The rumor was that Buddy Guy planned to retire – and considering that he’s pushing 90, no-one would blame him – but it seems that, despite Guy’s age, rumors of his retreat were, well, premature. Still, that doesn’t mean he isn’t feeling his age.
“I’m gonna tell you like I tell everybody else; if I tell you I’m doing all right, I’d be lying,” Guy says. “When you get to this age, everything gets to be aching. But other than that, I guess I’m doing okay.
“If you live to my age, your muscles and everything else aches. I was told in my twenties, ‘Wait till you get to my age,’ so I knew it was coming if I hung around long enough. Still, people say, ‘You don’t have any gray hair, and you still look good!’ I say, ‘You need glasses!’” [Laughs]
“With the blues, I still think I’m doing good. I appreciate you all from my heart – and whatever you can do to help the blues.”
You’re nearly 90, but you’re keeping up a furious pace. How do you do it?
I ain’t gonna lie to you. I can’t do what I did when I was 22
“A double shot of cognac before I go to the stage. [Laughs] Muddy Waters taught me that. When I first came up, I didn’t drink or do anything; I was too shy to talk and almost too shy to play. And they would say, ‘Man, stop dragging this schoolboy stuff with us. Get out there and play.’
“I had cognac at home, but I didn’t touch it unless my friend came over. Now, the only time you’ll see me drinking cognac is if I’m gonna go up and try and play a song. A little shot might give you the best that you got. [Laughs] You can’t ask for anything more.”
With cognac on your side, are you able to play as well as you always have?
“I ain’t gonna lie to you. I can’t do what I did when I was 22. Once, I was playing at Central Park in New York City and jumped off the stage. They thought I was crazy! But man, that was way up there, and I kind of sprained both ankles. [Laughs] I had to have two police officers help me go to the hospital. Now I almost need help walking off the stage, because I’ll be 89 in July.”
You seem to be going strong. Do you ever consider retirement?
“I thought about it, but all of my friends who I learned everything from – B.B. King, T-Bone Walker and those guys – used to tell me, ‘Just try and keep the blues alive. The blues are being ignored by big radio stations.’ Those guys wouldn’t catch airtime, so I haven’t stopped yet.”
In recent years, you’ve had your son Greg playing guitar in your band. Was he a blues fan growing up?
“I’m glad you asked that, because he’s been coming out there with me. When he was growing up, I’d never ever come home and say, ‘Here’s a guitar.’ But I remember when he was 12, 13 or 14, on the Fourth of July, we’d put the speakers in the yard and spin records.
“They’d play Michael Jackson and all kinds of stuff, but when somebody would put on one of my albums, Greg would run out and say, ‘Don’t play that.’ I didn’t say nothing, but when he turned 21, he came into the blues club, looked at me and started crying. He said, ‘I didn’t know you could do that. Now I want to get tough.’”
Get tough?
“It was kept from him. Let me give you an example. They would take a young man, or a young daughter, and put them in the army at 17 or 18, right? They can go there and survive or be killed, and they’d come home at 20. You ain’t old enough to drink a beer, but you’re old enough to kill or be killed. I don’t think that’s fair.
“So you can make a man or woman at 18 or 19 think they should be tough enough to come back and drink a beer and listen to some blues. That’s what happened to him. Ever since he saw me when he was 21 in that club, he’s had some good times and success. If you come to the show, I’m gonna bring him out. He can do a lot, but I didn’t teach him.”
Do you think you’ll record with Greg?
“He wanted me to play on his album, but I don’t know. But he’s playing very well. And like I said, I didn’t show him nothing. He looked at me once, bought a guitar with the Jeff Beck whammy bar on it, and he said, ‘I want to play a few licks.’”
Tell us about your recent album, Ain’t Done with the Blues.
“I had a birthday on the 30th of July, and the new record came out on that day. I’m still able to do a little to try and keep the blues alive, and I’m hopeful for another young person, like Kingfish, and a couple of other people.”
When you make a new record, do new developments in the sound of the blues impact how you approach things?
“You never know about a record. They had me play a little spot in a movie [2025’s critically acclaimed Sinners], and I still get more calls about the movie than I do my records. [Laughs]
“You know, with Michael Jackson and James Brown, everything they touched went to gold. If I knew how to do that, I’d probably be more than I am now. When I go into the studio, I just hope I’ll be playing the right lick and get lucky. You just never know.”
Seeing as the blues is often observational and inspired by life, do you find yourself influenced by different things as an older man?
“If people would just listen to the lyrics of the blues – you know, if you haven’t lived through some of the things that root blues lyrics, if they haven’t happened to you, keep living. The blues don’t just happen to somebody; it’s about good [and] bad times. And who doesn’t go through life and have bad and good times?”
Ain’t Done with the Blues is a pretty symbolic title for where you’re at in life. What does it mean to you?
“The way I came up, you had the blues, but it was a joyful blues. My parents were sharecroppers. We couldn’t even afford a bicycle, so a horse was the only way to stop walking for miles. [Laughs] And we picked cotton and raised potatoes and everything like that. We didn’t have no radio or nothing.
“My grandparents would say, ‘I don’t know how that boy got to be a musician, because we didn’t have no radio to listen to at night.’ But when I was 13 or 14, I got my first record, and I was still driving a tractor and plowing a mule. If that ain’t the blues, what is?”
While recording, are there any pieces of gear that you rely on the most?
“You know, all the super British guitar players, like Jeff Beck and Jimmy Page, when I went there to England in 1965 with this Strat, they all looked at me – and they weren’t famous yet – and said, ‘Man, I didn’t know that kind of guitar could play the blues.’ Then they all went out and bought Strats. But I had and still have a Fender Bassman amp.
“I just turn on the amplifier, and it’ll get on down. But the British guys all say I had something… people used to look at me and ask what I had. I’d say, ‘I didn’t make it, Leo Fender made it. It’s just a tone.’ That tone is so clear, and I never really paid attention to it. I just turn on the amplifier and play my guitar.”
As they say, tone is in the hands.
When I got to know Jimi, I’d go see him and say, ‘Before you go in there, you ain’t gonna hear nothing’
“Well, you know, after I met Jimi Hendrix… you’ll laugh, but I thought he used to play too loud. When I first came up, Muddy Waters and those guys had two little speakers at each corner of the blues club, and it was a clean sound. But when the British guys started playing, they had stacks of Marshalls. And when I got to know Jimi, I’d go see him and say, ‘Before you go in there, you ain’t gonna hear nothing.’
“That type of sound just took over. That clean sound went away because, with the amplifiers, it was a dogfight. It was just a rat race. And then all the special effects came in, and Jimi, I think he was one of the greatest that ever took advantage of the special effects, because a lot of people used them after him.”
You’re something of an ageless wonder. With a new record coming and no plan to stop, what does it mean to you to have been such a mainstay within the past and present blues scenes?
“All I do is just keep my fingers crossed. When you’re in this kind of business, it’s almost like good food, you know? You ain’t gonna know what it tastes like until you taste it. Then you say, ‘I’m gonna keep buying that here.’ I look at all kinds of things like that. It’s just like with Leo Fender; if I knew what Leo knew, I’d be one of the richest men in the world.”
- Ain't Done With the Blues is out now via RCA
- This article first appeared in Guitar World. Subscribe and save.
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