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Buddy Guy bringing the Chicago blues to Riverside

By Steven Horowitz

Most people know Chicago bluesman Buddy Guy’s electric guitar playing through the performers he has influenced. Jimi Hendrix, Eric Clapton, Stevie Ray Vaughn, Jimmy Page and countless others have sung his praises.

You can hear Guy’s inspiration in the soulful way they phrase their riffs. It comes off as the deep and gritty sound of the city. As George Gershwin was to jazz, Guy is to the blues.

He also personifies what it means to be a showman. He demonstrates that playing the guitar could be exciting to watch. Guy’s tricks on the axe are legendary. He’s been known to pluck the guitar strings with his teeth, play the instrument behind his back, hold it at arms length over his head while picking out the notes, and drop to his knees and clutch the instrument for dear life.

Guy hails from a sharecropper’s family in rural Louisiana. It’s that view of urban life as viewed by a country boy that makes his music so distinctively real. He takes in all of what he sees in the big city and lets it out through his playing.

There’s still a lot of country in Guy. During a visit to Iowa City several years ago, the first question he asked a reporter who wanted to interview him was, “Where’s a good place to go fishing?” After Guy got the information he said, “If you want to talk to me, meet me there tomorrow morning at seven.” And sure enough, Guy was out there casting after playing a full set of electric blues the night before to a packed house.

Critics consider Guy the quintessential Chicago blues musician. He moved to the Windy City in the late fifties when he was 21 and started playing the nightclubs where Muddy Waters, Little Walter and Howlin’ Wolf headlined. Soon he was backing these men up on their albums.

Guy was a top-tier session artist at Chess records and also put out a number of singles under his own name during the sixties. During the seventies and eighties he collaborated with the late harmonica maven Junior Wells and put out a series of great albums that form the very definition of what people think of when they think of Chicago blues music.

He went solo during the nineties and hit the charts for the first time. He sold more than half a million copies and won his first Grammy Award for Damn Right, I’ve Got the Blues. Guy has continued to successfully record and continues to tour and play the blues to new audiences.

So far, Guy has won five Grammy Awards, 23 W.C. Handy Awards (the most of anyone), and has been inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Who knows what he’ll be up to when he performs at the Riverside Casino at 8 p.m. Friday, but one can assume he’ll be kicking out some jams.