![]() ![]() At show’s end, Slim said, “Didn’t I tell you, boy? Folk come buzzin’ in like bees to honey.” (Crudup’s song “That’s All Right” would soon send Elvis on his road to stardom.) When Lightnin’ Slim made a live appearance at that local store, Buddy focused his “eyes on fingers like a hound dog focused on a rabbit hole” and learned about the power of blues to attract people. Lenoir, and Howlin’ Wolf floating in from a station in “far-off Tennessee” when “the weather was clear” and to Muddy Waters, Little Walter, and Arthur “Big Boy” Crudup on the jukebox at the local general store. What a difference between two and six! Was like I had a whole orchestra in my hands.”īuddy absorbed all the blues he could, listening to Lightnin’ Hopkins on the record player at home to Smokey Hogg, Willie Mabon, J.B. The stranger returned the next day to make good on his offer, spending $52 on a Harmony six-string for Buddy, who was overcome with gratitude: “All I could say was ‘thank you.’ I thanked the man who bought it, I thanked the owner of the store, and in my silent mind I thanked the Good Lord in heaven.” He wasn’t sure at first “what to do with them strings, but I was learning fast … Wasn’t long before I was playing ‘Boogie Chillen’ with all six strings. His brothers and sisters may have tired of his playing of Hooker’s repetitious song over and over again, but a stranger who walked by as Buddy was out on a porch “fooling with a new song by John Lee Hooker called ‘I’m in the Mood,’” was so impressed by what was coming out of Buddy that he offered to buy the teenager a real guitar. Until then, as Buddy tells his story, “My head was filled up with music I couldn’t play.” Now, with a guitar in his hands, the music in him was coming out. After the transaction had been completed and just before Coot fell deep into his wine, Buddy got a quick lesson in playing “Boogie Chillen,’” and “Life ain’t never been the same since.” Whether the instrument was a six-string guitar missing four strings or a homemade cigar box guitar or a homemade, two-string diddley bow, we aren’t told. I figured that one way or the other I had to get me a guitar…”īuddy got his guitar one Christmas when his father purchased a two-string instrument, after some serious negotiation, from the local songster, Henry “Coot” Smith. Hooker’s relentlessly tapping foot and a one-chord boogie riff created a hypnotic musical bed as he sang about a boy desperate to boogie despite the fact that “my Mama, she didn't 'low me / Just to stay out all night long.” But one night, Hooker sang, the boy “heard mama 'n papa talkin’ / I heard papa tell mama / Let that boy boogie-woogie / ‘Cause it's in him, and it got to come out.” Hearing this lyric, the young Buddy Guy “figured that this John Lee Hooker had to be talking about me. The mood was so strong that after the song had done played, you had to play it over.” As Buddy describes Hooker’s hit, “Wasn’t anything more than one guy playing his electric guitar by himself. Jazzy, jump blues recordings featuring suave vocalists backed by horn sections playing intricate arrangements dominated the R&B charts in 1949, but “Boogie Chillen’” topped them all with a starkly primeval sound. Buddy was twelve then, and as he recalled decades later in When I Left Home - his 2012 autobiography written with David Ritz - the “little light bulb in our cabin didn’t improve life much,” but “the beat-up used phonograph that played 78 records, changed everything … I thank God that my daddy had this one record by John Lee Hooker called ‘Boogie Chillen.’ That’s the record that did it.” Buddy Guy’s long journey to the Hancher Auditorium stage this evening began in 1948 when the “wooden shack built up on pillars” in which he and his parents and brothers and sisters lived in Lettsworth, Louisiana, was electrified.
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