Buddy Guy declares himself to Brazil on a farewell tour: “I didn’t imagine so much affection”

“The first time I was there, I was very surprised, because Brazilians knew my music. I knew there were very loving people, but I didn’t imagine so much affection. Then I fell in love. I love Brazil.” The declaration is buddy guya few weeks before landing again in the country for two shows in the 2023 edition of Best of Blues and Rockin his third participation in the festival.

Chat with this legend via video – me in the newsroom Rolling Stone Brazil, in the São Paulo neighborhood of Pinheiros; he, in his blues club Buddy Guy’s Legends, in the Loop region of Chicago – is also an invitation to understand and discuss, even if briefly, the state of the phonographic market and the emergence of new guitar virtuosos. While he tells me that he did everything for the “love of music” throughout his long career, I see in the background some of his iconic Buddy GuyStandard Stratocaster decorated with polka dots, the so-called polka dots. Not coincidentally, this is the pattern on the shirt I’m wearing during the interview, as a way of paying homage to Buddy. He smiles, embarrassed, because this pattern is part of his history.

“Whenever I see this, I think about how I became this man. I was a child who left Louisiana, my mother had a stroke and was looking after her five children”, says he, who was born in 1936 in tiny Lettsworth and built his first guitar with two strings tied together by the hair clips of the matriarch, Isabel . “When I went to Chicago [aconselhado por Muddy Waters], I said I would send them money and I would come back driving a Polka Dots Cadillac. I knew it wasn’t true, and I didn’t get a chance to tell her that,” Buddy recalls of his mother, who died before seeing him play live.

“Because of that, one day I thought I needed to create something that was a tribute to her. Then came the Fender Strat with the polka dots.” From that day on, the classic print would represent the memory of his mother, who would accompany him wherever he went.

“Over time, people started to show up at shows with black t-shirts, shirts, caps and hats with white polka dots”, he says, opening a smile, as he would repeat several times throughout the interview.

Years and records passed, and George “Buddy” Guy, with his aggressive and sweet, dirty, furious and emotional style, established himself as one of the masters of the genre, taking the guitar to the center of his creations – as in guitar-centered thinking.

“Since I didn’t go to school, I found out how to do some things that, at the time, would have been almost unthinkable for me”, he says, explaining his mastery over the instrument.

Eric Clapton, singer, songwriter and guitarist, once said: “Buddy Guy was to me what Elvis was to many others”. The first album, I Left My Blues in San Francisco, came out in 1967. The most recent, The Blues Don’t Lie, the 34th studio album, came in 2022. In the same year, Buddy launched his farewell tour, Damn Right Farewell Tour, which will be witnessed by many Brazilian fans.

Farewell tour, Brazil and the future

The memory of a previous visit to the country comes from his heiress, the singer Carlise Guy, who smiles as she tells how her father invited her onstage during the 2014 Best of Blues show. This time, the “Daughter Guy” will also officially perform at the festival with her own project, the The Nu Blu Band. “Singing was an escape for me, I never saw it as a job. I felt good. I wanted to do more when I saw that it was also good for more people”, says Carlise.

“I had never received so much love. Always wanted to go back. I am counting the days on the calendar.” Fun, smiles, doing good through sound: these seem to be Guy clan trademarks that go beyond albums, singles and performances, and the daughter and father declare themselves moved by these sensations.

“I can say that I’ve had fun throughout my career,” Buddy says. “I’ve had a few surprises, like when you go somewhere new and you don’t know what’s going to happen and you’re like, ‘What am I going to do? What can go wrong? Will people like me?’ So, I use this motto: ‘Be the best, the best happens’.”

Being called a “living legend”, the title that transforms him into a self-taught god of the genre, reveals a certain shyness in the experienced musician. He admits: “I cannot accept that I am the best of all. I am inspired by Muddy Waters. bb king, T-Bone Walker… They were doing it long before I knew what a guitar was”.

But retirement from the road does not represent a definitive end to the charismatic bluesman’s career. At the age of 86, Buddy Guy thinks about doing sporadic shows and is still curious about finding new voices. He sees in names like Christone Kingfish Ingram (“which I discovered in Mississippi and paid to have it recorded”) and Quinn Sullivan (“which can make you smile when you play”) a way to keep the genre fresh.

“Before BB King passed away, we talked about it. I thought maybe we had done something to stop the blues from being played on stations, or the problem was with our lyrics. [metafóricas]. Hip-hop doesn’t do that. They are direct in what they want to say and they sell a lot more records than we do”, he argues. “Today, the blues is not played on the radio like it was 60 years ago. But we need to try.”