ON SUNDAY the bluesman Buddy Guy received Kennedy Center honors, touted as the nation’s highest official recognition for excellence in the arts. He richly deserved it. A formidable singer and guitar player, the leading standard bearer for Chicago blues since the death of Muddy Waters in 1983, Guy has been an exemplary elder statesman of American popular music. At the age of 76, when other icons subside into fuzzy-bunny schtick, Guy’s making some of the best music of his career. If anything, he’s even better than he was 20 years ago, more willing to look deep into a song and his own craft to find the elements of tension and release that give the blues its lasting power, less willing to settle for playing yet another heroic guitar solo.
The Kennedy Center’s citation emphasized Guy’s “tremendous influence on virtually everyone who’s picked up an electric guitar in the last half century, including Clapton, the Rolling Stones, Jimi Hendrix, Jimmy Page, Slash, ZZ Top, Stevie Ray Vaughan, and John Mayer.” Guy really has been a seminal figure, but this emphasis on his importance as an influence has a bittersweet quality. It’s part of a general consigning of the blues to emeritus status, venerated but gently sidelined.
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When I was 11 years old I exchanged Christmas gifts with my two best friends. I was bummed out when my friend Tommy got a Frankie Vallie and the Four Seasons album and I got an album called Do the Twist with Ray Charles. I went home, somewhat dejectedly, and put the record on my little phonograph. Listening to Ray was a pivotal moment in my young life as I listened to the deepest and most beautiful music I had ever heard. Goodbye Frankie Avalon and Sandra Dee, hello Muddy Waters and Howlin' Wolf!
WGBH used to have a blues program every Friday and Saturday night - it's been gone now for 5 years or mote - I still miss it
Yes, WGBH used to be a much more interesting blend of jazz, blues, folk, classical and news. Now it is just an outlet for NPR and PRI news and commentary. Enough with the politics already.
Amazing how some people dislike even innocuous postings.
This article really just points out there is more to a performance than virtuosity with an instrument. Even as a high school student in Southern California in the early 1970s, it was nothing for me to go to a, say, Dizzy Gillespie, Renaissance chamber concert, Gato Barbieri, or Miles Davis concert one week, and then see the Who, Jethro Tull or Zeppelin the following week. They were all great musical performances for me (I had eclectic tastes, still do), but there was nothing like seeing Zeppelin live in terms of the whole experience. These and other rock 'gods' took live music to a new level unexperienced before. This has nothing to do with the music qualitatively, but with the whole experience. You see the same phenomenon today: for every Taylor Swift stadium concert spectacular there's a 100 unknown Taylor Swifts quietly playing in folk music clubs across the country. I think it's unfair to Taylor Swift to put her down musically just because she's been able to organize such a mega-event, just as I think it's unfair to put down Hendrix or Clapton just because they could package and market their musical experience in a way that made them a hotter act than some of the blues greats.