Buddy Guy's legend begins in a small town near Baton Rouge

By Tommy Comeaux and Hoodoo Jimmy Simpson, with interviewer Rob Payer of WBRH

Today he's one of the blues' biggest artists, the winner of several Grammys, a guitarist praised by the likes of B.B. King and Eric Clapton, and the owner of the most popular blues club in Chicago.

But the legend of Buddy Guy begins quite modestly not far from Baton Rouge, in a little town called Lettsworth, where the future blues icon was born in 1936.

"A lot of the young generation of people now haven't the slightest idea I'm from here because there's not too much information out there on blues people like myself and some of the greats that have passed on," Guy said. "Yeah, this is it: Lettsworth and Baton Rouge, and later on, Chicago."

"But this is home, regardless of how they feel in Chicago," he continued. "...Chicago was named the capital of the blues, but if you go back through the history and find out where we're really from, the real credit is due to Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama."

Given his roots, it's understandable how Guy found comfort in the blues.

"We didn't have running water, electricity or anything like that," Guy said. But that didn't stop the young creative genius from playing music. His first "guitar" was homemade from a lighter fluid can, a small, flat board and screen wire he'd taken from his mother's bedroom window. "Up there on the bayou, the mosquitoes would eat you up."

"Every time she'd make enough money to buy a little piece of screen, I'd strip it and make guitar strings out of it," Guy said.

Even as a child growing up way out in the country, Guy found blues music close to home. At Christmas, friends and family would gather to share "a jug of wine and a case of beer." They'd also share food.

"My mother would cook all these wood-stove cakes and we'd kill the pig," Guy said. "You'd have to either eat it all or give it away because we didn't have the refrigeration to keep it. You'd give all the neighbors part of it."

"They'd make a round of all the houses and when they finished, they'd go to this little bar in Torras, La., (not far from Lettsworth)," he said. "Then they'd play the jukebox."

Guy recalls listening to blues standards like "Boogie Chillun" and "Still a Fool" and artists like Lightnin' Hopkins on that old jukebox, music that apparently touched something deep inside the young Guy.

After finishing grade school, Guy moved to Baton Rouge to live with his oldest sister, taking with him an old guitar with two strings. In the afternoons, he'd sit on the front porch and pluck away on it. One day, fate drove up.

"I was sitting there one Friday and this gentlemen passed and he said, 'Son, if you had a guitar, I bet you could learn to play,'" Guy recalled. "I said, 'I imagine I could.'"

The man asked the ninth grader what he'd be doing the next afternoon and Guy told him, "I sit here every evening and pick away at it."

"He came by that Saturday evening and said, 'C'mon, I'm going buy you a guitar," Guy said, adding the generous stranger returned with a Harmony guitar he'd purchased on Third Street and a quart of beer. Later, his sister returned home from working at LSU. "Then we got in his raggedy car, an old Chrysler, and they said, 'We got a guitar and some beer, let's go out in the country to my parent's house,'" Guy remembered.

"I don't know who that guy was," he continued, but when the three got to his parents' home, Guy found out that the generous stranger had grown up with his father and the two had played music together in their youth. "They started discussing how they used to play and I went, "wow."

New guitar in hand, Guy began working at LSU during the day and "banging away with Lightnin' Slim and them and trying to learn as much as I could," he said.

Lightnin' Slim and Slim Harpo were among the most popular bluesmen in the Baton Rouge area when Guy was first trying to become a serious musician and they unknowingly gave the young bluesman a schooling in the blues he has never forgotten.

"I followed them and learned a lot," Guy said. "Lightnin' Slim's was the first electric guitar I'd ever seen."

"This guy's joking," Guy said at the time, adding he believed that Slim would just be acting like he was playing a guitar while a record player would actually be providing the guitar sounds. But when Lightnin' Slim struck up John Lee Hooker's "Boogie Chillun," one of Guy's favorite songs, the young man realized there was no pantomime going on there.

Slim was one of many of the era's biggest blues artists Guy went to see, only one of many influences the bluesman picked up in his younger days.

"I was into Muddy Waters and Little Walter" and Big Joe Turner and some of the other big blues artists of the time, Guy said. "I'd seen these guys (Turner and others) because we had a place here called the Temple Roof and they used to bring them in every Monday night."

But Guy didn't get to experience Muddy and Walter on those Monday nights on the roof of the old Temple Theatre on North Boulevard. "They never did bring them here." Guy was determined to see and hear his idols, though, and it would later serve as one of the reasons he headed to Chicago in 1957.

After he'd been playing the Baton Rouge area for a while, Guy's parents gave their blessing to his plans to move to Chicago.

"My mother told me not to worry about her," Guy said. "I could make three times what I was making here and that's what drove me to Chicago, to work and to be able to go watch Muddy and them."

"I said I'm going so I can watch the masters play, so I can see how it's supposed to be done," he said.

Before he left Louisiana, Guy performed at every little club in south Louisiana where the blues were being played.

"They had a lot of little small blues clubs," he said. It was in one of those small local blues clubs, Sitman's, that Guy first performed for a crowd.

"I used to play there every Tuesday night with the guy who gave me my first job, "Big Poppa" John Tilley," Guy said, with a slide guitarist, a drummer and Big Poppa on harmonica.

The band played gigs across south Louisiana, from near the Louisiana-Mississippi state line to clubs in the Baton Rouge and Port Allen area. "We would play all those little old small joints," Guy said.

It's been said that the young fresh-from-the-farm guitarist had to swig a less-than-tasty mixture of Dr. Tichenor's and wine to soothe his stage fright during those early days. And the now-world famous bluesman, who's played to huge crowds all over the planet, admits he still gets nervous before he gets on stage.

"I'm still like that," Guy said. "Before I go to the stage, I take a shot of cognac and my jitteries slow down. Muddy and the Wolf and them taught me that."

But the "jitteries" don't go away, he added.

"The public is not easy to please," Guy said, later adding that he gives everything he's got in every performance." I have to go out there and prove myself as a pretty good guitar player."

"If you come to see me play, you may not even like me, but you can go and say, 'He gave me the best he had," he said. "That's the way I look at it."

(Editor's note: This is the first of a series of articles on Buddy Guy, published in the February 2003 edition. Rhythm City would like to thank Rob Payer for sharing his thorough interview with the blues giant and for his neverending support of the local music scene.)

PART 2

Buddy Guy finds his place in Chicago

By Tommy Comeaux, with interviewer Rob Payer of WBRH

"You're the only one who can take my place," legendary bluesman B.B. King once told Buddy Guy and judging by the Lettsworth native's accomplishments in the 40-plus years since Guy left for the greener blues pastures of Chicago that King was probably right.

Nearly four decades later, Guy is undeniably second only to King in the blues hierarchy, having won numerous Grammys and more W.C. Handy Awards than anyone else.

Along the way, Guy has sold millions of records and won the admiration of some of music's greatest guitarists, including Eric Clapton, who calls Guy "the greatest blues guitarist ever."

His career in Chicago began modestly. It was actually Guy's Gills guitar that first opened doors for the Lettsworth native who cut his musical teeth in Baton Rouge's thriving blues scene of the late 1950s.

One of Guy's first stops after arriving in Chicago in 1957 was at Chess Records, where he dropped of a demo tape he had recorded in Baton Rouge.

"They never did hear it," Guy said, but everyone in the studio, who were all busy with a Bobby Wayne Bennett session, noticed the guitar he was carrying with him.

"They took the guitar away from me and let Wayne finish making the session with it," Guy said. "I left out of the studio and never did hear no more from Chess." At least, not for a while. Guy would later join Chess as a sessions guitarist.

Influenced by the likes of Big Joe Turner, John Lee Hooker, Lightnin' Slim, Guitar Slim, Lazy Lester, T-Bone Walker and Lightnin' Hopkins, many of whom he'd seen live in Lettsworth, Baton Rouge or New Orleans, one of the main reasons Guy headed to Chicago was to see live performances by two of his idols, Muddy Waters and Little Walter.

"I had found out you could go watch them at the clubs there like we were playing here," Guy said. "I said I'm going so I can watch the masters play, so I can see how it's supposed to be done."

When he left Baton Rouge, the young Guy had planned on little more than getting a day job in the Chicago area and playing guitar in the blues clubs at night. Stardom never occurred to him.

"In Chicago, they weren't paying that much then, so I was working days and playing the guitar at night until I got discovered in September 1967," Guy said, adding discovery to him at the time was an invitation by Junior Wells to tour with him.

Still not sure fame and fortune were imminent, Guy took a three-week vacation from his day job to make the Wells tour, which included dates in Canada in front of crowds of about 30,000, according to Guy.

"I didn't just say, 'I quit my job,' because it's not an easy life," Guy said. "...I was afraid it wasn't going to work out and I was going to get hungry, which I did, and starve out there."

It was Guy's flamboyant style of performing, both his playmanship and his showmanship, that gained him his notoriety, a style that went against everything that Chicago bluesmen were doing when Guy arrived there in 1957.

"When I got there, everybody sat in a chair to perform," Guy said. "They had a million guitar players in Chicago who could play rings around me, but they all were sitting around playing as an orchestra player, Muddy and all of them."

Guy relied on what he'd learned back home, the style of Guitar Slim, to make his performances stand out from the other guitarists. "I said, 'Y'all can outplay me, but you're not going to outdo me.'"

It was during those early years in Chicago that Guy met King, a meeting that still brings fond memories to the world's number two bluesman.

"B.B. King had never played in Chicago when I go there," Guy said, but became aware of Guy when he went to the Windy City soon after Guy began performing there. "He heard the word that somebody sounded like him," so King looked him up.

"I was playing this blues club, the 708 Blues Club, one of the biggest, most popular blues clubs there," Guy said, adding King was not the only big name in the blues there that night: Guy found himself performing for a roster of who's who in the blues.

"I looked out and there was Muddy (Waters), B.B. King, Little Walter, Sonny Boy (Williamson) and Howlin' Wolf watching me," he continued. "And I was like, 'What do I play?" I didn't even have a record out yet."

It wouldn't be long, though, before the talented Guy would have records out.

After winning several "Battle of the Blues" contests at Chicago area nightclubs, Guy was introduced by fellow blues guitarist Magic Sam to Eli Toscano, the owner of the Artistic and Cobra labels.

Guy recorded two singles for Artistic before the company went bankrupt, then he returned to Chess Records where he found his niche as a session guitarist for the label's certifiable blues legends, many of whom Guy idolized. He found himself backing the likes of Muddy Waters, Sonny Boy Williamson, Little Walter, Howlin' Wolf and others.

The young blues journeyman knew his place, though, was behind these big name bluesmen.

"I would play behind them because I never did want to blow them off the stage," Guy said. "Just for Muddy to ask for me to play with him, that's a gold record for me."

Chess Records, though, would not allow the boisterously rocking bluesman to record the kind of albums he wanted and Guy eventally signed with Vanguard Records in 1967. There he found a kindred spirit in harpist Junior Wells and the two recorded numerous popular albums, some of which found a new audience with white blues fans.

In the process, Guy's flamboyant, highly amplified playing style influenced some of the top performing guitarists of the late 1960s, stars like Clapton, Jeff Beck and Jimi Hendrix.

"They didn't even think about playing the blues until they heard me," Guy said Clapton and Beck have told him. "It's a pretty good compliment coming from someone like them, the Erics and the Becks, but when I go to the stage, I have to forget all about them and say, 'Let me show you who Buddy Guy is.'"

Around 1967, Guy finally got a call from Chess Records' owner Leonard Chess. Guy, though, was afraid he was getting called into Chess' office to get fired from the session work he was still doing there.

After all, Chess and many of the bluesmen Guy had done session work for had complained he played too loudly.

"They would come in and get on me because I was too loud while I was warming up," Guy said. "Every time I went in, I'd plug in and go sit in the corner...I would turn it up and go to stretching my fingers, like an athlete warming up, and they would all curse."

Guy said he'd never been to Chess' office before, and he expected he'd have to sit around all day to be seen, but Chess surprised him. "This time, he busted out the door and said, "Come on in.'"

"I'm sitting there and I'm shaking in his office and he puts this album on," Guy said, adding it was one of Cream's earliest. "And Eric (Clapton) and them are blasting away."

Guy said he wondered what Chess was up to: the man had continually fussed about Guy's loud playing and now Chess was playing these loud, boisterous blues/rock records for him.

"Then he switches and plays somebody else (another raucous blues/rock bands), then he bends over and he says, 'I want you to kick me,'" Guy said, adding he was very tempted to do just that. "I was so stunned and shocked and I said, 'Kick you for what?' He said 'Because you've been trying to show us (dummies) that this music is it.'"

"I want you to come in and make us a record like this and tell us how much money you want," Chess said.

It was a case of "too little, too late," though, for Chess Records. "Because they had done me so badly, I just said money's not important to me now," Guy said.

The money may have not been important to him by that time, but the blues still was. Today, the blues are still important to the man who has redefined the genre.

"Blues music is ups and downs and I've had more downs than ups and I still haven't quit playing," Guy said.

The truth is, Guy is playing more now than ever and apparently he's enjoying it more than he ever did.

"Right now, they have to stop me from playing every time I go to the stage, because I don't look at a clock when I'm playing," Guy said. "I want people to get the best of me."

(Editor's note: This is the second in a series of articles on Buddy Guy, published in the March 2003 edition. Guy will be performing at the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival on Sunday, May 4. Rhythm City would like to thank Rob Payer for sharing his interview with the blues icon.)

Part 3 - Coming Soon