At age 86, Buddy Guy
is a Rock & Roll Hall of Fame inductee, a major influence on rock titans
like Jimi Hendrix, Eric Clapton, and Stevie Ray Vaughan, a pioneer of Chicago’s
fabled West Side sound, and a living link to the city’s halcyon days of electric
blues.
Buddy Guy has
received 8 GRAMMY Awards, a 2015 Lifetime Achievement GRAMMY Award, 38 Blues
Music Awards (the most any artist has received), the Billboard Magazine Century
Award for distinguished artistic achievement, a Kennedy Center Honor, and the
Presidential National Medal of Arts. Rolling Stone Magazine ranked him #23 in
its "100 Greatest Guitarists of All Time." In 2019, Buddy Guy won his
8th and most recent GRAMMY Award for his 18th solo LP, “The Blues Is Alive And
Well”.
In July of 2021, in
honor of Buddy Guy’s 85th birthday, PBS American Masters released “Buddy Guy:
The Blues Chase The Blues Away”, a new documentary following his rise from a
childhood spent picking cotton in Louisiana to becoming one of the most
influential guitar players of all time. The documentary features new interviews
with Buddy Guy, Carlos Santana, Eric Clapton, John Mayer, Gary Clark Jr, and
more. Watch the full documentary at PBS Online here.
Though Buddy Guy will
forever be associated with Chicago, his story actually begins in Louisiana. One
of five children, he was 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. Buddy was just seven years old when he fashioned his
first makeshift “guitar”—a two-string contraption attached to a piece of wood
and secured with his mother’s hairpins. In 1957, he took his guitar to Chicago,
where he would permanently alter the direction of the instrument, first on
numerous sessions for Chess Records playing alongside Howlin’ Wolf, Muddy
Waters, and the rest of the label’s legendary roster, and then on recordings of
his own.