If you managed to catch the latest Michael B. Jordan movie Sinnersyou might have spotted a very familiar figure who’s a dead-ringer for Buddy Guy. Spoiler alert: it is indeed Buddy Guy. Much like Sammie (the character Guys plays in the movie), the 88-year-old still plays at his club in his native Chicago – all in the name of keeping the blues alive.
“There’s very few radio stations other than satellite who play blues now,” he tells Variety. “And the older people I learned from is no longer with us. But when I was coming up, on the AM stations everybody’s records were being played. There was gospel, jazz and the blues, and everybody knew who the late Lightnin’ Hopkins was.”
However, according to Guy, blues pioneers aren’t as well-known among the younger generation anymore. “They’re like, ‘Who is that? Who’s Muddy Waters?’ My grandkids don’t know nothing about the blues until they hit 21 and come up in the club while I’m there, and they say, ‘Granddad, I didn’t know you could do that!’
“So I’m 100% trying to support it so the next generation of white or Black kids can hear it and know more about the blues that was created way before the British type of (blues-rock) stuff come along and all the different types of music we have now,” he asserts with conviction. “Muddy Waters and BB King, I knew ’em before they passed away, and they told me, ‘Man, if you outlive me, just try to keep the blues alive.’
The triad of Guy, Waters, and King goes way back. When Guy moved to Chicago from Baton Rouge, Louisiana, he didn’t think he was good enough to play guitar with Waters or even make a record. In fact, he was previously working as a custodian at Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge.
“But I come up to Chicago, and the next thing I know, Muddy was asking me to play,” he related in a 2015 Guitar World interview. “And I found out that the money Muddy was making wasn’t much more than I was making working day jobs at LSU. But here’s Howlin’ Wolf, Muddy Waters, Little Walter, Sonny Boy Williamson… and they were having so much fun just playing. And I learned that they were playing for the love of music, not the love of money.”
As for B.B. King, one of Guy’s ultimate guitar heroes, he imparted valuable advice that the veteran blues guitarist still recalls to this day.
“B.B. King once told me that he’d never play the same thing twice,” he recalled in a 2023 Guitar World interview. “He said, ‘If you come to hear me play, you’ll never hear me play anything as I did before.’ So if you come and see a Buddy Guy show, you won’t hear me intentionally try and do anything note for note.”
Despite officially retiring from touring last year, Buddy Guy recently returned to the stage to perform on the final date of the 2025 Experience Hendrix Tour at the Fox Theatre in Atlanta.
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