Is the legendary guitarist and singer the last of his kind?
In spite of his
accolades, Guy has always been burdened with insecurity. “I’ve
never made a record I liked,” he says.Photograph by Stefan Ruiz for
The New Yorker
It’s a winter
night in Chicago. Buddy Guy is sitting at the bar of Legends, the
spacious blues emporium on South Wabash Avenue. He hangs out at the
bar because he owns the place and his presence is good for business.
The tourists who want a “blues experience” as part of their trip
to the city come to hear the music and to buy a T-shirt or a mug at
the souvenir shop near the door. If they’re nervy, they sidle up to
Guy and ask to take a picture. Night after night, he poses with
customers—from Helsinki, Madrid, Tokyo—who inform him, not
meaning to offend, that he is “an icon.”
“Thank you,” he
says. “Now, let’s smile!”
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| Buddy Guy, Raleigh NC, February 2013 |
Buddy Guy is
eighty-two and a master of the blues. What weighs on him is the idea
that he may be the last. Several years ago, after the funeral of B.
B. King, he was overcome not only with grief for a friend but also
with a suffocating sense of responsibility. Late into his eighties,
King went on touring incessantly with his band. It was only at the
end that his wandering mind led him to play the same song multiple
times in a single set. With King gone, Guy says, he suddenly “felt
all alone in this world.”
The way Guy sees it,
he is like one of those aging souls who find themselves the last
fluent speaker of an obscure regional language. In conversation, he
has a habit of recalling the names of all the blues players who have
died in recent years: Otis Rush, Koko Taylor, Etta James, James
Cotton, Bobby Bland, and many others. “All of ’em gone.”
Guy admits that no
matter how many Grammys he’s collected (eight) or invitations he’s
had to the White House (four), no matter how many hours he has spent
onstage and in recording studios (countless), he has always been
burdened with insecurity. Before he steps onstage, he has a couple of
shots of Cognac. The depth of the blues tradition makes him feel
unworthy. “I’ve never made a record I liked,” he says. As far
as his greater burden is concerned, he radiates no certainty that the
blues will outlast him as anything other than a source of curatorial
interest. Will the blues go the way of Dixieland or epic poetry,
achievements firmly sealed in the past? “How can you ever know?”
he says.
As he talks, he
keeps his eyes fixed on the stage, where a young guitar player is
strenuously performing an overstuffed solo on “Sweet Home Chicago.”
In this club, you are as likely to hear that song as you are to hear
“When the Saints Go Marching In” at Preservation Hall. The
youngster is a reverent preservationist, playing the familiar licks
and enacting the familiar exertions: the scrunched face, the eyes
squeezed shut, the neck craned back, all the better to advertise
emotional transport and the demands of technical virtuosity. It’s
fair to say that Buddy Guy, having done much to invent these licks
and these moves, is not impressed. The homage being paid seems only
to embarrass him. He is generous to young musicians who earn his
notice—he even brings them up onstage, giving them a chance to
shine in his reflected prestige—but he does not grade on a curve.
The tradition will not allow it. Guy turns away from the stage and
takes another sip of his drink, Heineken diluted by a glass full of
ice.
“The young man
might consider another song,” he says.
“They didn’t
waste any time firing up the publicity machine.”
Guy has always been
a handsome presence: slick, fitted suits in the nineteen-sixties;
Jheri curls in the eighties. These days, he is bald, twinkly, and
preternaturally cool. He wears a powder-blue fedora and a long black
leather jacket, a gift from Carlos Santana. He flashes two blocky
rings, one with his initials and the other with the word “blues,”
each spelled out in diamonds.
His influence over
time has been as outsized as his current sense of responsibility. In
the sixties, when Jimi Hendrix went to hear him play at a blues
workshop, Hendrix brought along a reel-to-reel recorder and shyly
asked Guy if he could tape him; anyone with ears could hear Buddy
Guy’s influence in Hendrix’s playing—in the overdrive
distortion, the frenetic riffs high up on the neck of the guitar.
Guy can mimic any of
his forerunners and sometimes he will emulate B. B. King,
interrupting a prolonged silence with a single heartbreaking note
sustained with a vibrato as singular as a human voice. But more often
he throws in as much as the listener can take: Guy is a putter-inner,
not a taker-outer. His solos are a rich stew of
everything-at-once-ness—all the groceries, all the spices thrown
into the pot, notes and riffs smashing together and producing the
combined effect of pain, endurance, ecstasy. All blues guitar players
bend notes, altering the pitch by stretching the string across the
fretboard; Guy will bend a note so far that he produces a feeling of
uneasy disorientation, and then, when he has decided the moment is
right, he’ll let the string settle into pitch and relieve the
tension.
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| Buddy Guy 2011 King Biscuit Blues Festival .jpgt |
Even on a night when
he is coasting through a routine set list, it is hard to leave his
show without a sense of joy. He cuts an extravagant figure onstage,
wearing polka-dot shirts to match his polka-dot Fender Stratocaster.
He is a superb singer, too, with a falsetto scream as expressive as
James Brown’s. Joking around between songs, he can be as bawdy as
his favorite comedians, Moms Mabley and Richard Pryor. This is not
Miles Davis; he does not turn his back to the audience. He is eager
to entertain. The unschooled think of blues as sad music, but it is
the opposite. “The blues is an impulse to keep the painful details
and episodes of a brutal experience alive in one’s aching
consciousness, to finger its jagged grain, and to transcend it, not
by the consolation of philosophy, but by squeezing from it a
near-tragic, near-comic lyricism.” That’s how Ralph Ellison
defined it. Guy puts it more simply: “Funny thing about the
blues—you play ’em ’cause you got ’em. But, when you play
’em, you lose ’em.”
Three chords. The
“one,” the “four,” and the “five.” Twelve bars, more or
less. Guy’s devotion and sense of obligation to the blues form
began long before the death of B. B. King. The story goes like this.
The son of
sharecroppers, George (Buddy) Guy was born in 1936, in the town of
Lettsworth, Louisiana, not far from the Mississippi River. On
September 25, 1957, he boarded a train and arrived in Chicago,
another addition to the Great Migration, the northward exodus of
black Southerners that began four decades earlier. But Guy hadn’t
come to Chicago to work in the slaughterhouses or the steel mills; he
came to play guitar in the blues clubs on the South Side and the West
Side. He was twenty-one. He had served his musical apprenticeship in
juke joints and roadhouses in and around Baton Rouge and knew the
real action was in Chicago, in smoke-choked bars so cramped that the
stage was often not much bigger than a tabletop. If all went well,
Guy hoped to get a contract at Chess Records, the hot independent
label run by Leonard and Phil Chess, Jewish immigrants from Poland
who were assembling an astonishing stable of artists, including
Little Walter, Willie Dixon, Howlin’ Wolf, Etta James, John Lee
Hooker, Sonny Boy Williamson, Bo Diddley, and Chuck Berry. Most
important, for Guy, Chess was the record label of the king of the
Chicago bluesmen, McKinley Morganfield, better known as Muddy Waters.
In his first months
in town, Guy found a place to crash, but he was hungry much of the
time and he missed his family. He played as often as he could at
blues hangouts like Theresa’s and the Squeeze Club, but it wasn’t
easy to make an impression when there were so many topflight
musicians around. And some nights could be scary. Guy was playing at
the Squeeze when a man in the audience buried an icepick in a
fellow-patron’s neck. “When the cops saw the dead man, they
couldn’t have cared less,” Guy recalled years later. “Didn’t
even investigate. To them it meant only one more dead nigger. In
those days cops came around for their bribes and nothing else.”
One evening,
emboldened by a drink or three, Guy went to the 708 Club, a blues bar
on Forty-seventh Street. The owner’s name was Ben Gold. Clubs along
Forty-seventh Street weren’t so difficult to crack. They stayed
open deep into the morning; workers coming off the night shift were
ready to drink and hear some music. A guy like Ben Gold needed all
the musical talent he could get to fill the hours, whether it was
from stalwarts like Muddy Waters and Otis Rush or from a nervous
newcomer from Louisiana. That night, Guy was feeling desperate, and
he decided to perform “The Things That I Used to Do,” a hit by
one of his idols, an eccentric, self-destructive musician named
Guitar Slim. When Guy was fifteen or sixteen, he bought a fifty-cent
ticket to see Slim at the Masonic Temple, in Baton Rouge. He wedged
himself close to the stage, hoping to watch the man’s hands, to
study his moves. He waited through the opening acts until, finally,
the announcer declared, “Ladies and gentlemen, Guitar Slim!” When
the band started into “The Things That I Used to Do,” you could
hear Slim’s guitar—but where was he? “I thought they were all
full of shit and all they were doing was playing the record,” Guy
told me. It was only after a while that anyone could see Slim, his
hair dyed flaming red to match his suit, being carried forward
through the crowd like a toddler by a hulking roadie. Using a
three-hundred-foot-long cord to connect his guitar to his amplifier,
he played a frenzied solo as his one-man caravan inched him toward
the stage. And, once he joined the band, Slim pulled every stunt
imaginable, playing with the guitar between his legs, behind his
back. He raised it to his face and plucked the strings with his
teeth. Many years later, Jimi Hendrix would pull some of the same
stunts to dazzle white kids from London to Monterey, but these tricks
had been around since the beginning of the Delta blues. As Guy
watched Guitar Slim, he made a decision: “I want to play like B. B.
King, but I want to act like Guitar Slim.”
That night at the
708 Club, Guy did his best to fulfill that teen-age ambition. He
remembers playing “The Things That I Used to Do” as if
“possessed”: “Maybe I knew my life depended on tearing up this
little club until folks wouldn’t forget me.”
When the set was
over, Ben Gold came up to him and said, “The Mud wants you.”
Guy did not quite
understand. Gold explained that Muddy Waters had been in the club,
watching. Now he was waiting for Guy on the street.
Guy went outside,
and spotted a cherry-red station wagon parked nearby. He saw his idol
sitting in the back seat, his pompadour done up high and shiny. Muddy
Waters rolled down the window and told him to get in.
Waters said, “You
like salami?”
“I like anything,”
Guy said. He hadn’t eaten for a few days.
Waters knew the
feeling. He produced a loaf of bread, a knife, and a thick package of
sliced meat wrapped in butcher paper. “You won’t complain none
about this salami,” he said. “Comes from a Jewish delicatessen
where they cut it special for me. Have a taste.”
“It’s my
four-o’clock chilling reminder.”
As Guy recalls in
his 2012 memoir, “When I Left Home,” written with David Ritz, he
and Waters talked for a long time, about picking cotton in the Delta,
about music, about the clubs on the South Side. Guy admitted that
things had been tough. Lonely, broke, and frustrated, he was thinking
of heading back to Lettsworth.
Muddy waved that
off. Look at me, he said. He’d grown up on the Stovall Plantation,
near Clarksdale, Mississippi. He played blues for nickels and dimes,
and figured that he’d have to make his livelihood in the fields.
But he kept at his music and developed a local reputation. In the
summer of 1941, two outsiders, Alan Lomax, representing the Library
of Congress, and John Work, a music scholar from Fisk University,
came to Coahoma County with a portable disk recorder. Lomax asked
folks where he could find a singer he’d been hearing about, Robert
Johnson. He was told that Johnson was dead, but that a young fellow
named Muddy Waters was just as good. Lomax and Work set up the
recording equipment at the commissary of the Stovall Plantation and
persuaded Waters to come around. Muddy knew all kinds of songs,
including Gene Autry’s “Missouri Waltz” and pop hits like
“Chattanooga Choo-Choo,” but Lomax and Work didn’t want the
whole jukebox. They wanted the local stuff, and recorded Waters
singing “Country Blues.” When Waters heard the recording, he had
a realization. “I can do it,” he said. “I can do it.” He
headed North, in 1943, to make a life in the blues.
In his early days in
Chicago, Waters played for change alongside the pushcarts in
“Jewtown,” a bustling commercial district on Maxwell Street. Some
nights, he played in bars. There were a few good acts around—Big
Bill Broonzy, Memphis Minnie, Memphis Slim, Eddie Boyd—but it was a
dispiriting scene. “There was nothing happening,” he said at the
time. You couldn’t play the country blues and expect to make a
living at it. Waters made his living driving a truck. But once he’d
armed himself with an electric guitar, a gift from his uncle, in
1947, Waters went about inventing a new form, an urban blues, the
Chicago blues, and this caught the attention of the Chess brothers.
In 1950, Chess put out a Muddy Waters original, “Rollin’ Stone,”
and sold tens of thousands of records. And look at him now. “I got
enough salami for the two of us,” he told his new protégé.
Guy still didn’t
see how he could compete in Chicago. But Muddy assured him that Ben
Gold would give him gigs. Gold had seen how Guy’s performance
worked up the crowd, and, he said, when patrons get all “hot and
bothered,” they drink more, the owner gets paid, and, usually, so
does the band.
“Funny, ’cause
tonight was the night I almost called my daddy for a ticket home,”
Guy said.
“Tonight, you
found a new home,” Muddy Waters told him.
Over the next
generation, Buddy Guy crossed paths with Muddy Waters countless
times. He recorded with him, he performed with him, he went drinking
with him and heard all the lore. Along with the other top blues
performers in town—Junior Wells (who played harmonica alongside
Buddy for years), Willie Dixon, Howlin’ Wolf, Etta James, Mama
Yancey, James Cotton, Otis Rush, Koko Taylor, and Magic Sam—they
played the clubs. But never for much money. Well into his forties,
Buddy Guy was often making just a few bucks a night.
In the seventies and
eighties, Guy ran a club of his own on the South Side, the
Checkerboard Lounge. After a stadium gig, in 1981, the Stones dropped
by to play with Muddy Waters and Buddy. Guy remembered it as his one
chance to make some money on the club, but the Stones entourage was
so large, and the room so small, that there were almost no paying
customers. He didn’t make a dime.
In 1983, Ray
Allison, Waters’s drummer, came by to say, “Old man is kinda
sick.” Waters was dying of lung cancer, and was frightened of what
lay ahead. “Don’t let them goddam blues die on me, all right?”
he told Guy. A few days later, he was gone.
When my father was
in his fifties, he developed a tremor in his right hand, the onset of
early Parkinson’s disease. He was a dentist and it must have
terrified him, but, for a while at least, he somehow steadied his
hand as he gripped a dental instrument. He kept his sickness a secret
as long as he could. His living, his family’s well-being, depended
on it. A Parkinsonian dentist—it was like a premise for a dark
Buster Keaton film, the drill, waggling in the air, inching toward
the helpless, cotton-wadded patient. The patients peeled away. Soon
he was retired and in a wheelchair. There were nightmares and
hallucinations, butterflies flitting in front of his face.
He’d spoken very
little of his life. When he told me some detail of his past—hearing
Sidney Bechet at a club in Paris when he was in the Army—it seemed
almost illicit. The singular joy he allowed himself was music, and
music was the way I could talk most easily with my father. His
recommendations—Louis Armstrong’s Hot Fives and Hot Sevens,
Billie Holiday, Sarah Vaughan—seemed to come from a happier time.
I’m sure that he was the only dentist in North Jersey who abandoned
Muzak for “I Got My Mojo Working.”
When I was in
college, he called to tell me that a singer named Alberta Hunter was
performing at a club in the Village called the Cookery. I should be
sure to see her, he said, and, as a way of insisting, he sent me a
check for twenty dollars to pay the cover charge. Hunter, who was a
contemporary of Bessie Smith’s, was the Memphis-born daughter of a
Pullman porter. As a girl, she ran off to Chicago to sing the blues,
and she became friends with Armstrong, Ma Rainey, Sophie Tucker, and
King Oliver. She co-wrote “Downhearted Blues” with Lovie Austin:
Trouble, trouble, I’ve had it all my days. After Hunter’s mother
died, in 1954, she spent the next couple of decades working as a
registered nurse at a hospital on Roosevelt Island. Now that she had
retired from nursing, Hunter decided that she would sing again. My
father had led me once more to the blues, to one of the originals, in
her last years. Hunter, that night at the Cookery, was bawdy,
fearless, magnificently alive. At my father’s funeral, we set up a
boom box and played his favorite music. People left the synagogue to
the strains of “Downhearted Blues.”
Buddy Guy doesn’t
get back to Lettsworth much. In December, though, he flew down from
Chicago to collect what he thought of as the honor of his life. The
Louisiana legislature had voted unanimously to name a piece of
Highway 418 in Pointe Coupee Parish “Buddy Guy Way.” The
celebration began on a Friday at Louisiana State University, where
Guy had worked as a handyman and a driver. The next day, after a
gumbo-and-catfish lunch at a place called Hot Tails, Guy and a small
group of friends travelled the fifty miles from Baton Rouge to
Lettsworth on a chartered bus.
It was cold and
rainy. Very few people live in Lettsworth these days. “It’s a
ghost town now,” Guy says. Some of the wooden shacks have long
since been abandoned by sharecropper families who went North. But
today people came out to wave from their porches. Guy looked sharp,
in the Carlos Santana leather coat. The honors themselves weren’t
unusual—speeches, a plaque—but it all struck deep. Guy’s mother
never saw him perform. “Getting honored at the Kennedy Center and
now this, it’s hard to say which one is better,” he told me. Guy
invoked the words of a Big Maceo song: “You got a man in the East,
and a man in the West / Just sittin’ here wondering who you love
the best.”
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| Buddy Guy Receives Kennedy Center Honors |
Guy grew up in one
of those shacks in Lettsworth. No electricity, no indoor plumbing, no
glass windows. A white family, the Feduccias, owned the land and
lived in a big house; black sharecroppers, like the Guys, picked
pecans and cotton. The Feduccias took half of the proceeds. Guy’s
parents had a third-grade education. His mother cooked in the big
house. His father worked in the fields. As a child, Buddy went to a
segregated school and early mornings and evenings he’d pick cotton,
two dollars and fifty cents for a hundred pounds.
I’m looking for
a volunteer from the audience who could potentially become more than
a volunteer, maybe even a friend.”
“My father worked
all day cutting wood with a crosscut saw,” Guy told me. “If that
ain’t exercise, I don’t know what is. I look at those gyms with
all those machines and I figure, fuck that. You can’t sell me on
that shit. If my father hadn’t done all that ‘exercise,’ he’d
still be living.”
There were hardly
any holidays. The reliable exception was Christmas. Someone would
butcher a pig, and there were greens from the garden—a feast. “I
never heard of other holidays,” he says. “We didn’t get no
fuckin’ Fourth of July. On Labor Day, we labored.”
One friend who came
around on Christmas was an odd cat named Henry (Coot) Smith. Coot
carried a guitar, and, after playing a few songs and having a couple
of drinks, he’d take a short nap before going on to the next house.
While Coot slept, Buddy picked up that guitar and strummed it; it
seemed like something magical, something he had to master. Much of
the music he heard in those days was gospel music from church. On
jukeboxes, he liked the bluesmen especially: Arthur Crudup, who wrote
“That’s All Right,” Elvis Presley’s first hit, and John Lee
Hooker, a Mississippi plantation worker, who went North to work as a
janitor in a Detroit Ford factory and, in 1948, recorded a droning,
spooky hit called “Boogie Chillen.” This was the first
electrified blues Guy had ever heard, and he wanted to play just like
that. He crafted his first instrument by stripping strands of wire
out of the shack’s mosquito screens and stringing them tightly
between two cans.
At the general
store, Guy played the jukebox, listening to other black kids who had
taken the train North and become stars. He started dreaming.
Eventually, for two dollars, he got a less primitive instrument, and
his favorite thing to do was to wander outside and play, all by
himself. “There was nothing to stop that sound,” he says. “I’d
go sit on top of the levees and bang away with my guitar, and you
could really hear it. . . . That’s just how country sound is. A
little wind would carry it even better.” As a teen-ager, Guy quit
pumping gas and learned his craft in roadhouses around Baton Rouge.
He never took a lesson. He listened. He watched. He had tremendous
stage fright. Cheap wine, known as “schoolboy scotch,” was the
remedy.
“Nobody ever sat
me down and said here’s B-flat and here’s F-sharp,” he says. “I
had to figure that out myself after I started playing with a band.
I’m eighty-two years old. Most of the people above me—John Lee
Hooker, Lightnin’ Hopkins—I faced them, I watched their hands to
see where they were going. They played by ear. And that’s how I
play now. I play by ear. I don’t play by the rules.”
On his valedictory
trip to Lettsworth, people shyly approached him. As Guy got off the
bus, a white man in his sixties said that his father had grown up
with Guy. They couldn’t play together or go to the same school, but
they knew each other. He talked of how proud everyone was of Guy.
Guy was getting
tired, but he hung in there. Some nights at Legends, when he’s been
posing for cell-phone pictures for a little too long, he gets
irritable and wonders how it can take so goddam long to push the
button. But now he was ready to stay as long as anyone liked. “My
mother told me, ‘If you’ve got flowers to give me, give ’em to
me now,’ ” he said. “ ‘I won’t smell them when I’m gone.’
I was glad to get this honor now.”
In the sixties, just
as Guy was reaching a certain stature in the blues world, something
curious began to happen. White people happened—white blues fans and
white blues musicians. For its first half century, the blues was
popular entertainment for, and of, black people. Not completely, but
almost. Guy told me that, when he played clubs in Chicago during the
late fifties, “if you saw a white face, it was almost always a
cop.”
With time, it became
clear that some white kids, including Mike Bloomfield and Paul
Butterfield, were in the audience, watching Guy the way he’d once
watched Guitar Slim. At the same time, the best of the British
Invasion expressed a kind of community awe toward the American urban
blues. When Guy first toured Great Britain, in 1965, all the white
English guitar heroes—Jeff Beck, Jimmy Page, and Eric
Clapton—flocked backstage to ask him how he did this and how he did
that. Guy had spent so much of his recording career backing up other
musicians that he was shocked that people knew his name, much less
the nuances of his work. But they did. As a young singer, Rod Stewart
was so in thrall to Guy that he asked to carry his guitars.
“Our aim was to
turn people on to the blues,” Keith Richards, who had formed a
friendship with Mick Jagger by trading Chess blues records, has said
of the early days of the Rolling Stones. “If we could turn them on
to Muddy and Jimmy Reed and Howlin’ Wolf and John Lee Hooker, then
our job was done.” When the Stones were invited to play on the
American television show “Shindig!,” they insisted on appearing
alongside Howlin’ Wolf, who had never received that kind of
exposure. They invited Ike and Tina Turner, Buddy Guy, Junior Wells,
and B. B. King to open for them.
And yet there was
something unsettling about the spectacle of the Stones or Eric
Clapton playing turbocharged versions of Robert Johnson, Mississippi
Fred McDowell, and Muddy Waters to fifty thousand white kids a night,
most of them oblivious of the black origins of those songs. Clapton,
for one, experienced a measure of guilt and, eventually, acted on it.
“I felt like I was stealing music and got caught at it,” he told
the music critic Donald E. Wilcock. “It’s one of the reasons
Cream broke up, because I thought we were getting away with murder,
and people were lapping it up. Doing those long, extended bullshit
solos which would just go off into overindulgence. And people thought
it was just marvelous.” In 1976, Clapton went on a drunken, racist
rant onstage, in Birmingham—an incident, he later said in an
elaborate apology, that “sabotaged everything.” Clapton never
stopped playing the blues. In 2004, he put out an entire album
covering Robert Johnson songs; it sold two million copies.
Some critics,
notably the poet and playwright LeRoi Jones (Amiri Baraka), found the
prospect of white blues players making a fortune enraging. In “Black
Music,” he wrote, “They take from us all the way up the line.
Finally, what is the difference between Beatles, Stones, etc., and
Minstrelsy. Minstrels never convinced anyone they were Black either.”
Black performers
almost never echoed that sentiment publicly; Waters and Guy were
usually quick to express friendship with the Stones, Clapton, and the
rest. Yet hints of their disappointment came through. “It seems to
me,” Guy said in the nineteen-seventies to an interviewer for the
magazine Living Blues, “all you have to do is be white and just
play a guitar—you don’t have to have the soul—you gets farther
than the black man.”
It also hurt that
black audiences, particularly younger black audiences, were moving
away from the Chicago blues. B. B. King told Guy that he cried after
he was booed by such an audience. “He said that his own people
looked on him like he was a farmer wearing overalls and smoking a
corncob pipe,” Guy recounted in his memoir. “They saw him as a
grandfather playing their grandfather’s music.”
As late as 1967, Guy
drove a tow truck during the day and played the clubs at night. The
hours were punishing, and high blood pressure and divorce followed.
(Guy married twice and divorced twice; he has eight adult children.)
In Germany, he played at the American Folk Blues Festival, but he got
booed, he said, because the audience thought he “looked too young,
dressed too slick, and my hair was up in a do. Someone said he was
also disappointed that I didn’t carry no whiskey bottle with me
onstage. They thought bluesmen needed to be raggedy, old, and drink.”
“Go wipe your feet
on the neighbor’s doormat.”
Expectations placed
constraints on his recordings, too. As sympathetic as the Chess
brothers were to black musicians, and as shrewd as they’d been in
marketing their work, they had been reluctant to have Guy unleash the
wildness in his playing. As the singer-songwriter Dr. John said of
Guy’s early records, “You feel a guy in there trying to burst
out, and he’s jammed into a little bitty part of himself that ain’t
him.”
Elijah Wald, a
historian of the blues who has written biographies of Josh White and
Robert Johnson, told me, “I feel like Buddy Guy is somebody who,
due to American racism, never quite reached his potential. He could
have been a major figure, but he was pigeonholed as a museum piece,
even in 1965. . . . Nobody from Warner Bros. was coming to Buddy Guy
and saying, ‘Here’s a million dollars, what can you do?’ ”
Bruce Iglauer, the owner of Alligator Records, a blues label in
Chicago, agrees. Buddy Guy was one of a small handful of “giants,”
he said, who helped define the blues but never got the chance to
become household names: “The door was never open to them at the
time when they were most likely to walk through. By the time the
doors were opened by Eric Clapton and the Stones, these guys were
already in their thirties and forties.”
In the late
nineteen-sixties, Guy recounts, Leonard Chess called him into his
office. “I’ve always thought that I knew what I was doing,” he
told Guy. “But when it came to you, I was wrong. . . . I held you
back. I said you were playing too much. I thought you were too wild
in your style.” Then Chess said, “I’m gonna bend over so you
can kick my ass. Because you’ve been trying to play this ever since
you got here, and I was too fucking dumb to listen.”
Chess’s failure
could have stayed with Guy as a bitter memory. But he has turned the
episode into a tidy, triumphant anecdote. He refuses any hint of
resentment: “My mother always said, ‘What’s for you, you gonna
get it. What’s not for you, don’t look for it.’ ”
There is no
indisputable geography of the blues and its beginnings, but the best
way to think of the story is as an accretion of influences. Robert
Palmer, in his book “Deep Blues,” writes of griots in Senegambia,
on the West Coast of Africa, singing songs of praise, of Yoruba
drumming, of the African origins of the “blue notes,” the flatted
thirds and sevenths, that are so distinctive in early Southern work
songs and later blues. There are countless studies on the influence
of the black church and whooping preachers; of field hollers and work
songs sung under the lash in the cotton fields of Parchman Farm, the
oldest penitentiary in Mississippi; of boogie-woogie piano players in
the lumber and turpentine camps of Texas. The Delta blues, the kind
of music that would one day galvanize Chicago, originated, at least
in part, on Will Dockery’s plantation, a cotton farm and sawmill on
the Sunflower River, in Mississippi, where black farmers lived in the
old slave quarters. Charley Patton and Howlin’ Wolf were residents.
So was Roebuck (Pops) Staples, the paterfamilias of the Staple
Singers. Accompanying themselves on guitar, they sang songs of work,
heartbreak, the road, the rails, the fragility of everything.
“The blues contain
multitudes,” Kevin Young, the poet and essayist (and this
magazine’s poetry editor), writes. “Just when you say the blues
are about one thing—lost love, say—here comes a song about death,
or about work, about canned heat or loose women, hard men or harder
times, to challenge your definitions. Urban and rural, tragic and
comic, modern as African America and primal as America, the blues are
as innovative in structure as they are in mood—they resurrect old
feelings even as they describe them in new ways.”
The richness of a
form, however, does not guarantee its continued development or
popularity. Guy didn’t begin to make real money until the early
nineteen-nineties, when he was nearing sixty. Like Sonny Rollins in
jazz, Buddy Guy was now in the business of being a legend, an
enduring giant in a dwindling realm. In 1991, “Damn Right I’ve
Got the Blues,” an album on the British label Silvertone, sold well
and won a Grammy; not long afterward, two more albums of his, “Feels
Like Rain” and “Slippin’ In,” also won Grammys. He began
playing bigger halls around the world. His most recent album is
titled, almost imploringly, “The Blues Is Alive and Well,” and
one of the cuts is “A Few Good Years”:
I been mighty lucky
I travel everywhere
Made a ton of money
Spent it like I
don’t care
A few good years
Is all I need right
now
Please, please, lord
Send a few good
years on down
Guy still performs
at least a hundred and thirty nights a year, including a “residency”
at his club every January.
Last spring, I
called my elder son and asked him to go with me to see Guy at B. B.
King Blues Club & Grill, in Times Square. The place opened in
2000, and a lot of great acts had performed there—James Brown,
Chuck Berry, George Clinton, Aretha Franklin, Jay-Z—but the rents
kept increasing, and now it was going out of business. Guy was there
to close his old friend’s club. I’d be lying if I said it was a
transcendent night. It was a routine night. He opened with “Damn
Right,” which has become a kind of theme song, and then launched
into a series of tributes. He played Muddy Waters (“Hoochie Coochie
Man”), B. B. King (“Sweet Sixteen”), Eric Clapton (“Strange
Brew”), Jimi Hendrix (“Voodoo Child”). He did his Guitar Slim
thing, walking through the crowd while playing. He did his Charley
Patton thing, cradling the guitar, playing with his teeth. He did his
act, and we walked out happy to have been there.
I was talking to
Bruce Iglauer, the Alligator Records man, who said that he, too, has
seen many routine sets, but also some extraordinary ones. He walked
into Legends not long ago and, by chance, Guy was onstage, singing
“Drowning on Dry Land,” an Albert King hit from 1969: A cloud of
dust just came over me, I think I’m drowning on dry land. The music
was fresh and spare. “And the singing!” Iglauer said. “He was
singing like the high tenor of a gospel quartet. Guy has said he
doesn’t like his own voice, but when he immerses himself in his
music his voice makes you cry, the pitch bending and the vibrato, and
all at the top of his register, just about to crack. For ten minutes,
he was the greatest blues singer on earth. People who can reach down
and reach the depths of their soul and hand that to an
audience—soul-to-soul communication? It’s what you hope for.”
Buddy Guy lives in
Orland Park, a suburb twenty-five miles south of Chicago. His house,
set back from the main road, is vast and airy, and sits on fourteen
wooded acres. There’s a collection of vintage cars outside: a ’58
Edsel, a ’55 T-Bird, a Ferrari. The house became a possibility only
after “Damn Right I’ve Got the Blues.”
 |
| Junior Wells - Muddy Waters - Buddy Guy |
Guy gets up
somewhere between 3 and 5 a.m., the lingering habit of country life.
Mornings, he likes to putter around, shop, run errands. Then there is
a long “siesta,” from one to seven, before the evening begins at
Legends or on tour. (Even on the road, the morning after a late gig,
Guy expects the band to be on the bus by four or five—“ready to
go or left behind.”) He lives alone. There is an indoor pool, but,
he said, “I ain’t never been in it.” He has reduced the failure
of his two marriages to epigrammatic scale: “They weren’t happy
when I wasn’t doing good, and when I was doing good they wasn’t
happy because I was on the road all the time.”
Both of his ex-wives
and his extended family came for Thanksgiving. Guy did all the
cooking. He loves to cook. When I came by late on a Sunday morning,
he was in the kitchen making a big pot of gumbo. Much of the animal
and vegetable kingdoms simmered in his pot: crab, chicken, pork
sausage, sun-dried shrimp, okra, bell pepper, onion, celery. Dressed
in baggy jeans and a sweatshirt, Guy was hunched over the gumbo,
adding just the right measure of hot sauce and, at the end, Tony
Chachere’s Famous Creole Cuisine gumbo filé. He did this with the
concentration he might apply to a particularly tricky riff. A pot of
Zatarain’s New Orleans-style rice simmered nearby.
Guy took me around
the house to give the flavors, as he said, time to “get
acquainted.” There were countless photographs on the walls: all the
musicians one could imagine, family photographs from Louisiana,
grip-and-grin pictures from when he was awarded the National Medal of
Arts in the Bush White House and from the Kennedy Center tributes
received during the Obama Administration. (Obama has said that, after
Air Force One, the greatest perk of office was that “Buddy Guy
comes here all the time to my house with his guitar.”)
“Two at a time,
damn it, two at a time!”
An enormous jukebox
in the den offered selections from pop, gospel, rock, soul. “I
listen to everything,” Guy said. “I’ll hear a lick and it’ll
grab you—not even blues, necessarily. It might even be from a
speaking voice or something from a gospel record, and then I hope I
can get it on my guitar. No music is unsatisfying to me. It’s all
got something in it. It’s like that gumbo that’s in that kitchen
there. You know how many tastes and meats are in there? I see my
music as a gumbo. When you hear me play, there’s everything in
there, everything I ever heard and stole from.”
As we looked at a
row of black-and-white photographs, it was clear that the shadows of
Guy’s elders in the blues never leave his mind. “I hope to keep
the blues alive and well as long as I am able to play a few notes,”
he told me. “I want to keep it so that if you accidentally walk in
on me you say, ‘Wow, I don’t hear that on radio anymore.’ I
want to keep that alive, and hope it can get picked up and carry it
on.
“But who knows?”
he continued. “The blues might just fade away. Even jazz, which was
so popular when I first got here—all of that disappeared.”
We were sitting at
the dining-room table. When I returned to the subject of whether the
blues would survive as a living form, Guy thought awhile. He recalled
the nightly ritual at Legends, when the m.c. does a cheesy-seeming
thing and asks audience members where they’re from. The nightly
census usually reveals tourists from out of town, new to Chicago and,
often enough, to this music. When Guy hears that, he said, “I can’t
help thinking: Somebody forgot us, forgot the blues.”
Well, not entirely.
There are still some extraordinary musicians around who play and sing
the blues with the sort of richness that Guy admires: Robert Cray,
Gary Clark, Jr., Bonnie Raitt, Adia Victoria, Keb’ Mo’, Derek
Trucks and Susan Tedeschi, Shemekia Copeland. Guy has even coached a
couple of teen-age guitar prodigies: Christone (Kingfish) Ingram, who
comes from the Delta, and Quinn Sullivan, who first performed onstage
with Guy when he was seven. But as Copeland, a singer and the
daughter of the guitarist Johnny Copeland, told me, “The blues as
Buddy knows it, as he does it, really will be gone when he is gone.”
In fact, she went on, “there are some artists now who think that if
they call themselves blues artists it’s like saying, ‘I have
herpes.’ Like it’s some terrible thing.”
Among
African-American audiences, and for so many around the world, the
dominant music has long been hip-hop. What’s the link, if any,
between the blues and hip-hop? Willie Dixon, who created some of the
most famous blues songs in the Chess catalogue, wrote in his memoir,
“The blues are the roots and the other musics are the fruits.” In
some of the earliest proto-hip-hop performers, those roots were easy
to hear. The Last Poets, the Watts Prophets, Gil Scott-Heron, and
others called on blues lines and blues chord changes. Beyoncé, a
dominant figure in pop and hip-hop, is fluent in the blues, a musical
and emotional strain that’s especially pronounced on a song like
“Don’t Hurt Yourself,” on “Lemonade,” or when she performs
as Etta James in the film “Cadillac Records.” But as beats,
electronics, and the like began to dominate the form, the connection
between root and branch, between blues and hip-hop, became more
attenuated.
Guy’s daughter
Rashawnna, born to his second wife, grew up in Chicago’s hip-hop
world. She knows Kanye West and Chance the Rapper. Performing as
Shawnna, she was a featured presence on “What’s Your Fantasy,”
a hit for Ludacris. She had a hit of her own called “Gettin’ Some
Head,” which sampled Too Short’s “Blowjob Betty.”
“When I first
started listening to it I was tapping my feet and my ex-wife said,
‘You hear what she’s saying?’ ” Guy recalled. When Guy
admitted that he loved the beat but could not quite keep up with the
pace of the lyrics, his ex-wife just said, “Sit down.”
Guy recalls, “My
daughter told me, ‘This is your music and we just take it a step
further.’ It’s like when the electric guitar came up on Lightnin’
Hopkins. Leo Fender and Les Paul turned the old blues into folk
music.”
Rashawnna, who now
works part time at Legends, said that, if blues is often about the
journey, hip-hop is about the conditions of the street. “I believe
the connection is through the lyrics and the expression,” she went
on. “The blues came from being down and out, and making the best of
it. Hip-hop is an explanation of growing up in the ghetto, telling
our story, making the best of things.” She worries that her father
wears too heavily his sense of duty to the blues and to bluesmen
lost. “We worry about him, but he’s happy to keep his promise to
Muddy Waters and B. B. King. That’s why he won’t stop touring.”
Her father just
smiles. Can’t stop, won’t stop. Every night onstage is in the
service of what he loves best, and the rest was mapped out from the
start. “Death is a part of life,” Buddy Guy says. “My mother
would tell us as children, ‘If you don’t want to leave here, you
better not come here.’ Sure as hell you come, sure as hell you go.”
♦
An earlier version
of this article misstated the name of an award received by Buddy Guy.
This article appears
in the print edition of the March 11, 2019, issue, with the headline
“Holding the Note.”
David Remnick has
been editor of The New Yorker since 1998 and a staff writer since
1992.
