Buddy Guy

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Buddy Guy

Born July 30, 1936
in Lettsworth, Louisiana
Genre(s) Blues
Notable guitars Fender Buddy Guy Signature Stratocaster
Years active 1950 - present
Official site Official Website

George "Buddy" Guy (born July 30, 1936) is an American blues and rock guitarist and singer. Known as an inspiration to Jimi Hendrix, Eric Clapton and other 1960s blues and rock legends, Guy is considered an important exponent of Chicago blues. He is the father of female rapper Shawnna.

Guy is known for his showmanship; for example, he plays his guitar with drumsticks, or strolls into the audience while jamming and trailing a long guitar chord. (Joining or leaping into the audience has long been common in both American popular and gospel music, as in the earlier work of Big Jay McNeely or the Dixie Hummingbirds).

Contents

[edit] Biography

Born in Lettsworth, Louisiana, Guy grew up in Louisiana where he learned to play guitar. In the early 1950s he began performing with bands in Baton Rouge. Soon after moving to Chicago in 1957, Guy fell under the influence of Muddy Waters. In 1958, a competition with West Side guitarists Magic Sam and Otis Rush gave Guy a record contract. Soon afterwards he recorded for the Cobra label. He recorded sessions with Junior Wells for Delmark Records under the pseudonym Friendly Chap in 1965 and 1966.

Guy’s early career was supposedly held back by both conservative business choices made by his record company (Chess Records)and “the scorn, diminishments and petty subterfuge from a few jealous rivals.” Chess, Guy’s record label from 1959 to 1968, refused to record Buddy Guy’s novel style that was similar to his live shows. Leonard Chess (Chess founder and 1987 Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inductee) denounced Guy’s playing as “motherfucking noise”. In the early 1960s, Chess tried recording Guy as a solo artist with R&B ballads, jazz instrumentals, soul and novelty dance tunes, but none were released as singles. Guy’s only Chess album, “Left My Blues in San Francisco,” was finally issued in 1967. Most of the songs belong stylistically to the era's soul boom, with orchestrations by Gene Barge and Charlie Stepney. Chess used Guy mainly as a session guitarist to back Muddy Waters, Howlin' Wolf, Little Walter, Sonny Boy Williamson, Koko Taylor and others. Image: Willie Dixon, Muddy Waters and a young Buddy Guy.

Guy's reputation spread to Great Britain with the American Folk Blues Festival in the 1960s, where young rockers like Eric Clapton, Jeff Beck, and the Rolling Stones were seeking out the roots of American blues. His first trip to the UK was in February 1965, during which Rod Stewart acted as his valet and Guy shared a bill with the Yardbirds. Guy’s tour exposed his music to a whole new generation of British musicians eager to soak it up. He was surprised to see how influential his music had become to English guitarists.

Guy later recalled:

Of course, I had a lot more energy than I have now—I was playing the guitar with my feet and throwing it up in the air—crazy stuff! But although I was getting to play overseas, back home I still didn't have a record. I thought that maybe it was because I played too loud and with too much feedback, then the next thing I know, Clapton and Hendrix are out there using the same tricks and selling millions of albums.

Guy reportedly grew increasingly frustrated with the unwillingness of Leonard Chess to let him cut loose with the loud, rock-influenced licks that regularly wowed live audiences. Guy left Chess Records in 1968, recounting:

When I got ready to go to Vanguard, that’s when Chess came to me and found out that Eric and his Cream and the Stones and Beck was hollering. Leonard came and told us, "Jesus, that’s the shit you’ve been trying to sell me for the last 12 years, and now it’s sellin' like hotcakes!" He bent over and said, "Kick me!"

Donald Wilcox noted in his biography of Guy:

Leonard Chess would eventually realize his mistake in not recognizing Buddy's appeal in the clubs, or that much of the appeal of the British rock bands was based on the kind of 'noise' that Buddy was producing live...Still, Chess had not yet released a single album by Buddy Guy. What saved Buddy at Chess was his versatility.

Ironically, Chess later released far more Buddy Guy albums (including compilations of unreleased sessions) after the artist left the label.

Buddy Guy was a leading star at the 1969 Supershow at Linoleum Factory, England that also included Clapton, Led Zeppelin, Jack Bruce, Stephen Stills, Buddy Miles, Glen Campbell, Roland Kirk, and Jon Hiseman. Image: 1969 Supershow.

By the late 1960s, Guy's career was in decline. The heavy blues-rock scene he had helped inspire was flourishing without him. For the next two decades, Buddy Guy had to endure the neglect many blues and rock artists faced in their careers: As visionaries and pathfinders they are overlooked while their followers received the fame, recognition and fortune.

Guy's career finally took off during the blues revival period of the late 1980s and early 1990s. It was sparked by Clapton's request that Guy be part of the '24 Nights' all-star blues guitar lineup at London's Royal Albert Hall and Guy's subsequent signing with Silvertone Records.

[edit] Music

While Buddy Guy's music is often labeled Chicago blues, his style is unique and separate. His music can vary from the most traditional, deepest blues to a creative, unpredictable and radical gumbo of the blues, avant rock, soul and free jazz that morphs at each night’s performance.

As New York Times pop music critic Jon Pareles noted in 2004:

Mr. Guy, 68, mingles anarchy, virtuosity, deep blues and hammy shtick in ways that keep all eyes on him...[Guy] loves extremes: sudden drops from loud to soft, or a sweet, sustained guitar solo followed by a jolt of speed, or a high, imploring vocal cut off with a rasp...Whether he's singing with gentle menace or bending new curves into a blue note, he is a master of tension and release, and his every wayward impulse was riveting.

Some blues fans and music critics believe that Guy's 1960–1967 Chess catalog remains his most satisfying body of work. This view discounts the pathfinding music Buddy was creating since his early live performances, some of which is captured in the American Folk Blues Festival albums. Eric Clapton, Jeff Beck and Jimmy Page appreciated this more radical side of Guy's music, in the early 1960s.

Guy’s songs have been covered by Led Zeppelin, Eric Clapton, the Rolling Stones, Stevie Ray Vaughan, John Mayall, Jack Bruce, and others. Several of Guy’s early songs and licks were allegedly stolen by the late Willie Dixon and Guy’s early record companies. [citation needed] Regardless, Guy is perhaps better known for his creative interpretation of the work of other songwriters.

Traditional blues fans may appreciate the albums, The Very Best of Buddy Guy, Blues Singer, Junior Wells' Hoodoo Man Blues, A Man & The Blues and I Was Walking Through The Woods. Contemporary blues and rock fans may appreciate Slippin’ In, Sweet Tea, Stone Crazy, Buddy's Baddest: The Best Of Buddy Guy, Damn Right, I’ve Got The Blues, and D.J. Play My Blues. Guy's live show is featured in the video Live! The Real Deal and he performs in the DVDs Lightning In a Bottle, Crossroads Guitar Festival, Eric Clapton: 24 Nights, Festival Express, and A Tribute to Stevie Ray Vaughan.

[edit] Entertainer

Guy is a showman who influenced how Jimi Hendrix and other musicians entertain on stage. Hendrix sometimes cancelled his own concerts to attend Guy’s club shows, which he filmed or audio taped. In Martin Scorsese's blues concert DVD, Lightning In A Bottle, footage shows an enchanted Hendrix in the audience watching a wild Buddy Guy performance.

Guy’s dramatic live shows used to involve much leaping off amplifiers; playing guitar with his feet, teeth, a handkerchief or a drumstick; playing guitar behind his back; playing guitar while hanging from the rafters by his ankles; and going on a walkabout into the audience on the end of a 150 foot guitar cord. Guy would sometimes begin his sets from inside the men’s washroom, all the while shaking up the house with his wild multi-fret bends and piercing, string snapping attack. He would then get on stage and dive into his solos, maybe capping a run by flipping his guitar backwards and sliding the pickups over his T-shirt, laughing all the way.

One trick Guy has perfected in recent years is pulling someone out of the audience—often an attractive woman—and having her paw the strings on his guitar, as Guy fingers the frets with his left hand. At one concert in the early '90s, playing to a huge hometown audience at Chicago's Ravinia Festival, Guy actually grabbed a nine-year-old boy by the wrist, pulled him on stage, and had him play the right-hand part of a robust and drawn-out solo.

Tom Lavin remembers the first time he saw Buddy Guy at a college concert. “Buddy was wearing a leopard skin blazer and when he soloed with one hand while he removed his jacket and then switched to soloing with the other hand while he took off the other sleeve, never missing a note. I thought it was the coolest thing I had ever seen. Right there I knew that's what I wanted to do.”

Guy recalls, "The first guitar player I saw putting on a show was Guitar Slim—I must've been 13 years old—he came out riding that guitar, wearing a bright red suit. I thought; 'I wanna sound like B.B. King, but I wanna play guitar like that.' " "Buddy's act was not premeditated or contrived," Donald Wilcox said in his biography of Guy. "His style was merely a natural by-product of being self-taught, having a compulsion to play, and being insecure enough to feel that if he didn't dazzle and hypnotize his audience with the flamboyant techniques he'd seen work for Guitar Slim, he'd be buried by competition from guitarists who were better technicians."

[edit] Influence

For almost 50 years, Guy performed flamboyant live concerts of energetic blues and blues rock, predating the 1960s blues rockers. As a musician’s musician, he had a fundamental impact on the blues and on rock and roll, influencing a new generation of artists.

As DJRadiohead once observed: “Rock and roll just could not be the same without Buddy Guy.” Buddy Guy helped modernize the blues, “moving the blues forward without losing sight of its roots.”

Buddy Guy has been called the bridge between the blues and rock and roll. He is one of the historic links between Chicago electric blues pioneers Muddy Waters and Howlin' Wolf and popular musicians like Eric Clapton, Jeff Beck, Jimi Hendrix and Jimmy Page as well as later revivalists like Stevie Ray Vaughan. This was what Stevie Ray Vaughan meant when he said, "Without Buddy Guy, there would be no Stevie Ray Vaughan." Even Guitarist magazine observed:

Without Buddy Guy, the blues, not to mention rock as we know it, might be a heckuva lot less interesting today. Take the blues out of contemporary rock music—or pop, jazz and funk for that matter—and what you have left is a wholly spineless affair. A tasteless stew. Makes you shudder to think about it...

In addition, Guy's pathfinding guitar techniques also contributed greatly to rock and roll music. Guy’s guitar playing was loud and aggressive; used pioneering distortion and feedback techniques; employed longer solos; had shifts of volume and texture; and was driven by emotion and impulse. These lessons were eagerly learned and applied by the new wave of 1960s British artists and later became basic attributes of blues-rock music and its offspring, hard rock and heavy metal music. Jeff Beck realized in the early 1960s: “I didn't know a Strat could sound like that — until I heard Buddy's tracks on the Blues From Big Bill's Copa Cabana album” (reissue of 1963 Folk Festival Of The Blues album) and “It was the total manic abandon in Buddy's solos. They broke all boundaries. I just thought, this is more like it! Also, his solos weren't restricted to a three-minute pop format; they were long and really developed.”

Guy could arguably be considered the inspiration, directly or indirectly, for every rock power trio format since Cream (i.e., bands such as the Jeff Beck Group, the Jimi Hendrix Experience, Rush, Nirvana). Clapton admitted that he got his idea for a blues-rock power trio during his teenage years while watching Buddy Guy's trio perform in England in 1965. Clapton later formed the rock band Cream, which was “the first rock supergroup to become superstars” and was also “the first top group to truly exploit the power-trio format, in the process laying the foundation for much blues-rock and hard rock of the 1960s and 1970s.”

Eric Clapton said "Buddy Guy was to me what Elvis was for others." Clapton, who's not prone to hyperbole, insisted in a 1985 Musician magazine article that "Buddy Guy is by far and without a doubt the best guitar player alive...if you see him in person, the way he plays is beyond anyone. Total freedom of spirit, I guess… He really changed the course of rock and roll blues."

Recalls Guy: "Eric Clapton and I are the best of friends and I like the tune "Strange Brew" and we were sitting and having a drink one day and I said ‘Man, that "Strange Brew"...you just cracked me up with that note.’ And he said ‘You should...cause it's your licks...’ " As soon as Clapton completed his famous Derek & the Dominos sessions (spawning "Layla") in October 1970, he co-produced (with Ahmet Ertegun and Tom Dowd) the Buddy Guy & Junior Wells Play The Blues album with Guy's longtime harp and vocal compatriot. That record, released in 1972, is regarded by some critics as among the finest electric blues recordings of the modern era.

In recognition of Guy's influence on Hendrix's career, the Hendrix family invited Buddy Guy to headline all-star casts at several Jimi Hendrix tribute concerts they organized in recent years, "calling on a legend to celebrate a legend." Jimi Hendrix himself once said that “Heaven is lying at Buddy Guy’s feet while listening to him play guitar.” Songs such as "Red House", "Voodoo Chile" and "Voodoo Child (Slight Return)" partly came from the sonic world that Buddy Guy helped to create. According to the Fender Players’ Club: “Almost ten years before Jimi Hendrix would electrify the rock world with his high-voltage voodoo blues, Buddy Guy was shocking juke joint patrons in Baton Rouge with his own brand of high-octane blues. Ironically, when Buddy’s playing technique and flamboyant showmanship were later revealed to crossover audiences in the late Sixties, it was erroneously assumed that he was imitating Hendrix."

Stevie Ray Vaughan once declared that Buddy Guy "plays from a place that I've never heard anyone play." Vaughan continued:

Buddy can go from one end of the spectrum to another. He can play quieter than anybody I've ever heard, or wilder and louder than anybody I've ever heard. I play pretty loud a lot of times, but Buddy's tones are incredible…he pulls such emotion out of so little volume. Buddy just has this cool feel to everything he does. And when he sings, it's just compounded. Girls fall over and sweat and die! Every once in a while I get the chance to play with Buddy, and he gets me every time, because we could try to go to Mars on guitars but then he'll start singing, sing a couple of lines, and then stick the mike in front of me! What are you gonna do? What is a person gonna do?!

Jeff Beck affirmed:

Geez, you can’t forget Buddy Guy. He transcended blues and started becoming theater. It was high art, kind of like drama theater when he played, you know. He was playing behind his head long before Hendrix. I once saw him throw the guitar up in the air and catch it in the same chord.

Beck recalled the night he and Stevie Ray Vaughan jammed with Guy at Buddy Guy’s Legends club in Chicago: “That was just the most incredible stuff I ever heard in my life. The three of us all jammed and it was so thrilling. That is as close you can come to the heart of the blues.” Image: Jeff Beck with Guy.

According to Led Zeppelin’s Jimmy Page: “Buddy Guy is an absolute monster” and “There were a number of albums that everybody got tuned into in the early days. There was one in particular called, I think, American Folk Festival Of The Blues, which featured Buddy Guy—he just astounded everybody.” Former Rolling Stones bassist Bill Wyman: “Guitar Legends do not come any better than Buddy Guy. He is feted by his peers and loved by his fans for his ability to make the guitar both talk and cry the blues… Such is Buddy’s mastery of the guitar that there is virtually no guitarist that he cannot imitate.” Guy has opened for the Rolling Stones on numerous tours since the early 1970s. Slash: "Buddy Guy is the perfect combination of R&B and hardcore rock and roll." ZZ Top’s Billy Gibbons: "He (Buddy Guy) ain't no trickster. He may appear surprised by his own instant ability but, clearly, he knows what's up." Lonnie Brooks: “Buddy Guy is a master. He’s the bravest guitar player I’ve every seen on a bandstand. He’ll pull you into his trap and kill you. He owns that bandstand and everyone knows it when Buddy’s up there." Image:Guy performing with the Rolling Stones at the Orpheum Theatre, Boston. Image:Buddy Guy.

[edit] Awards

In addition to being an inductee of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, Guy has previously served on the Hall of Fame’s nominating committee. Guy has won five Grammy awards both for his work on his electric and acoustic guitars, and for contemporary and traditional forms of blues music. By 2004, Buddy Guy had also earned 23 W.C. Handy Awards (the most any one blues artist has received), Billboard Magazine's prestigious The Century Award (Guy was its second recipient) for “distinguished artistic achievement,” the title of Greatest Living Electric Blues Guitarist, and the Congressional Medal of Arts (awarded by the President to those who have made extraordinary contributions to the creation, growth and support in the arts in the United States).

[edit] Rock and Roll Hall of Fame

B.B. King, Buddy Guy and Eric Clapton at the 2005 Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Inductee Ceremony
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B.B. King, Buddy Guy and Eric Clapton at the 2005 Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Inductee Ceremony

Guy was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame on March 14, 2005 by Eric Clapton and B.B. King. Clapton recalled in 1965, seeing Guy perform in London’s The Marquee Club and was impressed by Guy’s playing, his looks, his star power. He remembered seeing Guy pick the guitar with his teeth and play it over his head—two tricks that later influenced Jimi Hendrix. Seeing Guy’s power trio perform also gave him the idea for a power trio format Clapton later used in his rock band Cream. Guy’s acceptance speech was concise: “If you don’t think you have the blues, just keep living.”


[edit] Blues caretaker

Muddy Waters passed the torch to Buddy shortly before his death when he said, "Don't let them goddam blues die on me." Guy has kept that promise by passing on reverence to the blues to the next generation. The Buddy Guy Foundation helps pay for the tombstones of long forgotten blues musicians, giving them the respect Guy feels they deserved in life. Guy is also the proprietor of Buddy Guy's Legends, the premier blues nightclub in Chicago.

[edit] Discography

  • 1965 Hoodoo Man Blues – Delmark (w/ Junior Wells band)
  • 1966 Chicago/The Blues/Today! vol. 1 – Vanguard (w/ Junior Wells band)
  • 1967 I Left My Blues in San Francisco – Chess
  • 1968 A Man and the Blues – Vanguard
  • 1968This Is Buddy Guy (live) – Vanguard
  • 1970 Buddy and the Juniors – MCA (w/ Junior Mance & Junior Wells)
  • 1974 I Was Walking Through the Woods – Chess (rec. 1960–64)
  • 1977 Live at Montreaux – Evidence (w/ Junior Wells)
  • 1981 Stone Crazy – Alligator
  • 1982 Drinkin' TNT 'n' Smokin' Dynamite (live) – Blind Pig (rec. 1974 Montreax Jazz Fest.)
  • 1983 Buddy Guy – Chess
  • 1991 Alone and Acoustic – Alligator (rec. 1981 w/ Junior Wells)
  • 1991 Damn Right, I've Got the Blues – Silvertone/BMG
  • 1991 Buddy's Baddest: The Best of Buddy Guy – Silvertone
  • 1992 The Very Best of Buddy Guy – Rhino/WEA
  • 1992 The Complete Chess Studio Recordings – Chess (2 CD, 1960–67)
  • 1993 Feels Like Rain – Silvertone
  • 1994 Slippin' In – Silvertone
  • 1996 Live: The Real Deal – Silvertone
  • 1997 Buddy's Blues – Chess "Chess Masters"
  • 1998 As Good As It Gets – Vanguard
  • 1998 Heavy Love – Silvertone
  • 1998 Last Time Around - Live at Legends – Jive
  • 2001 Sweet Tea – Silvertone
  • 2003 Blues Singer – Silvertone
  • 2003 Chicago Blues Festival 1964 (live) – Stardust
  • 2005 Bring 'Em In (Buddy Guy album) – Jive
  • 2006 Can't Quit The Blues:Box Set – Silvertone/Legacy Recordings

[edit] References

    • “Damn Right I've Got the Blues: Buddy Guy and the Blues Roots of Rock-And-Roll (1993) by Donald Wilcox and Buddy Guy, Duane Press 1999 paperback: ISBN 094262713X

    [edit] External links

    [edit] Magazine articles

    [edit] News articles

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