Any discussion of Buddy Guy invariably involves a recitation of his colossal musical resume and hard-earned accolades. He’s a Rock & 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.

Guy’s story actually begins in Louisiana, not Chicago. Born in 1936 to a sharecropper’s family and raised on a plantation near the small town of Lettsworth, located some 140 miles northwest of New Orleans, George “Buddy” Guy was one of five children born to Sam and Isabel Guy. Buddy was all of seven years old, he recalls, when he fashioned his first makeshift “guitar” – a two-string contraption attached to a piece of wood and secured with his mother’s hairpins. There was usually no work to be done on the plantation on Saturday afternoons and Sundays, and the precious free time helped Buddy to develop the very skills that would one day bring him fame. It would nearly be another decade, however, before Buddy would own an actual guitar – a Harmony acoustic that now proudly sits on display at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland.

Guy moved to Chicago, not to be a professional musician, rather “so he could go to a club at night and watch Howlin’ Wolf, Muddy Waters and Little Walter and then play the blues like it’s supposed to be done”. By the end of the 60’s, Guy was cutting albums and his electric guitar style was capturing the interest of rock musicians. Clapton said “he was for me what Elvis was probably like for other people”.

His first three albums in the 90’s all earned Grammy awards. For Guy, it was like being a new artist. Internationally acclaimed, a Grammy winner and an inductee of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, Guy has cemented a blues legacy that places him in the company of his heroes who came before.

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