Done Feel Good

Blues legend Buddy Guy brews ‘Sweet Tea’ at Trenton’s War Memorial.

By: Matt Smith
   On the opening track of his latest album, Sweet Tea (Jive/Silvertone), Buddy Guy sounds like he’s sitting alone in the dark with an acoustic guitar, the room bare except for a creaky rocking chair and maybe a flickering light bulb swinging from the ceiling, occasionally illuminating his pained expression.

Buddy Guy pays tribute to the blues masters of North Mississippi in a new album and on stage in Trenton Mar. 6.

   On the spare, haunting version of Junior Kimbrough’s "Done Got Old," the world-weary bluesman
moans, "Well, I done got old/ Can’t do the things I used to do/ ‘Cause I’m an old man/ And I’m not the same."
   It is a somewhat misleading introduction, because on the subsequent eight tracks, the 65-year-old
Mr. Guy plugs in and plays with the ferocity of a midsummer lightning storm. He howls like a man possessed,
pleading for love ("I Gotta Try You Girl") and pleading even harder when his lust betrays him ("Baby Please
Don’t Leave Me").
   The album is a departure for Mr. Guy, who in the 1950s helped bring the Mississippi Delta
Blues to the shores of Lake Michigan, where he and Muddy Waters electrified it and gave birth to the Chicago
Blues. On Sweet Tea, the Lettsworth, La., native looks southward again, this time to the hill country
of North Mississippi.
   With the exception of the closer, the Guy-penned "It’s A Jungle Out There" and Lowell Fulsom’s
"Tramp," the tunes all come from the songbook of Fat Possum Records, a label based in Oxford, Miss., that in
the past 10 years has initiated or revived the careers of little-known bluesmen such as Kimbrough, Robert Cage,
James "T-Model" Ford and R.L. Burnside.
   Producer Dennis Herring, who has worked with pop acts such as Counting Crows and Jars of
Clay, approached Mr. Guy a few years ago with the idea of recording a raw, stripped-down album of the Fat Possum
songs, known for their trance-inducing repetition and lack of verses. He was hesitant but eventually agreed,
going down to Mr. Herring’s Sweet Tea Studios in July 2000.
   "I didn’t think I could do a good job with it because my attention would go back to the way
those guys were playing," says Mr. Guy, speaking from a tour stop in Lake Tahoe, Nev., "but (Dennis Herring)
didn’t want me to do that. They wanted me to go down there and play Buddy Guy. Otherwise, if I fooled with
it and got hooked on it, I was going to play their music and not mine."
   Still, when he arrived in Oxford to join Mr. Herring’s hand-picked band — rhythm guitarist
James Mathus (Squirrel Nut Zippers), bassist Davey Faragher (John Hiatt) and Spam, "T-Model" Ford’s drummer
— Mr. Guy struggled with the non-narrative bent of the hill-country style.

Buddy Guy’s latest album, "Sweet Tea," contains tunes from the songbook of Fat Possum Records, a label based in Oxford, Miss.

   "I kept telling myself, ‘These songs don’t have a story,’ " he says in a friendly Louisiana
drawl. "They said, ‘We don’t want it. That’s not what the northern Mississippi music was all about.’ I just
kept doing it and kept doing it. That cut on there, ‘I Gotta Try You Girl,’ after I got hooked on it, they
just couldn’t stop me."
   As with a hyperactive child, it was all the producer could do to keep Mr. Guy out of the
studio while the band rehearsed.
   "They set me up in the hallway and locked the door," he says. "The first cut you got on there,
‘Done Got Old,’ I was sitting in the engineer’s room on a couch one morning and he handed me an acoustic guitar,
saying, ‘Will you see what you can do with this?’ I said, ‘Yeah. Let me see,’ and I didn’t even see the damn
microphone man. I almost forgot all about it until the CD came out."
   When Sweet Tea hit the stores last May, it was met with glowing reviews, many critics
calling it Mr. Guy’s best effort since 1967’s A Man and The Blues (Vanguard). The album is up for a
Grammy Feb. 27 as "Best Contemporary Blues Album."
   He is celebrating his success on the road. A Chicago resident since 1957, he began the year
with a month-long stand at Buddy Guy’s Legends, his South Side blues club, and is touring throughout the spring.
   Mr. Guy had his first hits for Chess Records in the early 1960s, then made three albums for
Vanguard in the late ’60s. His 1972 duo album, Buddy Guy & Junior Wells Play the Blues (Atco), is
an acoustic blues classic. Unfortunately, he spent much of the 1970s and ’80s without a recording contract,
finally returning to prominence in 1991 with the release of Damn Right, I’ve Got The Blues (Jive/Silvertone).
   Although he now has the clout of a four-time Grammy-winner, Mr. Guy makes recording decisions
like a musician schooled in an era of fly-by-night record labels and session work that paid next to nothing.
   "I have never said ‘no’ to nothin’ yet," he says. "Didn’t nobody want to record me for 15
years. I’m with a label now that if they call me, tomorrow I’m on my way. They bring the material, all of them
hoping one day I can hit the right note or say the right thing, and (radio stations) say, ‘We gotta play this
record here,’ which is what I thought they were gonna do with ‘Sweet Tea.’ "

"I feel good," Mr. Guy says. "I’m still having fun. I thank God that I’m blessed to still be here to take this blues personally to some of the people I’m taking it too now."

   The album is a critical hit, yet the thunderous electric blues contained within have yet
to find a home on radio, largely ignored by narrow-thinking program directors.
   "Every paper I saw, they were giving me the stars and they were bringing them to me like,
‘Look man, "Rolling Stone" gave you four stars. "USA (Today)" gave you four stars.’ I said, ‘Oh s—t, they’re
going to have to play this one.’ But how wrong I was."
   Without young audiences discovering the blues on radio, which either ignores the blues entirely
or relegates it to the early-morning hours, Mr. Guy worries the music will die out. Until his kids got a bit
older, he wasn’t even a legend in his own home.
   "All of my children, man, grew up in the house with me, and when they turned 21, they walked
in the club and they just cried, ‘Dad, I didn’t know you was that good,’ " he says. "If my kids don’t know
who I am…you know they don’t play blues on radio no more, not like they do any other music."
   While Mr. Guy is thankful for the exposure white artists such as Eric Clapton and Bonnie
Raitt have given the blues, he’s not sure why skin color sometimes decides whether a worthy song will be played
or not.
   "Man, if you’re black and a blues player, your record is not going to be exposed out there,"
he says. "All you gotta do is give Eric, (Carlos) Santana or Bonnie Raitt a version of Muddy’s record and they’ll
play it. But they’re not going to play Muddy’s version."
   Likewise, Mr. Guy is appreciative of all the adulation he’s received but goes along with
it only out of respect for the legends who’ve gone before him.
   "The people that should have gotten these Grammies and all the awards I’m getting, their
names were never mentioned — Guitar Slim, Lonnie Johnson, Fred McDowell, Son House, all those people who
taught Muddy and them what they know," he says. "At least B.B. (King) gets a few (Grammies). Every time I accept
an award I accept it in their honor because they should have gotten it before I did."
   Mr. Guy plays more than 100 dates per year and, along with the 76-year-old King (who plays
about 200 shows annually), is one of a handful of electric blues players making vibrant records and touring
the country. He plans to keep going as long as he’s able, because he "wouldn’t know what else to do."
   "I feel good," he says. "I’m still having fun. I thank God that I’m blessed to still be here
to take this blues personally to some of the people I’m taking it too now."
   But, as he bemoans on "Done Got Old," does Mr. Guy feel his age?
   "When I turned 30, I’d tell someone I was getting old and they’d say, ‘Oh man, you’re young.’
I turned 40, ‘Oh man, you’re still young.’ 50, ‘Oh man, you’re still young.’ 60…. Now I’m asking, ‘How old
do I have to be before you accept that I am old?’ "
Buddy Guy plays the Patriots Theater at the War Memorial, Lafayette and Barrack streets, Trenton, March
6, 8 p.m. Entrain opens. Tickets cost $28-$36. For information, call (609) 984-8400. On the Web: www.thewarmemorial.com.