First Guitar
Buddy was all of seven years old, he recalls, when he fashioned his first makeshift “guitar”—a two-string contraption attached to a piece of wood and secured with his mother’s hairpins. There was usually no work to be done on the plantation on Saturday afternoons and Sundays, and the precious free time helped Buddy to develop the very skills that would one day bring him fame. It would be nearly another, decade, however, before Buddy would own an actual guitar—a Harmony acoustic that now proudly sits on display at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland.
By late 1955, following a stint pumping gas, the 19-year-old Guy was working as a custodian at Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge, and earning the princely sum of $28 per week. (”Back then, you could go to the grocery store with just three dollars,” Guy recalls with a laugh, “and you needed help to bring the groceries back!”) His heart and mind were already firmly attached to the guitar and the blues sounds he heard emanating from the radio, but a future in Chicago, at least then, wasn’t in the picture. At that point in his young life, Guy had never even been out of Louisiana.
“Back then, you could go to the grocery store with just three dollars, and you needed help to bring the groceries back!”
- Buddy Guy
But by the summer of 1957, the outlook had changed. “A friend of mine, a guy who was a cook in Chicago, he returned to Louisiana and said, ‘Man, you could go to Chicago and do well playing the guitar! You could play at night and work in the daytime!’”
