Tuesday, February 17, 2004
Artist: Buddy Guy
Album: Blues Singer
A college English professor once told a class of mine that our assignment was to write a paper at the college student level. To which the class clown replied, "Since we ARE college students so that'd include anything we wrote." I always loved that stupid answer: it seems to apply to so many predicaments.
George "Buddy" Guy won a Grammy this year for his acoustic blues album, "Blues Singer" on the Silvertone recording label (which he shares with Indigenous). Clearly whatever Buddy Guy records is going to fall into the blues category and since the recordings are primarily Buddy on an acoustic guitar, well, it's an acoustic blues album. And since he won the prestigious Grammy Award you can figure it's probably pretty good.
What the award doesn't tell you is that Blues Singer is a collection of cover songs written by great blues artists that probably figured in Guy's historic past. Guy dedicated the album to the late John Lee Hooker. Hook's passing was literally the death of the first generation of famed electric blues players: now the torch has passed to Guy and his generation.
The man once described by Eric Clapton as the greatest guitar player he'd ever seen, and we can assume Clapton's seen all the greats, reinvigorated his career back in the early 90's with the release of hard rocking, guitar driven , blues based album, 'Damn Right I've Got the Blues.' Since then Guy's albums have stood toe-to-toe with all of the bluesenvogue twang-bar kings. Suddenly Guy takes a pause to record an acoustic album as if in acknowledgment of his new found position in the blues world.
'Blues Singer' is a well heeled effort for Guy to show his fretboard skills in a low volume forum. Exceptionally well played and searingly honest, Blues Singer, reminds me of Guy's work with the late Junior Wells.
As the king of Chicago Blues in the 1950's Muddy Waters, with the help of Willie Dixon, culled together a stable of blues artists for the Chess Record label which has yet to be matched, in terms of talent, by any label before or since (although Atlantic certainly gave'em a run for their money in the '70's). One of their earliest talent acquisitions, fresh off the Greyhound and unfed for three days, was George 'Buddy' Guy. In many ways Guy's latest effort is heartfelt "thanks" to those that made his career possible.
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