Buddy Guy. When I Left Home. My Story

The man who recently hoaxed the President of the United States he shoud not be shy singing Sweet Home, Chicago, because he himself had heard him already singing. Buddy Guy has a long road behind. The last of those who left the Mississippi Delta for hope of a better living followed characters like Muddy Waters and Howlin´Wolf. Buddy Guy left Baton Rouge in 1957 with his guitar and came to Chicago where he had to learn a lot.

The autobiography, written by David Ritz who has delivered an excellent work in making the oral history readable without losing its authenticity is an impotant document of Blues history. Under the titel Buddy Guy. When I Left Home. My Story it tells as well about the extraordinary individual and musician Buddy Guy as about social development of industrial Chicago and different periods of the Blues.

Arriving in Chicago ment to the youngsters coming up from the Delta being cheap work force in services or the meat factories and heavy industry. After their long and hard shifts they went to the Blues Clubs for dancing out the frustration. Blues, Booze and Sex was program in the clubs, even after nightshift at seven in the morning. There Buddy Guy started playing his kind of Blues for some dollars. During the day he drived trucks and in the night he was on stage. There he got acquainted with Muddy Waters who was a kind of a father to him. We get information about the way Willy Dixon exploited young musicians at the Chess Studios. Despite of the money race the extraordinary role of Chess in the history of Blues becomes as well aware as the visits of later famous musicians like the Rolling Stones who came over the Atlantic in the early sixties for jamming with the protagonists of Electric Blues from Chicago. They have been the Godfathers of the young white bands from Europe.

In Buddy Guys book we read about the hype of Blues in the fifties and early sixties, the downfall in the seventies, the renaissance in the eighties and nineties. Every time the genuine Blues musicians of Chicago had to suffer or – if fate was better – full pockets but they never have been rich. The main benefit has always been their experience, their knowledge of live which is substantial for playing the Blues. In the original language of Buddy Guy you will get sentences like Go against nature, nature will fuck you. Hitting sequences like that in the face of as white collar raised readers means to give them a rather authentic impression about socialization of the Blues musicians and their simple but deep wisdom. If you have the Blues, so Buddy Guy, you have to play it. And while playing you lose it. Is there anything to add?

As a musician Buddy Guy in these days is a messenger from a different world. The book helps to decipher its history in a thrilling way.