Hot Wax: Buddy Guy's This Is Buddy Guy! (1968/2025)

Born in 1936 in Louisiana to a sharecropper family, George “Buddy” Guy worked the fields as a youth, picking cotton alongside his younger brother Phil. Looking for a way out of the backbreaking work of farming, Guy taught himself guitar by using a two-string diddley bow that he’d made. He later acquired an acoustic guitar, allowing him to hone his talents so, that by the mid-1950s, he was playing with various bands in the Baton Rouge area. Guy moved to Chicago in 1957, where he would find support from blues great Muddy Waters. After recording a pair of non-performing singles for Cobra Records (including one with Ike Turner), Guy signed with the legendary Chess Records label.

Unfortunately, Chess had no freakin’ idea what to do with the fiery, innovative guitarist; label founder Leonard Chess famously called Guy’s performances “noise.” Instead, Chess tried to shape Guy into a solo R&B singer, with a side dish of jazz instrumentals, a straitjacket not suited to Guy’s otherwise immense talents. The guitarist recorded but a single album for Chess – 1967’s I Left My Blues In San Francisco – the label preferring to use him as a session player for recordings by high-profile artists like Waters, Howlin’ Wolf, Koko Taylor, and Little Walter. Moonlighting while signed to Chess, Guy started a lifelong friendship with harmonica wizard Junior Wells, contributing guitar to Wells’ classic 1965 Hoodoo Man Blues album under the “Friendly Chap” pseudonym.

This Is Buddy Guy!

Working with a  new manager, Guy signed with Vanguard Records which, thanks to the efforts of producer Sam Charters, was expanding the label’s roster beyond folk music and into the blues. Guy recorded his underrated sophomore effort, A Man & the Blues, for Vanguard in 1968 and followed it up quickly with the live This Is Buddy Guy!, released later that year. Recently reissued on gorgeous 180-gram vinyl by Bluesville Records, This Is Buddy Guy! captures the guitarist’s raucous July 1968 performance at New Orleans House in Berkeley, California. Backed by a horn-heavy outfit that featured saxophonists A.C. Reed and Bobby Fields alongside trumpeters Norman Spiller and George Alexander and including rhythm guitarist Tim Kaihatsu, bassist Jack Meyers, and drummer Glenway McTeer.

The band is red-hot and ready to roll, and Guy takes them on a hell of a ride. This early in his career, Guy wasn’t writing songs as prolifically as he would later, so half of This Is Buddy Guy! is comprised of blues and soul covers, with just a handful of original tunes. The Guy/Willie Dixon co-write “I Got My Eyes On You” is a perfect snapshot of the guitarist at this point in time – Guy shouting lyrics above a loping rhythm punctuated by the occasional blast of horns and embroidered with shards of hot guitar. The song has ‘Chicago blues’ written in its DNA and, if Guy’s jagged leads were unusual in 1968, they’d become standard for many instrumentalists in years to come.

The Things I Used To Do

Much of the live set follows a similar blueprint – a cover of the Guitar Slim classic “The Things I Used To Do” offers Guy’s stab at soul-styled vocals (something which he wouldn’t master until later in his career) accompanied by machine-gun flurries of notes. It’s fascinating to compare Buddy Guy now vs. then: while time has tamed the stormy nature of his early performances, the fire still burns brightly. “(You Give Me) Fever” is provided low-key vocals with the occasional outburst of enthusiasm, but the band smolders in the grooves and Guy’s six-string vamps display a subtlety that Mr. Chess sorely overlooked. Eddie Floyd’s Stax Records hit “Knock On Wood” is delivered in a R&B revue style similar to the original with rowdy, Floyd/Redding/Pickett-styled soul vox with plenty of blazing horns and scraps of guitar.

The second side of This Is Buddy Guy! leaps off the turntable with the roiling intensity of Guy’s original “I Had A Dream Last Night.” Guy sets a somber mood with his emotional fretwork as Jack Meyers’ jazzy walking bass line anchors the song’s rhythm and mournful horns sing the blues in the background. It’s a forceful performance, with extended instrumental passages, and the perfect lead-in to “24 Hours A Day,” an up-tempo R&B stomp with rollicking horns and a swaggering rhythm painted by Guy’s sporadic fretboard runs. The Chicago-styled “You Were Wrong” showcases Guy as bluesman with scorching, inventive leads, and a bad luck tale as old as the blues. The album closes out with “I’m Not the Best,” a juke-joint barn-burner that channels Guy’s energy and wildness into a singular outrageous performance that displays perfectly why Guy became a major influence on generations of rock and blues guitarists to follow.     

The Reverend’s Bottom Line

Much like his old friend B.B. King, Buddy Guy is a blues chameleon, a talented guitarist and legendary performer capable of mastering various styles of the genre as witnessed by recordings like 1972’s Buddy Guy & Junior Wells Play the Blues (which strays onto blues-rock turf), 1981’s Stone Crazy! (pure blues-rock with guitar pyrotechnics to match), 1994’s Slippin’ In (back to Chicago), and 2001’s Sweet Tea (back to basics), upon which Guy built his Hall of Fame worthy legacy.

This Is Buddy Guy! documents the guitarist in his early years, and while his impressive six-string talents were nearly fully-formed at the time, he was still developing a sound of his own that would carry his career across seven decades. If you’re a Buddy Guy fan, you owe it to yourself to experience a young Buddy tearing up the boards and thrilling the audience a mere handful of years into his career with This Is Buddy Guy! Grade: A (Bluesville Records/Craft Recordings, released May 16th, 2025)

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