CHICAGO — Let’s go ahead and get this over with — you damn right Buddy Guy’s got the blues. Man can’t win ’cause he ain’t got nothing to lose.
Okay. That feels better.
Special Report
2012 Kennedy Center Honorees
Dustin Hoffman, David Letterman, Led Zeppelin, Buddy Guy and Natalia Makarova are this year’s Kennedy Center Honors recipients.
Buddy Guy’s Kennedy Center Honors blues
(SANDRO CAMPARDO/ASSOCIATED PRESS) - Buddy Guy performs on the stage of the Stravinski hall during the 42nd Montreux Jazz Festival in Montreux, Switzerland.
“Damn Right,” his Grammy-winning anthem, is stapled to the man like “The Thrill Is Gone” is to B.B. King, like “I’m a Man” is to Muddy Waters.
Louisiana born, Chicago molded, the 76-year-old is that primal to the music — one of the icons of the age, a real-life John Henry striding across the American mid-century landscape.
He was born in a sharecropper’s shack near a little bit of nothing called Lettsworth in 1936. This is hard by the Atchafalaya River, a couple of miles from the Mississippi, the air thick with humidity, poverty and mosquitoes that could carry you off to Texas.
“Looking out of my front door,” he’ll tell you, “you’d be looking at vacant land.”
Dropped out of school, never learned to read music. Caught an armload of train heading to Chicago on the morning of Sept. 25, 1957,with nothing but a guitar on his back and a few bills tucked in a hip pocket. Got off the train knowing no one, a 21-year-old bumpkin in a city that ground bumpkins up like offal in the slaughterhouses.
Self-assessment, 55 years later: “I was out of my league.”
And somehow, he made it from that place to this one — the Kennedy Center, the Honors — with talent, tenacity and a feverish love of his distortion-drenched, guitar-based blues.
Also, timing: His was the age when Chicago was rewiring acoustic country blues as an electric, terrifying force that gave birth to rock.
The short list of his peers, and he played with them all: Muddy Waters, B.B. King, Howlin’ Wolf, Willie Dixon, Little Walter, Sonny Boy Williamson and Junior Wells, his longtime playing partner. The short lists of his protegees: Jimi Hendrix (where do you think he got that distorted sound?), Eric Clapton (who considers him the world’s greatest living guitarist), Keith Richards (“When I first heard Buddy Guy, I got scared”) and Stevie Ray Vaughan and Carlos Santana and Jeff Beck and blah blah blah.
He’s in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, has been awarded the National Medal of Arts, and is ranked by Rolling Stone at No. 23 on the list of 100 Greatest Guitarists. Most of the top 10 learned at his feet, and No. 6, King, is his only living blues peer.
“Anything involved with guitar playing after Buddy has his influence on it,” says Brett Bonner, editor of Living Blues magazine, “and if he put his guitar down and sang, he could still peel the paint off the walls.”
Through all this, he is also a veteran club owner and businessman. Buddy Guy’s Legends, in the South Loop, is regarded as the best blues club in America.
“Chicago is cold, but it’s also coldblooded and competitive,” says David Ritz, the veteran celebrity ghostwriter who helped Guy pen “When I Left Home,” his autobiography, published earlier this year. “To wind up with his career and owning the major blues club in the country a couple of blocks off the lake . . . imagine having the intelligence and the savvy to have accomplished that.”
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