Buddy Guy Talks the Blues

Buddy Guy Talks the Blues
January 14, 2011
Michael Wright
Gibson Lifestyle

He was a hero to everyone from Eric Clapton to Jimi Hendrix. He played with nearly every major blues star of the last 70 years. And he’s still tearing it down on a regular basis at his own club in Chicago. He is, of course, Buddy Guy – and he sat down recently with ClashMusic to talk about the music that has coursed through his veins for 74 years.

“I played music no matter what,” said Guy, as he looked back on his youth. “But I didn’t look to make a career out of it, because I didn’t think I was good enough. I played the guitar because of the love of music. I didn’t see me making a decent living out of playing the guitar. I’m seventy-four-years-old now. Once, when I was fifteen-years-old, you couldn’t reach out there and find a guitar player doing well like it is today, where some of these guitar players making millions of dollars. Wasn’t no such thing as that.”

He continued, “You look at Arthur Crudup and Lightnin’ Hopkins and those fellas like T-Bone Walker: they was the ones who were playing the blues music then, and I imagine they would make enough to buy a bottle of wine or maybe get a hamburger or something like that, but they weren’t going to no banks or nothing like that. I had the pleasure of meeting Lonnie Johnson – I didn’t meet Robert Johnson – but I met Fred McDowell, Son House and those people like that, and I met them before they passed away, and they were just down in Mississippi playing for a drink on a weekend – what they call a Saturday Night Fish Fry. I’m like saying I want to do that, because that’s what I wanted to do. I didn’t say one day I’d be talking to you and making a decent living out of playing my guitar.”

Guy recalled being reigned in from his wild style of playing by Chess Records founder Leonard Chess – until Chess began to hear that same music being played by British artists of the 1960s.

“They wouldn’t give me a chance at it until the British guys exploded, then Leonard [Chess] came back – I think it was maybe four or six months before he passed away – and he sent Willie Dixon to my house. He said, ‘Go get the [expletive]’ – if you know what I mean – ‘and bring him down.’ And I went down and he said, ‘Man, you’ve been trying to give us this stuff ever since you come here and we was too [expletive] dumb to understand. And it’s selling, and it’s hot, because the British guys are playing it.’

“And he put on a record, I think by Hendrix or Cream, and then he said, ‘You come in here now and do exactly what you want.’ He didn’t live too long after that. But I went in there doing that, because I copied that stuff from the late Guitar Slim and T-Bone – they was putting on a show with the guitar. I wasn’t as good a guitar player like some of those guys like the late Wayne Bennett, Matt Murphy, Earl Hooker – I could go on and on – but I still considered myself in school. When I saw Muddy and B.B. and them play, I didn’t even want them to know I was in the house after they got to know me, because I wanted to sneak in and watch them and learn something.”