King of the Chi-Town Blues...
Written April 07, 2008. Filed under culture/critique & papers/articles

Last month I was privileged to be able to interview Blues legend Buddy Guy. Here is the article:
Buddy Guy was a mere toddler when he first heard the sound of sweet gospel, drifting through the windows of a rural church, deep in the Louisiana Delta.
Music, from the very beginning, was the sound of hope.
The son of a sharecropper, Guy never had much money, but fell in love with the blues in the early 40s, when his dad first installed electricity in the house and the swampy rhythms of Howlin' Wolf and Muddy Waters poured from the phonograph.
Famously, the young boy carved a makeshift guitar from a few bits of wood, flyscreen and his mother’s hairpins, and amidst the muggy plantations he sat for hours, dreaming of a different world, which his music would emancipate.
50 years on, George “Buddy” Guy is a quintessential Chicago electric blues legend and undoubtedly one of the most revered living guitarists.
Truly of another era, Guy carries the weight of a history and sound which set the course for modern rock n’ roll, inspiring a platoon of devotees as varied as Eric Clapton, The Rolling Stones and Jimi Hendrix.
Before heading to Australia for his current tour, Buddy was rugged up inside his Chicago home, sheltered from the snow, cooking some good old-fashioned Creole food. Modern day Chicago is a futuristic playground compared to the gritty streets that defined the city when Guy first arrived in 1957, clutching a satchel of southern fried chicken and a busking hat.
“We’re all very religious and I believe God put us here for a reason, not a season,” laughed Guy in his crackling southern accent.
“The guitar was just something natural that came to me, to fall in love with, but none of us ever dreamed this music could take us to all kinda places, all nationalities, to the world. These guys, Muddy Waters, Little Walter, would just be playing with a hat on stage, hoping for enough dimes to get a quart of beer, then you’d pay all night.”
Chi-town blues, as it is commonly referred to, was the sound of liberation for Black America, imbued with the cultural and racial symbolism of a changing nation. Yet, ideologically speaking, the themes of blues music were mild compared to the hip-hop lyrics that dominate Black music today. Guy’s daughter, Shawnna, is an MTV glamour girl, famous for her brashy up-front lyricism and work with the rapper Ludacris.
“My daughter Shawnna, she say to me, ‘Dad, we’re playing your music, what we’re doing is just like what you did back then,’” said Guy.
“I didn’t ever used listen to what these Black kids were saying in this hip-hop but when I did I realised they were saying things that Black kids weren’t even allowed to walk past the studio and whisper back in my day.
“But that’s what music is doing these days, and as long as you makin’ people happy, you doing something good. Music is like the automobile. When it come out it have no radio or heater, damn you gotta crank it up to get it started, but now you press a button it cranks up before you even get in it.”
Of course, it’s hard for Guy to conceptualise the impact of his music. Put it this way, Jimi Hendrix would never have lifted a guitar above his head for those mammoth solos if he hadn’t seen Guy do it first. Equally, as Stevie Ray Vaughan famously quipped: “Without Buddy Guy, there would be no Stevie Ray Vaughan”.
At 71 years of age, time waits for no man, but Guy is safe in the knowledge of one thing at least: the blues is alive and well.
“At my age you just gotta sit back and say wow,” said Guy.
“You wake up, you go to bed, you wake up, you do you’re thing, but then one day you’re a senior citizen, and you the maker of ‘old Black music’.
“The future’s bright, but there ain’t never going to be another Muddy Waters, another B.B. King. They’re the ones, they made the blues, so who gonna fill those shoes? Well ain’t nobody gonna fill those shoes, but the blues’ll still be playing long after we old men long gone.”
Article Published in The West Australian.




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