Buddy Guy will return to UPAC in Kingston for the final time on his ‘Damn Right Farewell’ tour, on June 15, 2023, with special guest the Samantha Fish Band.
At age 86, Buddy Guy is a Rock & Roll Hall of Fame inductee, a major influence on rock titans like Jimi Hendrix, Eric Clapton, and Stevie Ray Vaughan, a pioneer of Chicago’s fabled West Side sound, and a living link to the city’s halcyon days of electric blues. Buddy Guy has received 8 GRAMMY Awards, a 2015 Lifetime Achievement GRAMMY Award, 38 Blues Music Awards (the most any artist has received), the Billboard Magazine Century Award for distinguished artistic achievement, a Kennedy Center Honor, and the Presidential National Medal of Arts. Rolling Stone Magazine ranked him #23 in its “100 Greatest Guitarists of All Time.”
In July of 2021, in honor of Buddy Guy’s 85th birthday, PBS American Masters released “Buddy Guy: The Blues Chase The Blues Away”, a new documentary following his rise from a childhood spent picking cotton in Louisiana to becoming one of the most influential guitar players of all time. The documentary features new interviews with Buddy Guy, Carlos Santana, Eric Clapton, John Mayer, Gary Clark Jr, and more. Watch the full documentary at PBS Online here.
Though Buddy Guy will forever be associated with Chicago, his story actually begins in Louisiana. One of five children, he was born in 1936 to a sharecropper’s family and raised on a plantation near the small town of Lettsworth, located some 140 miles northwest of New Orleans. Buddy was just seven years old when he fashioned his first makeshift “guitar”—a two-string contraption attached to a piece of wood and secured with his mother’s hairpins.
In 1957, he took his guitar to Chicago, where he would permanently alter the direction of the instrument, first on numerous sessions for Chess Records playing alongside Howlin’ Wolf, Muddy Waters, and the rest of the label’s legendary roster, and then on recordings of his own. His incendiary style left its mark on guitarists from Jimmy Page to John Mayer. “He was for me what Elvis was probably like for other people,” said Eric Clapton at Guy’s Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction in 2005. “My course was set, and he was my pilot.”
Seven years later, July 2012 proved to be one of Buddy Guy’s most remarkable years ever. He was awarded the 2012 Kennedy Center Honor for his lifetime contribution to American culture; earlier in the year, at a performance at the White House, he even persuaded President Obama to join him on a chorus of “Sweet Home Chicago.” Also in 2012, he published his long-awaited memoir, When I Left Home.
These many years later, Buddy Guy remains a genuine American treasure and one of the final surviving connections to an historic era in the country’s musical evolution.
Buddy Guy 2023 Damn Right Farewell Tour
Feb 17 – Rockford, IL – Coronado PAC
Feb 18 – Joliet, IL – Rialto Square Theatre
Feb 23 – Fort Wayne, IN – Embassy Theatre
Feb 24 – New Buffalo, MI – Silver Creek Event Center
Feb 25 – Anderson, IN – Paramount Theatre
Feb 26 – Evansville, IN – Victory Theatre
Mar 01 – Baton Rouge, LA – Baton Rouge River Center Theater
Mar 03 – Austin, TX – Austin City Limits Live at The Moody Theater
Mar 04 – Austin, TX – Austin City Limits Live at The Moody Theater
Mar 05 – Houston, TX – 713 Music Hall
Mar 08 – Dallas, TX – Majestic Theatre
Mar 11 – Kansas City, MO – Uptown Theater
Mar 13 – Chesterfield, MO – The Factory
Mar 14 – Memphis, TN – The Orpheum Theatre
Mar 16 – Knoxville, TN – Tennessee Theatre
Mar 17 – Atlanta, GA – Atlanta Symphony Hall
Mar 20 – Spartanburg, SC – Spartanburg Memorial Auditorium
Mar 21 – Chattanooga, TN – Soldiers and Sailors Memorial Auditorium
Mar 22 – Charlotte, NC – Ovens Auditorium
Mar 23 – Greensboro, NC – Steven Tanger Center for the Perf. Arts
Mar 30 – Toronto, ONT – Massey Hall
Mar 31 – Toronto, ONT – Massey Hall
Apr 08 – Tyagarah, Australia – Bluesfest
Apr 10 – St Kilda, Australia – Palais Theatre
Apr 12 – Sydney, Australia – Enmore Theatre
June 15 – Kingston, NY – UPAC
More dates will be added
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