Buddy Guy just turned 90 on July 30. As he undertakes his BG90 tour, he looks back on some 70 years of experience as a blues guitarist, performing on stages all over the world.
From the two-string diddly bow he made as a boy growing up in Louisiana to his first proper guitar — gifted to him by a stranger — to his rise in Chicago, where he was mentored by greats like Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf, B.B. King and Guitar Slim, Guy rose to become a blues guitarist in his own right.
But as Guy tells Guitar Player, his blues expertise came the hard way. He was essentially a self-taught player, with little formal training beyond a couple of lessons with a high school music teacher who, to Guy’s chagrin, couldn’t show him the things he really wanted to learn.
“I moved to Baton Rouge, Louisiana, to go to high school,” he recalled to Guitar Player in our January 1999 issue. “And they had a music teacher there, and I thought, ‘My God, I’ve got what I’ve always wanted. I’m gonna let this guy teach me how to play the guitar.’
“I went in, and the teacher showed me some scales, and I said, ‘I don’t wanna play that; I wanna play like this’ — I had a Muddy Waters record and a John Lee Hooker record at the time. He looked at me and said, ‘I can’t teach you that.’
“So I said, ‘Well, then I can’t take a music class!’
“I was so excited by the way Muddy played the slide, how B.B. King squeezed the strings, and how Lightnin’ Hopkins and T-Bone Walker played their things. I said, ‘If they don’t teach this in school, I’ve got to find it myself.’
“Nowadays,” Guy continued, “young people have advantages that I didn’t have. It wasn’t until 20 or 30 years ago that you even saw blues written in music notation — they claimed they couldn’t write it.”
Guy built on that natural guitar talent with a wealth of knowledge and skills he gained over his formative years. He then passed that knowledge on to players like Eric Clapton, who saw Guy onstage in England in the mid-1960s and was moved to form his own blues trio, Cream.
His influence lives on in a new breed of guitarists. That includes players like Gary Clark Jr., John Mayer and Jonny Lang, who learned to play blues authentically by watching — and learning — from the master, who honed his craft with a Fender Stratocaster in his hands.
One tremendous benefit that Guy did have — after moving to Chicago in 1957 — was seeing Chicago blues legends such as Muddy Waters, Wayne Bennett, Matt Murphy and Earl Hooker when they were at the height of their powers.
But no matter what a musician’s cultural advantages — or disadvantages — might be, Guy maintains that anyone with enough heart can play the blues.
“If you love the blues, you can play it. Every interview I’ve ever had, I get asked ‘Can a white man play the blues?’ I hate that question! It’s a human being, man. If I had eight fingers on my left hand, then I would say, ‘No, a white man probably can’t play like me.’
“But these guys, man — the late Stevie Ray Vaughan, this young Jonny Lang, Eric Clapton, and Jeff Beck, to name a few — there’s some things they do that I wish I had known.
“Look at athletes — boxers, football players, baseball players — they come in all sizes and all colors, and all those guys are great. Music is the same way. There’s no advantage or disadvantage. If you want to learn this thing, man, and you love it the way I love it, you can do it.”
