Buddy Guy

Word reached Muddy Waters that a hungry unknown was playing guitar at Chicago's 708 Club, so he came to see for himself, then drove Guy off in his red station wagon and bought him a bologna sandwich — "I heard you were telling people you're hungry," Waters said. "So I got fed by the Mud," Guy has said, and the feeding continued for years as Waters brought him into Chess sessions where a young guitarist could actually learn. "I didn't work with him," Guy explains. "I was in class." What he absorbed there was Waters's slide-born vocabulary — bent, vocal-like single notes standing in for a whole verse.

listen: upstream & heresource: Guitar Player — "When Buddy Guy Met Muddy Waters" (Muddy Waters, Guitar Slim, and John Lee Hooker anecdotes) ↗share

1954

(I'm Your) Hoochie Coochie ManMuddy Waters

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1970

(I'm Your) Hoochie Coochie ManBuddy Guy

listen forWaters's 1954 "(I'm Your) Hoochie Coochie Man" rides Willie Dixon's stop-time riff on a bed of amplified slide, each phrase left to hang and rattle before the next one lands. Guy's own recording of it, cut sixteen years later with fellow bluesmen Junior Wells and Junior Mance on Buddy and the Juniors, keeps that same stop-time skeleton but strips the arrangement down further, guitar and voice trading the same bent, vocal-like phrasing Guy picked up watching Waters from a corner of the studio.

In Baton Rouge, Guy heard an electric guitar playing before he could find the player — Guitar Slim was working the crowd on a cord that tellings put anywhere from a hundred to three hundred feet long, hair dyed to match his red suit, carried through the room on a roadie's back. "I want to play like B.B. King," Guy decided that night, "but I want to act like Guitar Slim." The showmanship stuck — the entrances, the walking-the-crowd theatrics, and a guitar tone pushed hot enough to distort, years before Chess would let him put that sound on record.

listen: upstream & heresource: Guitar Player — "When Buddy Guy Met Muddy Waters" (Muddy Waters, Guitar Slim, and John Lee Hooker anecdotes) ↗share

1953

The Things That I Used to DoGuitar Slim

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1979

The Things I Used to Do (Live at the Checkerboard Lounge)Buddy Guy

listen forSlim's 1953 original "The Things That I Used to Do" barely warns you: a quiet turnaround, then a scalding, overdriven solo that reportedly blew studio amplifiers of the era. Guy cut his own version live at his own Chicago club, the Checkerboard Lounge, in 1979, looser and longer, but the trick is identical — hold back, then detonate, guitar tone pushed past clean until it snarls the way Slim's did that night in Baton Rouge.

Long before he met him, Guy owned a John Lee Hooker record and taught himself "Boogie Chillen'" by ear on a homemade two-string guitar — the first song, he's said, that he ever fully learned. He has placed his first meeting with Hooker on both a European package tour and a Southern swing with Big Mama Thornton in different retellings; either way, he sat in a corner playing that same song on an acoustic guitar to get Hooker's attention. "I'm John Lee, boy!" Hooker told him, laughing, and Guy has called him his best friend from that day on.

listen: upstream & heresource: Guitar Player — "When Buddy Guy Met Muddy Waters" (Muddy Waters, Guitar Slim, and John Lee Hooker anecdotes) ↗share

1948

Boogie Chillen'John Lee Hooker

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1981

Boogie Chillen'Buddy Guy

listen forHooker's 1948 "Boogie Chillen'" never leaves one droning riff, the guitar working as a talking, stomping pulse under his voice rather than moving through chord changes. More than three decades later, on tour with Junior Wells in Paris, Guy sat down with an acoustic guitar and cut that same riff almost note for note on Alone & Acoustic — proof the teenager teaching himself off a record in rural Louisiana had gotten the whole lesson right.