A Blues Apprenticeship
Within months, Guy had taken up residency in Chicago’s fabled 708 Club. His first appearance followed a set by Otis Rush and an oft-repeated story about a hungry Guy, broke and on the cusp of returning to Louisiana, getting salami sandwiches from none other than Waters himself, who’d arrived at the club in a red Chevrolet. It was the first time Guy had ever seen the blues giant, who happened to live nearby.
“He throwed down that loaf of bread and that salami—that was the lunch we used to have in the cotton fields. I never will forget that, man. People were sayin’, ‘That’s the Mud!’ Nobody called him Muddy Waters. When he asked me if I was hungry, and he said who he was, I said, ‘Well, if you’re Muddy Waters, I’m not hungry no more.’ Just meeting him filled me up.”
“‘Well, if you’re Muddy Waters, I’m not hungry no more.’ Just meeting him filled me up.”
-Buddy Guy
The great Waters was 21 years Guy’s senior, but the younger man quickly earned the respect of the long-established star. By the early 1960s, Guy was a first-call session man at Chess Records. In addition, he began to cut a considerable catalog of sides under his own name. Many fans and critics have lauded Guy’s singles output from 1960 to 1967, but the artist has never given them the satisfaction.
“I was always coached,” Guy says. “I didn’t know any damn thing. When Willie Dixon and other people came in, if they thought I was something new that they could cash in on, I didn’t have no say-so. I was almost told how to play the guitar with the session going on. I didn’t have the freedom. I never was free on those recordings.”
That’s not to say there weren’t high points. As a session man, he backed the likes of Waters, Howlin’ Wolf, Little Walter and Sonny Boy Williamson. One landmark recording backing Waters, Folk Singer, was cut in September of 1963 and released in the spring of 1964.
Wrote producer Ralph Bass in the album’s original liner notes of the “search” for a second guitarist to back Waters: “Buddy Guy, a young blues singer in his own right, was first choice and it is amazing for so young a musician as Buddy to be able to fit in with Muddy.”
