![]() ![]() It was, they said, the only real destination for an ambitious and talented young man. People around him started talking down Louisiana, or rather talking up Chicago. (He was especially taken with Guitar Slim, who had shoes in all colors of the rainbow.) He upgraded from his Harmony acoustic to an electric guitar, a Gibson Les Paul. And he started to build a life of music, hitting the bandstand with local acts and eagerly seeing big names when they came to town. He did time at a beer bottling plant and a gas station and as a janitor at LSU. Buddy started working, any job he could find. The whole family decamped for Baton Rouge soon after that, Buddy’s hope replaced by their heaviness. His sister lived there and he did too, for a little while, before his mother had a stroke that brought him back home. In his teens, Buddy left Lettsworth for Baton Rouge and better schools. He was still playing acoustic-his father bought him a makeshift two-string, which held him for a while, until a generous stranger bought him a Harmony six-string. Electricity also brought him an encounter with Lightnin’ Slim, an impromptu performance by the older man that taught Buddy what an amp could do, and it brought him Muddy Waters on a jukebox. The first record Buddy remembered hearing was “Boogie Chillen” by John Lee Hooker, a song that was itself a product of electricity. Electricity brought the lightbulb, but it also brought the phonograph. The Guy home didn’t get electricity until the late Forties, when Buddy was twelve or thirteen. He did whatever he could to put music into the air around him. His parents, alerted to his vandalism by the mosquitoes on their skin, put an end to the experiment, but Buddy just went back to the laboratory, stretched strings from hands to feet, looped rubber bands around nails driven into walls. He pulled a wire out and made his own instrument. Guy says that when he looked closely at the screens, all he saw was a lattice of guitar strings. A family friend who used to drop by the house with a two-string guitar showed him that man could fly.Īt some point, home improvements brought window screens to the Guy home: kept out the bugs, let in the air. Sound, in this way, was alchemized into music. They sang songs, made melodies, repeated their beautiful compositions as if they were proud of them. The first sounds that mattered to him were the chirps and trills of the birds in the trees. Noise, ever present, was a clutter and a clatter. Or rather: he came to understand that the world could be made to make sound. Early on, Guy came to understand that the world made noise. He picked cotton and learned to ride horses. #Amaerica song buddy b windowsThe windows of his house had no glass in them. The family had no electricity for the first twelve years of Guy’s life. For six, ten, twelve years, when you weigh even less than that, how do you puzzle through the process of calculating your own value? Over the years-in his memoir, When I Left Home, in interviews-Guy has slipped this question, asks that he be considered not from the outside, where he’d be seen as a boy in poverty, a laborer forced to perform a dehumanizing task, but from the inside, where he was in fact a little boy happy to be spending time with his father. As a small child, he was enlisted to pick alongside them. Buddy Guy, born poor to parents who picked cotton for $2.50 per hundred pounds. It’s his loss.īuddy Guy, born George Guy in 1936, in Lettsworth, Louisiana, a tiny town at the crook of the L of the state, just off the encroaching nose of Mississippi. The young man tries to remember the music the man in the club was playing but cannot. “Memory is a thicket in which you imagine you are happy to be trapped,” says the man in a hat. He ends up in a bar down the street, listening to a man in a hat hold forth on the toxicity of nostalgia. For a second, maybe even less, his life is repaired. He can see and hear inside, where there’s a man playing, an electric guitar being played. He needs to find a place, a coffee shop, a bookstore, a bar. One cold night he sets off wandering through the city and gets only ten blocks or so before he reconsiders. ![]() The young man has come north to further his education, and he’s remained on track for a few months, but then he’s derailed: by youth, by fear, by appetites, by a relationship, by a breakup. ![]()
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