One Wild Guy: Buddy Guy at Jesse Auditorium

There is no question there would have been no rock without blues. As proof, I offer up Buddy Guy’s performance at the University of Missouri Sunday evening. From the first note of his show, he kept the house rocking.

Buddy Guy started performing in the 1950s, but his most successful years have been in the last two decades. He is a Rock & Roll Hall of Fame inductee, has won numerous Grammys and other awards, and has influenced guitarists including Eric Clapton and Jimi Hendrix.

Guy kept the audience laughing with a string of off-color quips between songs. When he started playing Muddy Waters’ “Hoochie Coochie Man,” he wanted the audience to shout out the line, “Son of a gun,” which appears at the start of the song. When the audience failed to do this, he remarked, while keeping his voice in the song’s rhythm, “I played this in India three weeks ago, and when I started this song, they didn’t (expletive) it up like you did.” He tried again, and this time the audience got the line right.

Guy specializes in electric blues, a subgenre that developed in the late 1940s. I was able to pick out the beginnings of rock in Guy’s sound. As a heavy metal fan, I enjoy the sound of shredding, or very fast guitar playing. Buddy put a blues spin on it, at one point getting into a blues shredding contest with his backing guitarist. The audience loved this demonstration of guitar virtuosity. But that wasn’t the only demonstration of his skill.

Buddy Guy on the Jesse Auditorium stage. He is playing his guitar by drawing a small towel across the strings.

Two-thirds of the way through his set, Guy played short selections of artists he had influenced, including Clapton, Marvin Gaye, and Hendrix. The Hendrix impression turned into a 20-minute improvisation session, during which Guy played his guitar by rubbing it against his body, slapping it with a towel, and while holding it horizontally above his head. Anyone could make noise using these techniques, but Guy maintained a tune the entire time, such as the distinctive eleven-note riff from Clapton’s “Sunshine of Your Love.”

Like B.B. King a year and a half earlier, Guy expressed disapproval with the current hip hop scene. He used this as a segue into selections with highly suggestive lyrics, which he jokingly referred to as “hip hop blues.” The inventive lyrics kept the audience in stitches. Guy put on a great show, but I wouldn’t recommend it for children due to the language he uses.

I am glad I had a chance to see a true rock pioneer in person. The exact impact Buddy Guy had on music, both on his own and through the rock legends he influenced, may never be calculable. Perhaps it is best that it remain that way.