Before Hendrix and Clapton, Buddy Guy Was Already There

Buddy Guy once told Eric Clapton how much he liked the guitar playing on “Strange Brew.” Clapton’s answer, as Buddy remembered it in a Premier Guitar interview, was almost too good: “You should, they’re all your licks!” Imagine complimenting somebody’s playing and finding out he had been listening to you the whole time. Buddy later clarified that exchange to biographer Don Wilcock. Eric had acknowledged where he got those phrases. Buddy himself was unsure which of his records, or Junior Wells’ records, had supplied them. The student remembered the lesson better than the teacher remembered giving it.

That gets us closer to Buddy’s place in guitar history than another greatest guitarists list ever will. His influence was already doing its work while he was busy playing gigs and making records. Clapton could recognize something in Buddy’s playing, carry it into his own music and send it around the world. A listener could fall in love with Cream without knowing that part of what caught their ear had passed through a Chicago blues club first.

There is a problem with the way this history gets told. Hendrix and Clapton usually get the exciting chapters. Buddy gets a respectful mention among their influences. Then we move along to the amplifiers, the albums and the concerts that changed everything. But spend a little time with what these musicians actually said about Buddy and that arrangement starts looking ridiculous. He helped change their understanding of the instrument. With Clapton, he even helped change the kind of band Eric wanted to have.

Before we get to England, though, picture Buddy trying to explain his playing to Leonard Chess. According to Buddy’s 1993 interview with Terry Gross, the crowds were responding to the distortion and the unruly sounds he was getting onstage. He wanted to bring that excitement into the studio. Chess heard noise. Buddy heard an audience telling him he was onto something. The disagreement mattered because a record company could decide which version of an artist the rest of the world would get to hear.

Years later, Buddy recalled, Chess called him in after hearing what Hendrix and Cream were doing. Suddenly those sounds made commercial sense. Buddy remembered Chess admitting that he had rejected something Buddy had been trying to give him for years. Think about how frustrating that must have been. Your own audience has already responded. Other musicians have understood. Then the people controlling your recordings need somebody else’s success to convince them that your ideas were worth recording.

Still, some of the fire made it onto records. “First Time I Met the Blues,” recorded in 1960, is a useful place to begin. The voice and guitar both sound under pressure. The guitar phrases interrupt, answer and push at the singing. Put that kind of playing in front of a young musician and there is more to learn than where to put a finger. There is a way of approaching a song: how far you can push a phrase, how much strain you can leave in the sound, how much excitement you can get from making the listener wait for it to settle.

Clapton was paying attention. At Buddy’s 2005 Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction, Eric recalled hearing him on Folk Festival of the Blues and being able to recognize his playing on Chess recordings. That is a telling detail. A young guitarist was hearing a distinctive musical voice even when Buddy was part of somebody else’s performance. Then Eric saw him at London’s Marquee Club in 1965, and the records suddenly had a person attached to them. The clothes, the movement, the guitar and the confidence were all there together.

The lasting consequence was the trio. Buddy showed Clapton how much room a guitarist could have with bass and drums behind him. Eric could see a band that gave him freedom to lead, stretch out and change direction. When he later formed Cream with Jack Bruce and Ginger Baker, Buddy was part of the thinking behind it. Jack remembered that clearly enough to explain it in a 2012 interview: Eric imagined himself out front like Buddy Guy. Bruce wanted an outlet for his compositions. Baker had ambitions of his own. Cream emerged from those competing ideas.

That makes Buddy’s influence considerably bigger than a borrowed lick. He helped provide a working example for a band whose recordings and improvisations would shape generations of guitarists. Plenty of players learned from Cream and carried its ideas into other groups. They could be taking something from Buddy without ever owning a Buddy Guy record. Once an idea travels through enough musicians, its origin becomes harder to hear. The influence keeps moving anyway.

Even the guitar itself came with assumptions Buddy could upset. In a 2008 Rhythms interview, he recalled Clapton and Jeff Beck telling him they had been surprised to hear blues played that way on a Stratocaster. Buddy found their surprise surprising. To him, the instrument’s ability to play blues was already obvious. He remembered the British players associating it with country music. A guitar they thought they understood had done something they were unprepared for, simply because Buddy was holding it.

Buddy had experienced that kind of shock himself. He told Premier Guitar about seeing Guitar Slim in Baton Rouge with a bright red suit, a gold Les Paul and a cord long enough to take him all over the room. Slim gave him a whole performance to aspire to. B.B. King gave him another kind of musical example. Buddy was taking what excited him and working out what he could do with it. By the time young British guitarists watched him, those influences had become a recognizable Buddy Guy performance. They were seeing the result of years of listening and trying things.

Hendrix belongs in that story as a musician who kept listening even after other people had begun treating him as the answer to every guitar question. Buddy recalled Jimi attending a performance with a reel to reel recorder and asking permission to tape him. In a 2016 Guitar World interview, Buddy admitted that he had barely understood who this man in the audience was. He had other things on his mind, including the women in the room. Meanwhile, Hendrix wanted a recording he could take away with him. There is something wonderfully human about that scene. One man is working the room. Another wants to study the work.

The timing matters to the story. By this period, Hendrix had already developed the playing that made him famous. He was still interested in what Buddy could show him. That is how serious musicians behave. Becoming original hardly means becoming finished. Hearing somebody bend a phrase differently, hold a note longer or change the mood of a room can give you something to work on even when the world is already calling you a genius.

Linda Porter, who lived with Hendrix in London in 1966, offered Wilcock an especially interesting way of understanding the connection. She believed Buddy’s example had given Jimi permission to be flamboyant. In her view, that influence worked partly below the level of a conscious decision. Hendrix could see a blues musician taking those liberties and feel that there was room for him to do it too. Her recollection helps explain something a comparison of guitar solos can miss. A musician can influence another player’s nerve as much as his notes.

“Red House” is a good place to consider the musical side of that relationship. Hendrix has the space of a slow blues to work in, and the intensity comes from what happens inside his phrases. A note can be held, worried at and pushed before he lets the line move on. Buddy’s own playing offers an important precedent for that kind of tension. The comparison is an interpretation of their music, and it gives us something more useful to listen for than a checklist of matching licks. The connection is in how a guitarist makes a familiar form feel unsettled and personal.

There is another route into Hendrix’s blues that people can easily overlook. He opened his Monterey performance in June 1967 with Howlin’ Wolf’s “Killing Floor.” Buddy had played on Wolf’s original recording and later recalled being called into the session to supply a part the musicians were trying to get right. Hendrix’s version moved at its own furious pace. Still, the record behind that performance came from the musical world Buddy was helping build as a session player. His contribution could reach another guitarist through a record with Howlin’ Wolf’s name on the front.

Sometimes Buddy’s own name was barely there at all. The first seven thousand pressings of Junior Wells’ Hoodoo Man Blues credited him as “Friendly Chap,” because the people making the album believed he was under contract elsewhere. Delmark’s account of the sessions also describes a malfunctioning guitar amplifier. The engineer kept things moving by connecting Buddy to the Hammond organ’s Leslie speaker for several tracks. Here was an album intended to capture a working Chicago band with unusual freedom, and one of its distinctive sounds came from solving a problem in the studio. Its guitarist initially appeared under a name somebody had made up to get the record released.

Those details help explain why influence and fame can tell such different stories. Buddy was supplying sounds, performances and possibilities that other musicians could use. The audience for those ideas grew enormously through Hendrix and Clapton. Buddy’s own opportunities took longer to catch up. It is easy to look backward from the famous albums and assume the music developed in the same order as the recognition. The musicians’ recollections give us a messier, much more interesting history.

Buddy himself left plenty of room for what Hendrix added. In that Guitar World conversation with Zakk Wylde, he praised Jimi’s creativity and the way he took the guitar somewhere else through effects. He was happy to recognize the achievement of a musician who had learned from him. He also kept listening to younger players. During the interview’s photo session, Buddy was quietly trying to figure out what Wylde was playing. Decades after Hendrix had brought a recorder to hear Buddy, Buddy still wanted to know how another guitarist did something.

So take Buddy Guy out of the story and imagine how much changes. Clapton loses a model for the freedom he wanted in a trio. Hendrix loses an example of how boldly a blues musician could behave onstage. Both lose a voice that had already stretched the guitar toward the sounds they would make famous. Their talent remains their own, but the music that fed that talent has changed. And when “Strange Brew” comes around again, remember Buddy telling Eric he liked those phrases. Eric knew exactly why.

Reporting sources: Buddy Guy in Premier Guitar, his 1993 Fresh Air interview, Clapton’s 2005 induction speech coverage, Jack Bruce’s recollections, Buddy’s Rhythms interview, Buddy and Zakk Wylde in Guitar World, Don Wilcock’s reporting in Blues Blast, Delmark’s session history, and Experience Hendrix’s Monterey history.