There’s an age when the world quietly agrees to let a man sit down. Ninety feels like that age. Buddy Guy never got the memo.
On July 30, he turns 90. He was born in 1936 in Lettsworth, Louisiana, a sharecropper’s son who taught himself guitar on a homemade two-string contraption nailed to a wall. He carried the blues out of the cotton fields, up to Chicago, and into the hands of every rock guitarist you can name. Clapton, Hendrix, Stevie Ray Vaughan all pointed back at him.
For a lot of people, he’s simply the last one standing. Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf, B.B. King, John Lee Hooker: the giants of the electric blues are gone. Buddy Guy is the final living link to that whole world, the man who was in the room when it was being invented.
So you’d forgive him for taking it easy. That was never the plan.
Last summer, on his 89th birthday, he put out a brand-new album, his twentieth, and dared to call it “Ain’t Done with the Blues.” He wasn’t joking. This past winter it won Best Traditional Blues Album and handed him his ninth Grammy. Ninth. At an age when most people are counting grandchildren, not gold gramophones.
Then he did the thing nobody expects from a man about to turn 90. He booked a tour.
They’re calling it BG90. It opened on July 15 in Toronto, at the old Massey Hall, and it runs about three months across North America before it winds down in Tulsa, Oklahoma, in September. Buffalo, Chicago, Dallas, and a long string of nights in between. He isn’t sitting in for a song or two out of courtesy. He’s headlining the whole thing.
He didn’t want to do it alone, either. He’s pulling the next generation up on stage with him: the young firebrand Christone “Kingfish” Ingram, guitarist Ally Venable, and others on select nights. The old master, handing the torch forward in real time, one city at a time.
If this all sounds a little familiar, it should. Years ago he ran what he billed as his “Damn Right Farewell” tour, the kind of goodbye that’s supposed to be a goodbye. It wasn’t. “I’ll play as long as I can,” he has said, and he clearly meant every word of it.
Ask him why he keeps going and he doesn’t reach for anything grand. After that ninth Grammy, he put it about as plainly as a man can. He’s just trying, he said, to keep the blues alive.
Maybe that’s the whole secret. Not stubbornness, not ego. Just a man who spent ninety years believing the music would die if he ever set it down, so he never does.
On July 30 he’ll blow out the candles somewhere on the road, probably between soundcheck and showtime. And the next night, odds are, he’ll strap on that polka-dot Stratocaster again and hand a room full of strangers the best hour of their week.
Ninety years old. Still hasn’t found a good reason to sit down.
