This is recounted as a very well-organised oral history (cowritten by David Ritz), which makes it ring true and continuously interesting.It's refreshing to read this very different kind of musician's autobiography, which feels honest and yet at odds to the lives and social contexts of the white music legends of the 1960s. It's sobering to realize that Buddy Guy was born just four years before John Lennon. Guy's positivity and realism about his talent, experiences and mistakes makes him a rare role model for a life in music. ( )

Buddy Guy's story of growing up poor to a sharecropping family in Louisiana, loving the blues and learning to play guitar, and his long, slow ascent to the pinnacle of success as a blues musician. He goes from playing acoustic blues at home to Chicago, where "it wasn't nothing more than country blues jacked up with big-city electricity."

Guy credits the blues with bringing him from "a plantation way out in the middle of nowhere to the knife and gun concrete jungle of Chicago." He talks about the blues players that came before him and his contemporaries as much as he talks about himself. It's clear that Buddy Guy loves everything about the blues, and almost anyone that plays it. ( )

This is blues-guitarist Buddy Guy’s autobiography (written with David Ritz) -- from a sharecropper childhood in 1940-50s Jim Crow Louisiana, to a first guitar that he played day and night and slept with, to the small clubs and blues-great performers of 1960-70s Chicago, to his own success, and life now at his club in Chicago and farm outside it.

I don't know alot about guitars or blues but I’m interested in people’s backstories, and this is an extraordinarily humbly told story. It includes a few dark characters, but I kept marveling at Guy’s tendency to encounter good people (or his choice here to be grateful for them). The audio is excellently and flavorfully read by Mirron Willis.

A couple excerpts:

I remember being at a blues festival when I overheard two fans talking. They didn’t know my face, so they was free to say what they believed. They was looking over the program when one cat said to the other, “Buddy Guy is on the bill. You know who he is?”

“One of those old blues guys.”

“How old?”

“Buddy Guy? Oh man, he’s been around. Got to be in his nineties.”

At the time, I was 43.

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On the way to {the outdoor amphitheater} Alpine Valley, Eric {Clapton} said to me, “Hey Buddy, haven’t heard a record from you in a while.”

“That’s ’cause I don’t have a deal.”

“That’s crazy! I’ve copied all your old licks. How am I gonna learn your new licks if you don’t have a new record?” ( )

An honest page-turner from an honest guy, this autobiography (a biography if you think David Ritz really wrote it, which I don't) revealed a different Buddy Guy than I expected to read about. I've seen the guy twice live--first with sidekick Junior Wells, then a few years later, both in the '80s in Montreal and both times at The Rising Sun--and I had the impression he was cocky if anything. Not that I didn't love his searing licks, the dynamic way he'd turn the guitar way low and then BAM! crank it up when everyone was chatting, and his expressive high voice. But I was dead wrong about his personality...he tells us how he didn't mind picking cotton as a kid if it meant being near his dad, that he promised his mom he'd be back to Louisiana with a polka-dot Cadillac (she died before he could, but this is why his Strats are often polka-dotted), and that he was extremely shy (plays to the wall at one point, rather than face the crowd). His is a modest account that continually pushes the lens over to others that preceded him. Language-wise, it's refreshing to read the vernacular in which he writes--this is why I think David Ritz just helped him by organising chapters and perhaps asking leading questions to be answered into a recording device, because the syntax and way of speech has to be all Guy's. An additional treat in this blues feast is that Guy puts real flesh on the skeletons of the great blues heroes we all know and love--Muddy Waters, Lightnin' Hopkins, John Lee Hooker, Big Mama Thornton (whom "Johnny" was a bit nervous around), Guitar Slim, B.B., Jimmy Reed and many more. He doesn't shy from stating the bald truth about some (Leonard Chess, Howlin' Wolf, Willie Dixon) who weren't always perfectly fair, but he never overplays the judging hand. He's all about music, family and respect. The book is finished far too quickly, and you wish for more. There were a few typos in the book that should have been caught, but what a fine read. ( )

If you're a fan of the blues, you must read (or listen to) this book. Buddy Guy is the "Big Poppa" of Chicago blues today, but that wasn't always the case. This book tells his story from leaving Louisiana to follow his music to Chicago. Buddy has certainly witnessed some crazy things in his life! What struck me the most about his story was that other people could tell, just by listening to him play, without knowing who he was, that he needed to keep playing. There was and still is something in him that comes out when he plays that complete strangers would even recognize and relate to. ( )