It’s almost the end of the road for Buddy Guy. In 2022, the blues guitarist announced the extensive Damn Right Farewell Tour, which will soon put an end cap on the incredible seven decades the nearly 88-year-old virtuoso has dedicated to traversing the country, igniting audiences 130-plus times a year with his quick and nimble electric picking that, he says, has all been in an effort “to keep the blues alive.”
“I promised all of the older guys who are no longer here with me that I’d always try,” Guy adds, referencing such blues godfathers as Howlin’ Wolf, Muddy Waters and B.B. King.
His Sunday night performance closing out the Chicago Blues Festival will bring him back to the event where he has logged so many milestone moments, from the ”Super Chicago Guitar Jam” in 1988 where Guy huddled with Otis Rush, Son Seals Blues Band and Koko Taylor and her Blues Machine, to his tribute to B.B. King shortly after King’s passing in 2015.
“When you get to a certain age — you know, I remember watching all the guys who I learned everything from, the older they got, they’d forget songs, and you’re not giving people what they paid for,” Guy says of his decision to wrap up his illustrious touring career. He cautions it won’t be the last time he graces a Chicago stage; his long-running January residencies at his South Loop club Legends will continue, and he may do festivals in the future, as health and time permits. It’s just a matter of quality over quantity at this point.
“I don’t want to go out there every night and can’t do what I used to do because who can do what you could do at 22, and now you damn near 92? I think I’d be cheating people, so that’s what got me doing this.”
His playing is still an epic masterclass that begs near genuflection. Even so, Guy says, he’s paid his dues. “I’ve been working since I was picking cotton at 6 years old … so I’ve been working a long time.”
Born in 1936 to sharecroppers, Guy spent his earliest years on a plantation in the tiny town of Lettsworth, Louisiana, and made his own first DIY guitar at 7 years old using string, wood and hairpins from his mother to keep it taut. After he logged time playing in Baton Rouge, Chicago came calling. “I came [to Chicago] because, in Baton Rouge there was no cover charge, no blues clubs. But I learned that [in Chicago], a bottle of beer was 25 cents and it was 35 cents if Muddy Waters was in the house playing, and that’s how he got paid.”
Even after his move in 1957, things didn’t take off at first. Even though Guy was soon recording with Waters and Howlin’ Wolf at the legendary Chess Records, blues was still a major underdog, and Guy was driving a tow truck during the day to make ends meet while playing gigs at night.
When the British rock invasion swept in in the '60s, however, everything changed. “Muddy Waters, B.B. King, Howlin’ Wolf, we were all playing the blues here and it was 99% Black people that listened. But when the British guys started playing — the Beatles, the Stones — white America was saying, ‘Wait a minute …’ ”
Guy recognizes bands like the Rolling Stones (whom he still holds a close friendship with to this day) for giving credit where credit was due.
“There was an [ABC variety] show called ‘Shindig!’ and they were trying to get the Rolling Stones to do the program. Mick Jagger said, ‘I’ll do it if you let me play Muddy Waters,’ ” Guy recalls. “And they said, ‘Who in the hell is that?’ He said, ‘You mean to tell me you don’t know who Muddy Waters is? We named ourselves after his famous record.’ ”
Since then, Guy released countless records (his latest, 2022’s "The Blues Don’t Lie"), nabbing seven Grammy Awards and being honored with a Lifetime Achievement Grammy in 2015 as well as the Presidential National Medal of Arts, among other accolades. In 1989, he opened his long-running Legends blues club on Wabash (after years running the Checkerboard Lounge on the South Side); 35 years later, it’s still going strong.
When it comes to the future of the blues, Guy is concerned about where it’s headed as the venerable guitar slingers rest in peace and others, like him, start to retire.
“They [barely] play blues on the radio no more unless you got satellite,” he laments, noting how much Top 40 pop and hip-hop has dominated the landscape.
“I know some hip-hop guys who say, ‘Buddy, if you go on stage and curse a little bit you might sell another album,’ ” he says, laughing. “But a young kid trying to make it, they look at me and say, ‘Why do I want to play blues if ain’t nobody going to hear the record but me?’ ”
There are some glimmers of hope though; Guy was an early champion of the former child savant Quinn Sullivan, and Guy has applauded and recorded with Gary Clark Jr. Regardless of the future, says Guy, “It ain’t going to stop me — I’ll be playing the rest of my life … just to make somebody say it was worth watching him because he gave it the best he got.”
