Buddy Guy is ready to play the blues at Musco Center for the Arts

By Eric Althoff

March 8, 2018 3:50 PM PT

Blues legend Buddy Guy is still plagued by self-doubts.

The 81-year-old performer, who will play Wednesday evening at Musco Center for the Arts in Orange, maintained that even after decades on the road, eight Grammys and a reverential place in the rock pantheon, his hands still shake before going on stage.

“You know, man, I’m still nervous,” Guy said by phone from Chicago, Ill., where he was close to a blues club that bears his name. “I still don’t believe I’m good enough to be coming to your town. I feel anxiety. It’s pressure on me.”

After a shot of Cognac to quell his nerves, he said he will take the stage with his token Stratocaster in hand — just as he has done hundreds of times before in a career spanning over a half-century and millions of records.

His latest album “The Blues Is Alive and Well” comes out in April.

Though he’s considered the world’s prominent bluesman, Guy said when he began playing guitar in the 1950s, music wasn’t helpfully subdivided into various genres and styles.

As a young man in Louisiana, he began to imitate the sounds around him.

“When I taught myself how to play, it was just ‘music,’ ” Guy said. “Everything used to be R&B. We didn’t have all the different types in the late ’50s [and] early ’60s — rock, soul and all that.”

Yet from the Deep South came an entirely new style premised on three-chord laments told in a minor key. Early practitioners from the Mississippi Delta included Robert Johnson, Jimmy Reed and John Lee Hooker — as well as a cotton worker by the name of B.B. King.

“I played well enough to play with Albert King, B.B. King and all these great guitar players [who are] no longer with us,” Guy said.

Guy and B.B. King shared the stage multiple times before the latter’s 2015 death at the age of 89. Guy, upon learning of his friend’s convalescence in Las Vegas, was desperate to see him one final time.

“I was in Arizona, and I got the call that B.B. King was pretty sick, and all he wanted to do was go home,” Guy said. “I was trying to get in touch with him, and I couldn’t get through.

“He was the best guitar player I ever heard,” Guy said, noting King’s technique of “vibrating” strings to get a distinct blues sound. “Every time I played on a show with him, I always learned from him.”

Even as King, Guy and other bluesmen were refining the blues in midcentury America, they were nonetheless limited in the venues they could play, particularly in the Jim Crow South.

Many musicians fled to Europe, where they not only found a more receptive audience but also inspired the likes of Mick Jagger, Keith Richards, Eric Clapton and Mick Fleetwood.

The new crop of English artists incorporated the blues into their own sound; the British Invasion was little more than re-selling back to American white teens the music of America’s black musicians.

It also served to help integrate the audience for blues in the U.S.

Coming full circle, Guy said he now greets blues fans from around the world who come to his Chicago club, Buddy Guy’s Legends.

“About eight people walked up to me and said, ‘[We’re] from Australia. Are you going to play?’ ” Guy said. “I said, ‘Well, if you’ve come all that way and I’m not singing, I’ll go up [on stage]’.”

The Rolling Stones, Clapton and others from the classic rock era have all called Guy to play with their them over the decades.

Guy remains impressed that young musicians are still inspired by him in the 21st century.

Quinn Sullivan, an 18-year-old guitar prodigy from Bedford, Mass. paid tribute to his mentor and friend with an original tune called “Buddy’s Blues.”

“I just played with him on a session in Nashville, and we’re trying to work with record companies now to put it out,” Guy said of Sullivan who often accompanies Guy on tour.

While the blues is a musical form that, similar to spirituals, was born out of the pain of the African-American experience, Guy said that nothing gives him more joy than the smiles his music puts on concertgoers’ faces.

“When I look around the world, people are mad and doing stupid things, but when you just play, I’m able to make them forget about it for an hour.”

The motivation to keep touring even as an octogenarian comes from a simple truth: He wouldn’t know what else to do with himself, he said.

Guy’s musical path has taken him to the White House, where he joined the likes of Jagger, Jeff Beck and Gary Clark Jr. to perform the tune “Sweet Home Chicago” in May 2012 for former Windy City residents Barack and Michelle Obama.

“I used to pick cotton in Louisiana, and I told the president, ‘This is a long way from picking cotton to picking the guitar in the White House,’ ” Guy said, with a laugh. “I don’t know nothing else, man.”