Atlantic City Weekly

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Although his last batch of albums -- beginning with 1991's Grammy-winning Damn Right, I Have The Blues (Silvertone) -- has earned the iconic bluesman glowing reviews, multiple awards and a broader fan base, Buddy Guy doesn't measure success in dollars and gold-plated trophies. He remembers the time when musicians drove from town to town, guitars piled on their laps, hoping to make a few bucks at the next joint.

Guy also remembers the reason he began, as an adolescent country kid growing up on a Louisiana plantation, to play the guitar in the first place.

"When I learned how to play guitar, it was for the love of music," says Guy, who took a train up to Chicago at age 20 and began his professional career in music. "You couldn't look forward, when I was 14-years-old, and say, 'If I become a good guitar player I can live comfortably.' There was no such thing as that."

Now, after five decades of playing the blues, Buddy Guy is an elder statesman of the music he helped carry into the 21st century. He also owns the best blues club in his adopted hometown of Chicago and constantly tours, having just returned from India and Singapore. Along the way he's had the opportunity to befriend some of his own musical heroes, like Muddy Waters and Little Walter, and play with assorted iconic figures of American folk blues like Mississippi Fred McDowell and Son House.

His own wild electric guitar style inspired '60s rockers like Jimi Hendrix and Eric Clapton, and modern blues players from the late Stevie Ray Vaughan to John Mayer have hailed him as a major influence. Last year, for his 70th birthday, Silvertone/Legacy issued Can't Quit The Blues, Guy's first-ever, career-spanning retrospective. On it, one not only catches glimmers from shining moments of Guy's career (from his early Chess sessions, to his days with Junior Wells, to his exceptional recent output) but also how late '50s Chicago blues -- itself a matured offspring of the rural blues of the South -- morphed into the arena-filling blues-rock of today.

By telephone from Chicago, Guy, who plays the House of Blues Atlantic City this Friday, April 6, recently spoke to AC Weekly.

This May will mark the 50th anniversary of your first demo record -- "The Way You Been Treating Me" -- recorded in Baton Rouge.

You got it [down] better than me; I didn't know that. That shows you how much I pay attention to my own music. I was a much younger man, though.

Do you remember recording it?

Well, I know I recorded it in a radio station. It was all AM stations then and there was a radio station in Baton Rouge called WXOK. The disc jockey was named -- all the black disc jockeys then had a little college radio name -- Diggy Do. And that was the black station in Baton Rouge, and I would go up there and, actually, he made the demo for me to [bring to Chicago] give to Chess [Records] to listen to and see if [they] would sign me after they heard it. And evidently they must not have liked it or something.

You eventually started recording on sessions at Chess. How did you break in there?

Well, actually, they didn't pay attention to me and I went to Cobra first ... I went into Chess in '59 or '60. That's when I got the chance to do some sessions with Sonny Boy [Williamson], Muddy [Waters], [Little] Walter and [Howlin'] Wolf. I wasn't considered as a sideman; they would always call me because all those great blues players found out that when I played behind them I'd always just sit back in the corner and try to play their music right, while a lot of the [other] young men were like: "If I get a chance to play with them, I'm going to show them who I am."

Had you been a fan of these great blues players while living in Louisiana?

That's how I learned, listening to their 78s. John Lee Hooker, Muddy -- I couldn't play like them, but that's all you could listen to.