Long live the King of Chicago: Sanjoy Narayan on the legacy of Buddy Guy

The Blues legend recently turned 90. A tribute concert will feature a staggering line-up of disciples, from Eric Clapton and John Mayer to Susan Tedeschi. Nothing less would do.

There’s a crackling video I return to on YouTube, whenever modern music begins to feel too sanitised.

It is from March 1969, recorded in an abandoned linoleum factory in Staines, England.

An intense, young Black man from Louisiana delivers a blistering, high-octane performance of Mary Had a Little Lamb, backed by a line-up of rock royalty: Jack Bruce on bass, Buddy Miles on drums, saxophonists Chris Mercer and Dick Heckstall-Smith.

This man isn’t just playing his Fender Stratocaster, he’s wrestling with it; wielding feedback like a weapon, and coaxing a raw, howling distortion out of it that must have shocked purists of the era.

While he was already famous in the underground club scene, for playing with his teeth and plucking strings with his elbows, this show (organised for the documentary Supershow: The Last Great Jam of the ’60s) saw him cast aside the physical stunts to let his explosive musical genius do the talking.

The man was Buddy Guy. On July 30, he marked a milestone that feels almost mythical in the history of American music: he turned 90. This October, the music world will come together to pay tribute.

At Radio City Music Hall in New York, a staggering line-up of disciples from across generations, ranging in age from 42 to 81 — including Eric Clapton, John Mayer, Gary Clark Jr, Derek Trucks and Susan Tedeschi — will gather for Buddy’s Got the Blues: A 90th Birthday Concert Celebration.

They are coming to honour a man who grew up without shoes in a Louisiana cotton field and ended up in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, with nine Grammy Awards and a Kennedy Center Honour.

To understand the magnitude of his success, one has to look back to where the road began.

George “Buddy” Guy was born in 1936 to sharecropper parents. This was the Deep South in the heart of the racist Jim Crow era, a time and place of punishing physical labour and systemic oppression. There was no money for instruments.

As a boy, Buddy fashioned his first guitar out of two-strand screen wire and a tin can. He used his mother’s hairpins to hold the strings in place. The contraption didn’t sound like much, but it let him practise the rhythms he heard humming through the cotton fields.

When his father finally bought him a cheap acoustic guitar, they say Buddy practised until his fingers bled.

A PAT ON THE BACK, A SALAMI SANDWICH

By 1957, with the proverbial few dollars in his pocket and guitar in a battered case, he caught a train north to Chicago. He was 21 years old.

He hoped for a different future in the Windy City, but it wasn’t easy to find. In his early days there, Buddy was starving. He walked the streets looking for work, his stomach growling.

The turning point came on a freezing night, when a stranger asked if he could play the guitar he was carrying around. That might earn him a few bucks. The stranger then took him to the legendary blues venue called the 708 Club. Buddy plugged in and poured all his hunger, desperation and raw talent into a single performance.

Sitting in the audience, as luck would have it, was the musician Muddy Waters. He was so impressed, he got the famished young guitarist a salami sandwich and said, “You’re hungry. Eat.” That sandwich, Buddy has often said, tasted better than anything he’s eaten since.

Muddy didn’t just feed him. He adopted him into the royal lineage of the Chicago blues.

Buddy was soon house guitarist at Chess Records, playing behind titans like Muddy, Howlin’ Wolf, Koko Taylor and Sonny Boy Williamson. But Chess Records boss Leonard Chess found Buddy’s solo style too wild, too abrasive. He dismissed his innovative use of distortion and feedback as “just noise”.

It is one of music history’s great ironies that the very sound Leonard Chess tried to suppress ended up rewriting the rulebook for rock ‘n’ roll.

BORN TO PLAY GUITAR

What really worked for Buddy was a quiet fan club that had been building elsewhere.

While the American mainstream was slow to catch on to his art, a swathe of young British musicians was listening intently across the Atlantic.

When he toured the UK in February 1965, now 29 years old, he blew the minds of a generation of budding guitar gods. A young Eric Clapton, who was in the audience when he played at the Marquee Club in London, would later describe Buddy Guy as “without a doubt, the best guitar player alive”.

Anecdotes of his influence are legendary.

Jimi Hendrix once cancelled his own show to watch Buddy play, and got a seat in the front row, reportedly telling friends he was learning how to command the stage by watching the master. When Stevie Ray Vaughan was an emerging guitarist in Texas, it was Buddy’s fiery, uninhibited style that served as his sonic blueprint.

Jimmy Page, Keith Richards and Jeff Beck all imbibed deeply from the well of his fretboard pyrotechnics. He became the vital bridge between the foundational country-blues of Mississippi and the high-voltage arena rock that defined the late-20th century.

Carlos Santana described Buddy as a “hurricane” and a master who was able to “strike lightning with the guitar”.

THE LAST ONE STANDING

And he wouldn’t stop.

Most musicians contemplate retirement in their 60s or 70s. Buddy simply accelerated.

He toured relentlessly, playing over 100 shows a year well into his 80s. When he released Born to Play Guitar in 2015 and The Blues Is Alive and Well in 2018, he was still delivering vocals that could peel paint off walls, and delivering guitar solos that felt, as Santana said, like lightning strikes.

I remember watching him live, 19 years ago, at Delhi’s Siri Fort Auditorium. He was 71, sporting his signature polka-dot Stratocaster and matching cap. He prowled the stage. At one point, he looked out at the roaring crowd, smiled his infectious, gap-toothed grin, and teased: “I’m gonna play something so funky you can smell it.”

Then he delivered a solo so fierce, it left the audience breathless. I remember a friend going berserk with adulation — nearly supine, with folded hands — as Buddy took his now-famous walk through the auditorium’s aisles while playing.

Buddy Guy is a showman of the highest order, but he also has a lifelong reverence for the music. He is the last man standing from the golden age of the Chicago blues.

In Ryan Coogler’s Sinners (2025), the supernatural horror movie set in the Jim Crow-era, he makes a memorable cameo, playing the older version of Sammie, an aspiring blues musician. His appearance celebrates the deep historical roots of the blues, and likely earned him widespread attention in a new audience.

The October concert to mark his 90th birthday is more than a celebration of longevity. It is a celebration of the triumph of human spirit over adversity, packaged in twelve bars and a polka-dot guitar. He didn’t just survive the blues, he defined them, electrified them, and kept them alive for generations to come. Long live the King of Chicago.

(To reach out, email sanjoy.narayan@gmail.com. The views expressed are personal)