“When I’m off the road, I’m an old country guy,” he says via phone from his Orland Park, IL home. “I love to get up when the rooster crows and then cook. That’s what you had to do on the farm. You had to be in the field at daybreak, so you had to get up when it was dark and do the food.”
Guy says he never even had an alarm clock.
“If we play until 11, I will take a shower and eat a bowl of soup and lay down dressed,” he says. “Before the phone rings, I sit up at the side of my bed, and when it rings, I say, ‘I’ll be right down.’ You learn that on the farm. My parents were sharecroppers. They worked by the sun. They didn’t work by the clock. That’s why you had to get up and cook. There wasn’t fast fried chicken then. If you wanted fast fried chicken, you had to fast fry it yourself.”
For Buddy Guy, 88, who’ll hit the road again this summer and play at 6 p.m. on Saturday, June 7, with Los Lonely Boys and Eric Gales at Jacobs Pavilion, the stretch of summer dates won’t necessarily be his last shows ever.
“I had a problem with management,” he explains. “They were calling it the farewell tour, but it’s more like the ‘slow down’ tour. Now, when you have connecting flight, if you’re connecting flight is late, they don’t wait on you. I was recently in Germany, and the plane hadn’t gone, but they closed the door, and I had to wait another five hours.”
The story of how Guy learned to play guitar is a remarkable one. As a child, Guy wanted to play guitar so badly that he made his own stringed instruments until he could afford to buy his first six-string.
“I took rubber bands and stretched them out against my head,” he says. “At one point, we finally got a screen door, and I would strip the screen and nail the pieces of string to the wall and I could pluck them.”
Guy remembers seeing a guitar player on the farm who could play Lonnie Johnson tunes. That gave him the idea that he could become a successful musician.
“I just felt like I wanted to do something that no other kid was doing,” he says. “Back then, if you played well enough, you could make a decent living. I kept at it. All of a sudden, when the British started playing the blues, things changed. They were playing music by my late friend B.B. King and Muddy Waters and Lil’ Walter, who just got a street sign in Knoxville, TN. But you couldn’t make a decent living until the British started playing out music. There was a TV show called Shindig, and they wanted to get the Rolling Stones on it. They said they would do it if they could do it with Muddy Waters. White America said, ‘Who the hell is that?’ The Stones said, ‘You don’t know him?’”
Guy started recording in the late 1950s after he moved to Chicago and recorded for famous blues labels such as Cobra, Artistic and Chess Records. Up until the 1960s, however, he continued to work as a tow truck driver.
“When I could stop driving the tow truck and make two dollars a night playing the guitar, that made me feel a little better because I could finally get some rest,” says Guy, who has a cameo in the new musical horror film Sinners. “I finally realized that I could make a living.”
Released in 2022, Guy’s latest studio effort, The Blues Don’t Lie, features a slew of guests and shows Guy’s tremendous impact.
“Those guys we are all friends,” he says. “I did a Bobby Bland tune. He used to say that he played with damn near everyone who could play. He just loved to play like I do.”
Thanks to contemporary rockers such as Jack White and Black Keys, the blues remains a going concern. But Guy would like it if more young people wanted to hear the music.
“I don’t think enough of them are listening to the blues,” he says. “Your big FM station doesn’t play no blues. I got a son, and he didn’t really know what I did. I didn’t tell him to play the guitar. Like my daddy told me, I told him, ‘Whatever you do, don’t be the best, just be the best until the best come around.’ My son and his friends would spin records in the yard. When they would put my record on, he would take it off. When he turned 21, he walked in [Buddy Guy’s Legends] one time when I was playing. He saw me and said, ‘I didn’t know you could play like that.’ He got a guitar and now he can play well and wants me to put a track on his album.”
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This article appears in Cleveland SCENE 05/08/25.
