Buddy Guy April 9, 2007

Buddy Guy is a Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inductee, a chief guitar influence to rock titans like Hendrix, Clapton, Beck and Vaughan, a pioneer of Chicago's fabled West Side sound, and a living link to that city's halcyon days of electric blues.

In 1957, he found a blues apprenticeship in Chicago's fabled 708 Club. His first appearance followed by an oft-repeated story about a hungry Guy, broke and on the cusp of returning to Louisiana, getting salami sandwiches from none other than Waters himself, who'd arrived at the club in a red Chevrolet. "He throwed down that loaf of bread and that salami—that was the lunch we used to have in the cotton fields. I never will forget that, man. People were sayin', ‘That's the Mud!' Nobody called him Muddy Waters. When he asked me if I was hungry, and he said who he was, I said, ‘Well, if you're Muddy Waters, I'm not hungry no more.' Just meeting him filled me up." As a session man, he backed the likes of Waters, Howlin' Wolf, Little Walter and Sonny Boy Williamson. 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.

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. 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. 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 69-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"). 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.

Official Website: http://www.buddyguy.net