Buddy Guy
Watch
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Trailer
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He’s Wild and Crazy
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Meeting Muddy Waters
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Keeping the Blues Alive
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What Signature Tone?
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The first time Buddy sees Lightning Slim
Buddy Guy
At age 79, Buddy Guy is a Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inductee, a major influence on rock titans like Jimi Hendrix, Eric Clapton, and Stevie Ray Vaughan, a pioneer of Chicago’s fabled West Side sound, and a living link to the city’s halcyon days of electric blues. He has received 6 GRAMMY Awards, along with a 2015 Lifetime Achievement GRAMMY Award, 34 Blues Music Awards (the most any artist has received), the Billboard Magazine Century Award for distinguished artistic achievement, and the Presidential National Medal of Arts. Rolling Stone Magazine ranked him #23 in its "100 Greatest Guitarists of All Time."
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"Music makes people happy, and that's why I go on doing it - I like to see everybody smile."
— Buddy Guy
Buddy Guy plays Ernie Ball guitar strings
Ernie Ball is the world's leading manufacturer of premium electric and acoustic guitar strings, bass strings, and guitar accessories. Our strings have been played on many of the best-selling albums of all time and are used by some of history's greatest musicians including Paul McCartney, Eric Clapton, Jimmy Page, Slash, The Rolling Stones, Angus Young, Eagles, Jeff Beck, Pete Townshend, Aerosmith, Metallica, and more.
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Buddy Guy is a genuine American treasure.
Though Buddy Guy will forever be associated with Chicago, his story actually begins in Louisiana. One of five children, he was born in 1936 to a sharecropper’s family and raised on a plantation near the small town of Lettsworth, located some 140 miles northwest of New Orleans. Buddy was just seven years old when he fashioned his first makeshift "guitar"—a two-string contraption attached to a piece of wood and secured with his mother’s hairpins.
In 1957, he took his guitar to Chicago, where he would permanently alter the direction of the instrument, first on numerous sessions for Chess Records playing alongside Howlin’ Wolf, Muddy Waters, and the rest of the label’s legendary roster, and then on recordings of his own. His incendiary style left its mark on guitarists from Jimmy Page to John Mayer. "He was for me what Elvis was probably like for other people," said Eric Clapton at Guy’s Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction in 2005."My course was set, and he was my pilot."