When Buddy Guy turns 73 on July 30 he’ll be hard at work, juggling his near-constant touring with recording the sequel to last year’s Skin Deep.
That album was the most recent milestone in a long, distinguished career that started in the bars around Baton Rouge, La., about 60 miles from Guy’s hometown of Lettsworth, La. It’s the first of the 60-plus albums he’s made that exclusively features songs he had a hand in writing. Guy and producer Tom Hambridge drew on the legend’s past to co-author biographical tales like the title track and the tongue-in-cheek “Out in the Woods.”
Despite the sparseness of his songwriting credits over the years, Guy’s ferocious, impulsive style of playing guitar — and his participation in the evolution of Chicago blues with the Cobra, Chess, and Vanguard labels — has made him one of the most emulated string-slingers on the planet. Eric Clapton, Jeff Beck, Jimmy Page, and Stevie Ray Vaughan are among those who’ve copped his licks, most famously played on a variety of Stratocasters or a Gibson ES-335. In the ’70s and early ’80s Guy flirted with ES-335s similar to the ’59 Dot reissue produced today by the Gibson Custom Shop, as well as Guild models of similar design.
To celebrate Guy’s birthday, we’re raided our personal vault of interviews with Guy over the past two-and-a-half decades to get his impressions of his best, baddest recordings:
“Sit and Cry the Blues” and “You Sure Can’t Do” (1958)
“Those were the first records I ever made. I got to make those records because of Magic Sam. He saw me in a battle of the guitars and took me over to Cobra Records.”
Muddy Water’s Folk Singer (1963)
“Leonard Chess wanted to make an acoustic blues record to cash in on the folk craze. He told Muddy to go to Mississippi to find an old guy who could really play the stuff. But Muddy called me. That was one of the thrills of my life. Chess was cussin’ when I came to the session with Muddy. But when he heard me, he just sat there with his mouth open.”
Junior Wells’ Hoodoo Man Blues (1965)
“We had a regular jam session every Monday morning at Theresa’s on the South Side. This guy [Delmark Record’s founder Bob Koester] would come in every Monday for those 7 a.m. jam sessions. They’d be packed with people either going to work or coming home. The bars were always busy. We didn’t rehearse none of that stuff when we made the album. We just went into the studio and played what we were playing at the jams. We got a picture of one of them sessions with the late [drummer] Fred Below. The bottles of whiskey was on the amplifiers and piano. The cups was falling… spilled beer and gin on the floor.”
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A Man & the Blues (1967)
“That was me at my best. I had the people it took to make a great blues record. [Pianist] Otis Spann and Fred Below and [guitarist] Wayne Bennett…man if you don’t play some good blues with them, you can’t play. And we had been playing together in clubs and at Chess for years. The stuff Spann and I was doing — the little coordination stuff… You don’t replace that. Spann’s shoes are still empty.”
His early Chess singles “Watch Yourself” and “The First Time I Met the Blues”
[Chess music director] “Willie Dixon and Leonard Chess was always saying, ‘That’s a little too much guitar.’ I would just sit back and say ‘okay.’ I wasn’t really secure in my playing. I figured I mustn’t be good enough to do my own thing. Now I know they were wrong.”
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Junior Wells’ South Side Blues Jam (1970)
“Back in those days, that’s when they started saying ‘South Side Blues’ and ‘West Side Blues.’ We were all just a bunch of players in Chicago. We didn’t give a damn if it was South Side or West Side. We just wanted to play some blues.”
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Damn Right, I’ve Got the Blues (1991)
“I swear this is the first time I ever got to sound like me on a record. Everybody’s always told me to turn down or play through this or that amp in the studio. This is the first time I got to turn up and sound like Buddy Guy.”
Sweet Tea (2001)
“When the producer Dennis Herring sent me the songs by Junior Kimbrough he wanted me to record, I said, ‘What in the hell kind of blues is this?’ I’d never heard this Mississippi hill country stuff – and I grew up way out in the woods. But I said to myself, ‘Buddy, put your foot forward.’ And I did. It sounds mean!”
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Skin Deep (2008)
“My whole life I show up in the studio and I don’t know half the songs. I don’t know who brought them in. I’m reading lyrics that make me just go through the motions. But I’ve lived these songs.”
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