“He was for me what Elvis was probably like for other people… My course was set, and he was my pilot
- Eric Clapton

Any discussion of Buddy Guy invariably involves a recitation of his colossal musical resume and hard-earned accolades. He’s a Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inductee, a chief guitar influence to rock titans like Hendrix, Clapton, Beck and Vaughan, a pioneer of Chicago’s fabled West Side sound, and a living link to that city’s halcyon days of electric blues.

The Beginning

But Guy’s incredible story actually begins in Louisiana, not Chicago. Born in 1936 to a sharecropper’s family and raised on a plantation near the small town of Lettsworth, located some 140 miles northwest of New Orleans, George “Buddy” Guy was one of five children born to Sam and Isabel Guy. His earliest years were marked by the all-too-familiar characteristics of the Jim Crow South: separate seating on public buses, whites-only drinking fountains, and restaurants where blacks—if even served at all—were sent around back. But the social order of the day notwithstanding, it was tolerance, not bitterness, instilled in the young Buddy Guy.

“There’s a lot of stuff my parents kept from us kids,” he says. “I know that my mom and dad—and also my grandparents—went through a lot worse than what I did. But they didn’t want us knowing nothin’ like that. They kept that hid from us because they figured that would just put pressure on us and worry us. They just tried to tell us the good things about life.”

Guy’s father used to point to examples like heavyweight champion Joe Louis and pioneering major leaguer Jackie Robinson, who broke baseball’s long-standing color line in 1947 when Buddy was 11 years old. If you possess the talent, Sam Guy told his children, you couldn’t be denied in this world, regardless of your skin color. “Before my parents passed away, they told me, ‘Don’t be the best in town. Just try to be the best until the best come around.’”

“Don’t be the best in town. Just try to be the best until the best come around.”
- Buddy’s Parents