Buddy Guy is perhaps the greatest living exponent of classic Chicago electric blues. He is a thrillingly inventive guitarist, a passionately soulful singer and a peerless showman. In the course of a decades-long professional career, he has sold more than 2 million albums, earned five Grammy® Awards and 24 W.C. Handy Blues Awards—more than any other single artist.
Guy released Sweet Tea in 2001—one of the most sonically innovative and critically acclaimed albums of his career. On it, he offered exciting new interpretations of songs originally recorded by North Mississippi hill-country blues progenitors Robert Cage, T-Model Ford and Junior Kimbrough. Working with producer Dennis Herring at Sweet Tea Studio in Oxford, Miss., Guy stripped away the horn sections, keyboards and guest vocalists of his ‘90s recordings to create a fierce, stripped-down sound. The music of Sweet Tea evoked “a world full of temptation and cruelty” (Rolling Stone) and resulted in “the guitarist’s best album since his 1991 breakthrough, 'Damn Right, I’ve Got The Blues'” (Guitar World). It also earned a Grammy® nomination for best contemporary blues album.
George “Buddy” Guy was born July 30, 1936, in Lettsworth, La. “I was so far out in the country, man," he once said. "We didn’t have running water, no electric lights, no radio, and I didn’t know nothing about no electric guitar. We used to get the catalogs, like from Sears, and that’s how our mother would order our clothes. Didn’t have no stores there to buy clothes from."
Today, Guy is an internationally celebrated symbol of the living blues. Owner of Chicago nightclub Buddy Guy’s Legends, he continues to tour worldwide, and he has been inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum im Cleveland, Ohio.
