The Legend Grows
By the decade’s end, Guy was staking out new creative territory, cutting albums like 1967’s I Left My Blues in San Francisco, his last effort for Chess, and 1968’s A Man and the Blues for Vanguard. In the process, Guy, the purveyor of a stinging, attacking electric guitar style and wild, impassioned vocals, was capturing the minds of a growing number of rock musicians. “He was for me what Elvis was probably like for other people,” Clapton remembered at Guy’s Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction in 2005. “My course was set, and he was my pilot.”
The were no fewer than 20 releases under Guy’s name during the 1970s and ’80s, the best of them collaborations with the late harp master Junior Wells. But by the time the Eighties became the Nineties, Guy amazingly didn’t even have a domestic record deal.
But life, as Buddy has long since learned, is loaded with unpredictable twists and turns—and Guy’s life was about to enter a new stratosphere of commercial success. His first three albums for Silvertone—the 1991 comeback smash Damn Right, I’ve Got the Blues (reissued in 2005), 1993’s Feels Like Rain and 1994’s Slippin’ In—all earned Grammy Awards. Suddenly, it was cool to like Buddy Guy. For Guy, it was like being a new artist.
“Who knows?” Guy asks of his resurgence. “In my earlier days, if I’d have been too wild, I might not be here talking to you now. I’m very religious, and I think God’s got his eyes on all of us, and he’s got a time for all of us. When it happens it happens, and if it don’t it don’t.
“I had got it in the back of my mind that I’d just keep playing, because I felt that I hadn’t had a chance to really express myself with my singing and my guitar. Nobody would listen to me, but I wasn’t gonna stop playin’. So they gave me a chance to do Damn Right, I’ve Got the Blues, and when it came out, they told me it was on Billboard–and with a bullet. I didn’t even know what the hell that was, man! But I guess somebody must have been listening to me.”
Guy’s legend has only grown throughout the Nineties and the early 21st century. Subsequent releases like the eminently satisfying Live: The Real Deal (1996), the daring Heavy Love (1998) and 2001’s Sweet Tea have demonstrated that Guy, while firmly ensconced in his blues roots, has always tried to keep his music looking forward—even at the risk of alienating lovers of traditional blues sounds. And now, the story continues with Bring ‘Em In, which finds the 71-year-old Guy trading licks with the likes of Carlos Santana (”I Put a Spell On You”) and John Mayer (on the Otis Redding-penned “I’ve Got Dreams to Remember”) and his first ever box set “Can’t Quit the Blues” which has an incredible collection of material, some of it never before released, spanning 50 years of Guy’s career over three CDs and one DVD.
Internationally acclaimed, a Grammy winner and now an inductee of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, Guy has firmly cemented a blues legacy that places him squarely in the company of his heroes who came before. “This all reminds me of something my mother used to tell me,” Guy says of his current-day status as a music icon. “She said, ‘If you got the flowers for me, son, give ‘em to me now so I can smell ‘em, ‘cause I’m not gonna smell ‘em when you put ‘em on the casket.’
” I’m gettin’ to smell a few now”
- Buddy Guy
