Blues legend Buddy Guy has influenced just about every blue-eyed soul guitarist of the past 40 years. Rock musicians ranging from Eric Clapton to John Mayer have been living endorsements of the Chicago Blues style that has been passed from Muddy Waters to Buddy Guy. What is not as well known is that what really got the blues into Buddy was not the mythical “deal with the devil”; on the contrary, Buddy sets the record straight once and for all. The Lord, and not Satan, should get the credit for the birth of the blues.
The 77 year old Guy testifies, “I’m very religious. I was brought up that way, man. My mother and father brought me up in a Baptist church, as most blues cats grew up in church. Blues is very closely related to spirituals in church. When I was growing up in church, we didn’t have any instruments. So, if you go way back, you have The Pilgrim Travelers, The 5 Blind Boys of Alabama, The Dixie Hummingbirds, you would use voices for your music, you get that religious feeling in blues. The blues is just different because of the way with lyrics. When you go back and think of Ray Charles, he had all of those big hits and they were with music that was of a religious type.”
You can’t really understand modern blues without having first heard those classic gospel recordings of the 40s and early 50s. Sister Rosetta Tharpe, a fine guitarist in her own right, had drummer Kenny Clarke, bassist Pops Foster and pianist Sammy Price on hand when she recorded classics like “God’s Mighty Hand.” Likewise, Elvis Presley stole note for note Sister Wynona Carr’s “Jesus is Coming Again” and turned it into “Good Rockin’ Tonight.” Buddy Guy explains, “The two are so similar. We used to go out on the levees in Louisiana, and go out in the evening after working in the fields all day, go into the #3 tub to get some of the dust off of you, (cause we didn’t have any running water) afterwards to get some fresh air. We didn’t have anything else to do. We didn’t have any electricity for lights, so we’d just go outside and sing songs, things by The Soul Stirrers, BB King, or T Bone (Walker) and try to squeeze our guitar strings to sound like them. BB and I are good friends now, and he’ll also tell you that he was playing the spirituals first, but then he went around the corner and started playing the blues, because he got more dimes and quarters thrown into the hat!”
Growing up (literally) dirt poor in Louisiana, Buddy learned what was important in life from his mom and dad. He recalls, “The Bible was what my mom and dad had in the house. My dad, man, he didn’t get to third grade, but there wasn’t anything that was in the Bible that you could ask him that he couldn’t answer. My first wife would read the Bible, and she came and visited him before he died, and asked him some kind of question. He looked at her and said, “Naw, what you’re saying ain’t right, if you look at chapter and verse so and so and it reads like this…” She looked at him, left and said, “I ain’t gonna tangle with him no more!” Every time it would rain would be the only time we had off work at the sharecropping farm, and he’d always have a Bible in his hands.”
Because of the strong spiritual upbringing, Buddy was able to endure the difficult times he initially had as a musician. He claimed the promise, “trust in the Lord with all of your heart….and He will make your path straight.” Buddy explains, “The way I was brought up is to treat everybody right, and you’ll be blessed. I think my life has been blessed. I think that the God I pray to has got a plan set for us. I think we were all sent here for a reason. I think I was evidently put here to play music. The same thing for the bus driver, the pilot, the captain of the ship, and so on.”
“I carry a Bible with me in my shoulder bag wherever I go, and I’ve got one laying beside my bed. I’m not a great reader because I had to fall out of school after my mother got a stroke, but that’s no excuse. My daddy went to third grade, but at least I went to eighth! Some of those words in the Bible were hard to pronounce, but he got through it. He figured out to say those words. I go to church every chance I get when I go home, so I don’t miss a Sunday. It’s a great feeling.”
While his faith in God gets stronger by the day, Buddy still worries about the future of the blues. “I think it’s surviving, but I don’t think it’s surviving like it should. You don’t have any young people coming up and playing the blues like you had in my days. When I first picked up the guitar there was no future or making a decent living in it; it was just playing a guitar, having fun and making someone happy. Nowadays, young kids are looking out there on the television, and they want to be like that.”
Just like an apostle looking for someone to pass on his vision to, Buddy is always on the lookout for the next 6 stringer to carry the torch. He states, “I like John Mayer. Johnny (Lang) is my friend. He’s on one of my cds. I was on stage about a while ago up at Massachusetts. A little guy came up, he was about 8 years old. He came up with a 3 piece suit on , and a polka dot neck tie, and his daddy said, “Buddy, he can play.” So, I said, “Well, he can come on up!” He could play, so I’m having my people contact Jay Leno and some of these television shows and seeing if they can bring him on. He’s that good, and he should be heard right now, and he’s playing blues right now.”
Both musically and spiritually, Buddy has fought the good fight, he is finishing the course, and he has kept the faith. Help pass on both of his visions.
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