Buddy Guy

Rock stars turn into dinosaurs if they keep on touring past their due date; but the same law of diminishing returns doesn’t affect blues stars. Now in his ’70s, Buddy Guy remains a formidable performer, equally and easily at home with rip-it-up express-train jams and slow, agonizing hymns to women found and lost. Born in Louisiana, Guy made the inevitable trek to Chicago in the late ’50s, where he received valuable tutelage from Muddy Waters himself.

Guy’s innovative style and hyperbolic stage shows proved a bit too much for Chess Records; in 1968, he released A Man and the Blues on Vanguard, complete with psychedelic cover, in time to link him to the rock-blues movement of the era. That album contains Guy’s definitive version of “Sweet Little Angel,” a deeply felt number with keening vocals and piercing guitar. Eric Clapton once lavished praise on Guy. A 2004 appearance at a blues festival in Texas showed that Guy was even capable of reinvigorating the often comatose later Clapton (check it out on YouTube under “Sweet Home Chicago”). However, it must be said that, as great as he is, even Buddy Guy couldn’t make John Mayer look or sound hip.