At 87, Buddy Guy on a mission to keep blues music alive

Wearing a black shirt with white polka dots, Chicago blues guitarist Buddy Guy ambled onto the stage at Santa Rosa’s Luther Burbank Center last year and did what he’s been doing for more than 60 years. He knocked ’em dead.

From the first electrifying note to the last, Guy jolted the cheering crowd with his powerful playing and soulful singing.

Late in the show, Guy came down from the stage and delivered a blistering solo as he stomped in his black Pumas up and down the aisles, all the way to the back of the theater.

Carlos Santana has praised Guy’s “tenacity of tone” and said in a recent documentary that he “stands like he’s got a flamethrower, like he’s gonna torch the town.”

Guy turned 87 on July 30, saying just before his birthday that he planned to celebrate with cognac and cake.

He brings his Damn Right Farewell Tour to Sonoma State’s Green Music Center Friday. Eric Gales opens the show.

Guy is midway through a yearlong international farewell tour that’s taken him through Europe, Canada and all over the United States.

“I can play, but getting from Point A to Point B, the trips that take all day on the bus or the airport … anybody would say, that’s enough,” he told Billboard last February.

Guy doesn’t plan to lay down his guitar entirely. He said he’ll continue to play at his Chicago blues club, Buddy Guy’s Legends, and will travel occasionally to festivals, such as Jazz Fest in New Orleans.

In a career that dates to the late 1950s, Guy has won eight Grammy Awards including a Lifetime Achievement Award and Best Traditional Blues Album for last year’s “The Blues Don’t Lie.” That collection features guest vocalists Mavis Staples, Elvis Costello and James Taylor, among others.

He’s received a Kennedy Center Honor, a Presidential National Medal of Arts and was inducted by B.B. King and Eric Clapton into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

Lightning strike

Christone “Kingfish” Ingram, a 24-year-old blues standout who opened for many of Guy’s shows this year, said Guy’s guitar can sound like a “lightning strike. It gives me the chills.”

Growing up in the blues hub of Clarksdale, Mississippi, Ingram feels a kinship with the man he respectfully calls “Mr. Guy.

“He’s from the South. I think a lot of people forget that,” Ingram said. “He went from Louisiana to Chicago — he took that leap of faith — that was the greatest decision ever.”

Guy’s career began after he moved from rural Louisiana to Chicago in 1957 to listen to Muddy Waters and other blues giants in the city’s smoky clubs. He just wanted to see them, but soon he was playing alongside them.

Looking back on his career in the 2021 documentary “The Blues Chase the Blues Away,” Guy recalled that he didn’t think he could be as talented as Waters or King.

But after seeing a bluesman named Guitar Slim, who Guy said was “wild and crazy,” Guy realized he could put on a show.

“I said, ‘I wanna play like B.B. King, but I want to act like Guitar Slim.’ I can’t play as good as they do, but I’m gonna go up there and kick the stands and jump off the stage,” he says in the 2021 film. “And I got attention doing that.”

Early stage fright

Given Guy’s command of the stage, it’s perhaps surprising he was once too shy to face a small audience.

As a teenager, he left his home of Lettsworth, Louisiana, and got a job at a gas station in Baton Rouge.

Inspired by John Lee Hooker’s song “Boogie Chillen,” Guy took up the guitar. He was playing at the gas station when “this big mountain of a man” heard him playing and said, “Ain’t bad,” Guy writes in his 2012 autobiography, “When I Left Home.”

The man, Big Poppa, invited him to play that night at his club, and though Guy could play and sing, when it came to facing the audience, he “just couldn’t.”

He got fired, Guy said, for the first and only time in his life.

“Funny thing about the blues: You play ’em because you got ’em,” he writes. “But when you play ’em, you lose ’em. … The blues chase the blues away.”

Soon he learned to face the audience, to own the stage and to excite crowds with his growls and stealthy moves. And he bent strings like no other guitarist had, eliciting plaintive howls from his instrument.

Bill Bowker, a longtime deejay at Santa Rosa radio station KRSH, said Guy is a “formidable force in the world of blues music.”

Host of the weekly “Blues With Bowker” show, he said Guy “just sounds so real. There’s nothing phony about his music. He’s just so good.”

Bowker said Guy creates “exciting and deep-feeling” music. “I feel the honesty and worthiness of the lyrics, the music. It’s outstanding. I’m glad he’s still here.”

It can be hard to imagine how far Guy has come.

He picked cotton alongside his sharecropper parents starting at age 6 and grew up in a wooden shack with a leaky roof and no indoor plumbing.

“I didn't know running water until I was 17 years old,” he told the audience at a 2016 show in Santa Rosa.

He walked miles to school while white kids rode buses. When the buses passed Guy and his friends, “We tried to run as far from the dust as we could,” he said in the 2021 documentary.

Electricity arrived in the 1940s, and the Guy family got lighting fixtures and a phonograph, perhaps not in that order, as his father, Sam Guy, loved music.

When Guy first heard Hooker’s “Boogie Chillen” he thought, “Whatever that is, I wish one day I could learn that.”

Guy’s father bought an old guitar with just two strings from a family friend. Buddy loved the guitar so much he slept with it.

“Boogie Chillen” has a lyric: “Let that boy boogie woogie because it’s in him and got to come out.” Guy felt Hooker was speaking directly to him, and he chose to devote his life to the blues.

Bound for Chicago

On Sept. 25, 1957, Guy got on a train bound for Chicago. It was the day after President Dwight D. Eisenhower sent federal troops to Little Rock, Arkansas, to ensure the admission of nine Black pupils to that city’s Central High School, an order that had been viciously opposed by white supremacists.

When Guy got to Chicago, he learned that admission to clubs was free, but “you had to buy a bottle of beer to hear them play,” he says in the film. “I did that ’til I got broke.”

At one point, Guy hadn’t eaten in three days when he ran into fellow bluesman Otis Rush at the 708 Club. Rush told Waters that Guy was hungry, and Waters came down to the club with a salami sandwich, Guy recalls emotionally in the film.

“I was a lost ball in high weeds,” Guy said. But Waters told him: “Don’t ever go back to Louisiana.”

Guy had recorded song, “Baby Don’t You Want to Come Home,” at a radio station in Baton Rouge and brought the demo to Leonard Chess, founder of Chess Records. But the powerful record company executive said Guy “didn’t have it.”

At times, Guy wondered what he was doing, struggling in the “concrete jungle” of Chicago, but he had a dream — and he’d made a promise to his mother, Isabell.

“Before I left Louisiana in 1957, my mother was ill and I promised her that one day I’d make it big and drive back home in a polka-dot Cadillac,” Guy wrote on his Facebook page on Mother’s Day in 2015.

“She never did get a chance to see me play, so I got my polka-dot guitar as a way of keeping that promise to her.”

His mother died in 1968, but Guy has held on to that red guitar with white dots. He still wears polka-dot shirts in tribute to Isabell.

Lifelong mission

During the 1960s, top blues musicians including Waters hired Guy to play guitar in their bands. Soon Guy gained broad recognition, fronting his own group and partnering with Junior Wells.

When Guy went to England in the mid-1960s, Eric Clapton, Jimmy Page and Jeff Beck came to see the guitarist they were trying to emulate.

At a time hippies when were calling Clapton “God,” he was calling Guy “the best guitarist I’ve ever heard,” according to Billboard.

During the summer of 1970, he was part of a train tour called The Festival Express with Janis Joplin, Jerry Garcia and The Band. Between concerts they jammed on the train, the wildly popular rock icons left spellbound by Guy’s guitar wizardry and artistry.

At 87, Guy still has a mission: to keep alive the memory and music of great blues artists such as Waters, Howlin’ Wolf and King.

“I’m singing this kind of blues because they don’t play it on the radio,” he said at his 2016 Luther Burbank show. “I’m fortunate that I'm still doing it.”

White House jam

Over his prolific career, Guy has received so many honors he can’t quite count them all. He was thrilled when Louisiana named a section of State Highway 418 for him — Lettsworth Buddy Guy Way.

Yet one night may stand above the rest, an evening in February 2012 when Guy was invited to perform with an all-star band in the White House in honor of Black History Month.

Guy’s searing guitar led the band — which included King and Mick Jagger — through a sizzling rendition of “Sweet Home Chicago.”

“I heard you sing with Al Green,” Guy said midsong, pointing at President Obama. “You done started something, you gotta keep it up now!”

Obama initially demurred, but when Guy said, “You can do it,” the president took the mic and sang, “C’mon baby don’ you wanna go.”

The audience and even the band cheered as they played in front of a portrait of George Washington.

“Who would dream, picking with a cotton sack on my shoulder, (that) one day I’m gonna play in the White House,” Guy says in the 2021 documentary. “You couldn’t even think that. That couldn’t even cross your mind. But I did.”