A multiple Grammy Award-winner and member of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, he was a major influence on guitar titans Jimi Hendrix, Eric Clapton, and Stevie Ray Vaughan. Guy has been awarded more Blues Music Awards than any other artist in history. Opening act Moreland & Arbuckle are traditionalists and innovators at the same time, merging old school Chicago and Delta blues with garage rock sensibilities. Tickets are $65 general, $65 Senior/Child and $32 HSU students. Tickets are available at the University Ticket Office, at the Works in Eureka, and at humboldt.edu/centerarts.
In the summer of 1957, Buddy Guy moved from his home in Louisiana to Chicago at the urging of a friend and within months, he had taken up residency in Chicago’s fabled 708 Club. His first appearance followed a set by Otis Rush and oft-repeated story about a hungry Guy, broken 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.
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.
By the decade’s end, Guy was staking out new creative territory, cutting albums like 1967’s I Left My Blues in San Francisco, and 1968’s A Man and the Blues. In the process, Guy, the purveyor of a stinging, attacking electric guitar style and wild, impassioned vocals, was capturing the minds of a growing number of rock musicians. “He was for me what Elvis was probably for other people,” Eric Clapton remembered at Guy’s Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction in 2005. “My course was set, and he was my pilot.”
There were no fewer than 20 releases under Guy’s name during the 1970s and ’80s, the best of them collaborations with the late harp master Junior Wells. But by the time the Eighties became the Nineties, Guy amazingly didn’t even have a domestic record deal.
But life, as Buddy has long since learned, is loaded with unpredictable twists and turns – and Guy’s life was about to enter a new stratosphere of commercial success. His first three albums for Silvertone – the 1991 comeback smash Damn Right, I’ve Got the Blues 1993’s Feels Like Rain and 1994’s Slippin’ In – all earned Grammy Awards. Suddenly, it was cool to like Buddy Guy. For Guy, it was like being a new artist.
Internationally acclaimed, a Grammy winner and now an inductee of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, Guy has firmly cemented a blues legacy that places him squarely in the company of his heroes who came before. “This all reminds me of something my mother used to tell me,” Guy says of his current-day status as a music icon. “She said, ‘If you got the flowers for me, son, give ‘em to me now so I can smell ‘em, ‘cause I’m not gonna smell ‘em when you put ‘em on the casket.’’ “I’m getting’ to smell a few now.”
On tour with Buddy are Moreland & Arbuckle. Ever since guitarist Aaron Moreland first met singer/harpist Dustin Arbuckle at an open mic jam in Wichita in 2001, Moreland & Arbuckle have established themselves as a force to be reckoned with. Along with Brad Horner on drums, the group features Moreland playing everything from National steel to a cigar box guitar, and Arbuckle singing and playing harmonica.
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