Buddy Guy’s Kennedy Center Honors blues

Commotion in Aisle 7

Let’s go to the man’s house.

(SANDRO CAMPARDO/ASSOCIATED PRESS) - Buddy Guy performs on the stage of the Stravinski hall during the 42nd Montreux Jazz Festival in Montreux, Switzerland.

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This takes the better part of an hour, driving from downtown Chicago. You wind up in a little suburb and you take a residential road, then turn on another narrow drive, leading to a cove of houses, and there it is: two buildings, set in the woods, on 14 acres.

You go past the garage, which houses the Rolls-Royce, the Ferrari, the 1958 Edsel, the 1955 T-Bird. Walking inside a sliding door off a dining room, you go through the spacious kitchen, back to the left and into the entertainment room, with a pool table and a wet bar. The indoor swimming pool is on the other side of a glass wall.

On the bar stool, wearing a beret, is George “Buddy” Guy.

He’s slender, soft-spoken, about 5-foot-8. He still has a trace of country-boy-gone-to-the-city — he’ll say, ‘yes, sir,’ or ‘no, ma’am,’ tongue slightly in cheek — and tell gently wide-eyed stories about how he got to know Muddy Waters, the man sitting around his house in curlers, watching baseball.

“I was just never as good as they were,” he says of the slightly older generation of blues musicians who preceded him to town. “I was just so lucky to be able to play with them.”

Then he’s on to stories about cooking, how much he still loves his native red beans and rice, shopping for good chicken at the grocery store.

“People see me in there, they say, ‘What are you doing in here?’ I say I got to eat like everybody else.”

He digresses into his worry about chemicals injected into foods, comparing them with the fresh-out-of-the-dirt vegetables of his youth . . . and it’s this sort of down-home focus that, off-stage, has dominated most of his life. He has been married (and divorced) twice, but has always been close to his eight children. Pictures of his parents, Sam and Isabella, are in frames on a nearby table.

He learned to play guitar on a two-string thing in his parents’ house, and his dad bought his first real guitar from a man named Coot. (Every small Southern town has a man named Coot.)

Then, the life-changing revelation: As a teen, he went to the Masonic Temple in Baton Rouge and saw Guitar Slim. Slim always had a few hundred feet of cord running to his amp so he could start his set while standing in the street out front. From his autobiography: “He played his guitar between his legs, played it behind his back, played it on his back, played it jumping off the stage, played it hanging from the rafters.”

That would be Guy’s stage presence for the rest of his life — after conquering his nerves. At his first gig, in the early ’50s, played in front of maybe 15 patrons, he was so nervous he turned his back and faced the rear of the stage, playing “Work With Me Annie.” He just couldn’t play with people looking at him.

When he first got to Chicago, playing clubs like the 708 and Squeeze, he learned to take a shot of whiskey or wine, releasing his “wild man” stage persona. His new family was fellow guitar slingers and blues musicians. He was a session man at Chess Records — “a plain-looking building that sat between a supply company and a rundown rooming house,” he recalls in his autobiography. The label was world famous, but it paid about like it looked.