Blog
Buddy Guy: When I Left Home
Written by Jimmy
If you can’t play the blues, you can read about ’em. I started with Clapton’s autobiography, but just finished Buddy Guy’s auto-biography while travelling to Melbourne. Fantastic. I’ll now go out and get all his music, but here are some highlights from the book:
1. His favourite partner throughout was Junior Wells and his favourite album was Hoodoo Man. He said the he and junior brought out the funk in each others’ blues. Here’s the title song:
2. He started playin’ the blues after hearing John Lee Hooker play Boogie Chillen on the radio. Buddy’s dad bought him a 5 dollar guitar with two strings and he spent years learning to play Boogie Chillen and a dozen other blues songs with the two string guitar. When he later got a six string, he felt he had been given an orchestra for his fingers. He John Lee Hooker playing it 50 years later:
3. His whole recording career he felt he was ‘held back’ doing mostly acoustic blues or very constrained blues on electric by the head of Chess records. Only in the 90’s was he able to break out and record like he played live. One song he put together to start to breakout was Damn Right I Play the Blues. Here he is with John Mayer:
Let’s buy his albums and visit the Legends Blues bar in Chicago – a little blues club he founded in Chicago. And yes, that’s the Rolling Stones appearing there on May 18th!