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MARTY CLEARA guitar from a stranger and wine from another helped shape one of the biggest names in blues.
It's like he was born to be a blues legend.
Listen to Buddy Guy talk about his life. The stories are amazing, but somehow unsurprising. It's the quintessential life of a blues man.
Guy was born in 1936 in rural Louisiana, the son of a sharecropper. The family didn't have a radio, and when he was a boy Guy heard music only once a year: in church on Christmas.
As a kid, he created an instrument with a couple of old guitar strings and constantly tried to make music. His family tired of the noise and made him play outside. One day a passing stranger heard him.
"He said, "I bet you could really play if you had yourself a guitar,' " Guy recalled in a phone interview last week. He pronounces it GI-tar, accent on the first syllable. Just like you'd expect an authentic bluesman to say it.
The stranger bought Guy his first real guitar, a Harmony acoustic six-string.
Some years later, maybe a decade or so, Guy moved to Chicago. He wanted to make it as a blues singer and guitarist, but once he heard the pros in the Chicago clubs - people like B.B. King and Otis Rush - he was too intimidated to play.
So he was standing on the street, broke and hungry, guitar in hand, trying to bum a dime for a phone call.
"So here's this man and he says, "I ain't going to give you no dime, but I'll give you some of this wine if you can play that guitar,' " Guy said. "I figured anything in my stomach's better than nothing at all, so I went to his house and played for him. He took me up to this club where Otis Rush was playing and said to him, "You got to hear this kid.'
"I don't even know who that guy was."
That was 1958. Guy stayed in Chicago, honing his guitar chops.
There were other blues musicians who had so much talent and charisma that they could sit still and still keep an audience entranced. Guy didn't think he could compete on that level, so he developed a kinetic style of showmanship that was uncommon among blues players.
"I'm a Baptist. I got to move around," Guy said. "I'm not a great singer, and I don't think I'm the greatest guitar player. But I can put two and two together."
By the 1960s, though, Guy was considered one of the great guitarists, and the gods of blues-based rock guitar, including Eric Clapton and Jimi Hendrix, were acknowledging him as a major influence.
He has never lost his knack for showmanship. But his latest album, Blues Singer, gives a nod to those just-sit-there-and-play heroes of his early Chicago days. Blues Singer is a collection of songs by blues masters, and it's the first totally acoustic album of Guy's career.
His set at the Tampa Bay Blues Festival - slated for 8:30 p.m. Saturday - will probably start off with some acoustic material from the new CD, he said. After that, it's up to the audience.
"I'll have the acoustic guitar and the electric," he said. "I don't have a set list. I hear the voices. If they want electric, they got it; if they want acoustic, they got it. I don't come to play for myself. I come to play for them."