Top Gun
By Jason Landry
JL: Your album, Born to Play Guitar has been getting a lot of praise, in fact, you won a Grammy award for Blues Album of the Year. Are you happy that so many people are embracing the blues now more than ever before?
BG: I don't think that they're doing it more than ever before because it's not being exposed like it was when we had a lot of AM stations playing everybody's music. You can't drive down the street now if you don't have satellite radio--you can hardly hear a blues record played on the radio. And it's not easy for the young generation of people to know who Tom, Dick and Harry is who's playing blues if they don't know about it. The best way I can explain it is, you don't know how well I can cook until you taste it. But with the blues--it worries me a bit, because my own children didn't know who I was until they got 21 and was able to come into a blues club to see me perform. They cried and said, Dad, I didn't know you could do that. So I know your kids don't know who I am unless you tell them. And they'd probably say, where did you get that from? But in my days, you could turn your radio on and you could hear a good gospel record, you could hear a good jazz record, and you could hear a good Muddy Waters record. They just don't play it like that no more. When the disc jockeys come on your big FM stations now, they just play the same albums all day--the superstars.
JL: There are a few tracks on the new album that initially jumped out at me. Born to Play Guitar, Wear You Out, Back Up Momma. Whether it is the melodic way that you deliver a song, or the grit and power of two dynamic guitar players cutting heads. Which one of your new songs personifies who Buddy Guy is today?
BG: That's a good question because I don't write most of the songs. I try to do my best playing or performing, but I still consider myself a student to those guys who deserve every award I've got--I didn't learn nothin' from the book. So for me to pick out something and answer you and don't lie like the politicians do, I'd have to let that come from someone else.
JL: I know your dad once told you, "Don't be the best in town, just be the best until the best come around." When it comes to some of your musical mentors like Muddy, Wolf, or the other blues cats from Chicago, what specific advice did they give you?
BG: Well. . .in the ways of action. You know, I thought I was doing better off. And I'm talking almost 60 years ago. I came out of Louisiana and I thought Muddy Waters, Howlin' Wolf, and Little Walter and them was making hit after hit--back in those days it was called the chitlin' circuit. They were playing in front of a 99.9% black audience. I went to Chicago to hopefully get a chance to see them and meet them, and go by some of these famous homes they got. The first time I got a chance to meet Little Walter, the first thing that he asked me to do was to buy him a half pint of gin, which was 90 cents. I cried because I couldn't believe Little Walter was asking me to buy him a half a pint of Gordon Gin. I just had my little savings and I gave it to him. My first question is: is it worth it to play music? But they were playing it for the love of music--not the love of money.
JL: Did you ever have a defined goal of what "success" would be like as a musician?
BG: No, I couldn't dream of nothin' like that. See, in my days you could count guitar players on one hand, because nobody was making a decent living playing a guitar. If you went to a Saturday night fish fry and played in a house or a room or whatever with a hat at your feet and you played the guitar and they threw nickels, dime and pennies in there. Everybody would listen to you sing and play and dance and get drunk and fall out and go to sleep and wake up the next morning. If you played well enough, you'd get yourself a good lookin' woman and you got drunk. But you'd have to go back to work and then next weekend do the same damn thing. There wasn't no such thing as I played well enough, I don't have to go to work tomorrow, I'll make enough money playin' my guitar.
JL: Describe to me what it felt like when you were honored by The President of the United States for being a person who has influenced American culture through the arts?
BG: First of all, I was brought up pickin' cotton and there were no machines. We were sharecroppers. And I said to myself, This is a long ways from pickin' cotton to be pickin' a guitar in The White House.
JL: What did President Obama say about that?
BG: He just smiled. They had the records on me anyways. The former President Bill Clinton made a speech for me when I was at the Kennedy Awards and he had me crying because he had some history on me of things that even I had forgotten. Some of the things he said I'm like, how did you know that?
JL: On reading your book, I finally figured out the polka dot theme that has been one of your trademarks throughout your career. It's a memorial to your mother. If you were able to bring home that polka-dotted Cadillac to her, what do you think she would have said?
BG: You know, I go to sleep pretty often thinking about that because I was lying--I wasn't telling her the truth. I didn't even dream of a polka dotted Cadillac because I couldn't dream of playing guitar well enough to buy a bike. She had a stroke and I was the only child that was leaving and I was trying to put a smile on her face because all mother's back then would worry about their children when they took off and went somewhere. I knew I wasn't going to buy the Cadillac. And all of a sudden I went to sleep and then woke up when I made it to Chicago and I finally got a gold record. I said to myself, you lied to your momma, and you didn't get a chance to explain to her that you lied, and it crossed my mind as I was thinking, you should get something in her honor. I went to the guitar company and asked about the polka dots and they said for fifteen to almost twenty years that they couldn't do it, and then finally they got a guy who said, I think I can make the polka dot guitar. They didn't think it was going to do well, and then they brought it to the NAMM show in Nashville and they were all sold before they got there.
