Chicago Bound
“All I thought about was that I could get the same work at a college in Chicago somewhere that I did at L.S.U.,” Guy remembers. “Instead of $28 per week, I’d be making $68 or $78 a week, and that’s what was really standing out in my head. I didn’t leave Louisiana to be a professional musician. That didn’t even cross my mind. I just wanted to go to work and come in a club at night and watch Howlin’ Wolf, Muddy Waters and Little Walter and them play the blues like it’s supposed to be done. I thought maybe I could learn something and then go home and play it. I didn’t plan this. I still don’t think I’m good enough to do it.”
“I just wanted watch Howlin’ Wolf, Muddy Waters and Little Walter and them play the blues like it’s supposed to be done.”
- Buddy Guy
It was September 25, 1957—a date Guy would cite countless times in interviews over the ensuing decades—when he boarded the 8:14 a.m. train in Hammond, Louisiana, arriving in Chicago just before midnight. In an instant, his world had changed. Gone was the rural landscape of Louisiana; in its place was the thriving urban sprawl of a metropolis. It may as well have been a foreign country. “I just got off the train at 63rd and Dorchester, looked up at the moon and said, ‘Which way should I go?’”
