Guy. He remembers the cost of a drink 60 years ago, the color of a guitar 70 years ago, the rhythms of a night in his 20s.
“Some stuff follows me my whole life,” he said.
George “Buddy” Guy, who arrived in Chicago near the end of the Great Migration. Buddy Guy, who became one of Chicago’s great bluesmen, and one of the greatest guitarists ever. Buddy Guy, keeper of an American art form, the music from which all American music flows. Buddy Guy, a one-man chamber of commerce and embodiment of the blues. Buddy Guy, still in the business of playing the Legend Buddy Guy. Buddy Guy, a living storybook to reread once again — a Midwestern life of such cultural consequence and ingrained mythology, it begs a little clarity.
He was born July 30, 1936, in rural Louisiana, and grew up on a farm. He made $2.50 for every 100 pounds of cotton that he picked. He left home at 21 and came to Chicago on Sept. 25, 1957 — which is his other birthday, he likes to tell people. He’s made 19 records under his own name and many others with friends and collaborators. He’s won eight Grammys, and he never took a single guitar lesson.
In fact, he made his first guitar.
But depending on who’s telling that tale, as a child, he made the guitar out of rubber bands or wood or his mother’s hairpins. When I asked about that guitar, he replied: “OK, in the South, we got mosquitos that will take you out of bed! I used to go fishing, they suck your blood, you hit them and the blood runs. We had this chemical to use on them and when the can was empty, it was like an old cigar box. I’d seen a guitar in a magazine I couldn’t afford, so I took two tacks and made a little guitar neck with wire screen wires. Which you could never finger like a guitar. The strings would break. First time I learned to play a real guitar, I walked three miles playing, just for someone to see me. I saw a cousin. I yelled ‘Look at this!’ He said, ‘You got it!’ I said, ‘Don’t stop me or I’ll lose it!’”
His stories start one place and end elsewhere. He can sound so apocryphal at times. Even his son Greg Guy said: “All of them stories of his, I was in doubt myself, but they’re real.”
He bunches up stray facts as if not to waste time. He prefers to condense. On the other hand, he also doesn’t want to be rushed. Not long ago, at a show with the Foo Fighters and other bands, he was performing on a stage that rotated so each act could be cycled on and off stage quickly, but when the stage began rotating to signal the end of his set, Guy stepped off of the disc and continued to play on the non-rotating part. He’s still full of fight and contradiction. One reason he created the Checkerboard Lounge, his famed, long-gone South Side club, was to tour less and spend more time at home with his kids. And that was 50 years ago — as late as 2022, he was still averaging about 130 concerts a year. Everyone who knows him knows he can’t stop, won’t stop. He slips into conversation that he’s never been the equal of the greats who inspired him, those names you know even if you don’t listen to the blues — Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf. He says this minutes before a show. He says that he’ll try his best but who knows if it’ll be any good. Then within seconds, he’s killing, aiming his guitar neck into his audience.
Like a flamethrower, Carlos Santana described it.
Guy is a Chicagoan via Louisiana, a mash of the Delta branch of the blues and the urban blues pioneered in Illinois. He’s an upholder of tradition whose hook became unpredictability. He might wander off a stage and into bathrooms, playing guitar. He still wanders off the stage at nearly every show, still playing. I asked about this. He said:
“When I don’t do that, somebody will say you must not be feeling good. I got that from the late Guitar Slim in Louisiana. He’d play in Baton Rouge, where I’d moved. Clubs wouldn’t let bands play then until they sold a lot of whiskey. If a band started, they didn’t sell no more, people too busy watching. So they’d tell Slim, ‘Wait another 45 minutes.’ Anyway I’m in front of the stage and his band plays two numbers, then ‘Ladies and gentleman, Guitar Slim!’ But I don’t see nobody. They’re full of (expletive), I think. Then this heavy guy walks in the club holding Slim on his shoulders, like a baby in the park. Slim had this 150-foot cord, red and white hair. He was brought to the stage, climbed off those shoulders then started singing: The things I used to do… House goes crazy. I said to myself if I ever learn the guitar, I want to play like B.B. but act like Slim. When I first got to Chicago, blues guys sat in chairs on stage! Muddy’d be in a chair, like you to me.”
Nobody’d fault him for sitting at 88.
“Yeah, but look — his last years, B.B. sat in a chair. Big airports, I get a wheelchair now. But I’m not happy sitting down. My family was Baptist, and if you get happy, you shout, you get up. That’s what I thought I could bring to blues. The little tricks do get attention.”
That unpredictability is more predictable these days. Guy at 88 has become a comforting figure for those who worry about the future of the blues; he’s arguably the last thread connecting Chicago to the first generation of greats, coming out of the rural Southern poverty that defined early blues. And yet he’s also long past wanting for much. That’s the irony of having a legacy: You’re expected to represent the past even when you’re not that person anymore. Writer Albert Murray once decried American’s understanding of the blues as a “simpleminded expression of frustration and despair,” loved less for its art and craft and sound than as a kind of “therapeutic compensation” for being Black in America. Guy’s last 30 years have played like a period to that thought, brushing off decades of neglect and embracing the joy of the music, not only the pain.
But even Buddy Guy knows to stop, or semi-stop.
“The average person expects you still give them what you gave as a 20- or 30-year-old. The truth is, I might try, but it’s getting harder when you’re damned closer to 100.”
By the time Buddy Guy took the stage at Blues Fest, Millennium Park was past capacity. People were being turned away. Backstage, in the bowels of Pritzker Pavilion, musicians heard about fans jumping fences to get in. They shook heads, flattered to hear the excitement for a free annual festival, but keenly aware a lot of that excitement was for Guy: He was history, and, everyone heard, he was going away. Backstage was hectic, loud, like an airport terminal where everyone’s hauling guitars. Except for where Guy waited. He sat in the corner of a couch in his dressing room, flanked by water and chips, surrounded by his children and nephews and their children. Occasionally, a cheer from the huge crowd would penetrate this bunker and Guy would look up, impressed.
“Everyone keeps asking how I’m doing,” he said. “As if I have a choice but play! What’s 88 minus 6? I’ve been working, uh … 82 years. I’m going to try and enjoy what’s left.”
Let us now praise famous bluesmen: Buddy Guy is retiring at age 88
Buddy Guy, who just turned 88, will be officially retired from the road by early fall. Only, before that happens, before the Chicago legend slows, a few facts demand context.
www.chicagotribune.com
