Buddy Guy – First Time I Met The Blues: 1958-1963 Recordings

This here is some early Buddy Guy. It’s weird, because I still kinda think of Buddy Guy as one of the young men of the blues, the second generation of greats anyway, and yet he’s been doing it all this time, and it turns out he’s three years old than my mother (and apparently still going just as strong here at the end of 2024 – he was touring as recently as September).

Although he didn’t get his first album until 1967, Buddy’s first single came out in 1958 (“Sit and Cry (the Blues)” b/w “Try to Quit You Baby”), and there were a dozen more singles before that first album compilation – not unusual in the blues/RnB world at the time. This compilation collects 17 tracks from 1958-1963, most of which I’d say fall more toward the RnB side than the pure expressive Chicago blues he would later become known for. This apparently was Leonard Chess’s insistence on Buddy working in a style that didn’t match his live act. There’s some Willie Dixon and Little Brother Montgomery on here, but a bunch of the songs are Buddy Guy originals too. Maybe a bit more rock and swing to them than his later work, but there’s also nothing raw or unready about this material. Buddy only got better with the years but boy did he start out at a level.

To show how slow this project is going, I picked this record up on New Year’s Eve, 2021, and I’m just getting around to writing about it three years later as I slowly catch up on new purchases. It’s gotten plenty of play in that time, as my new records lean very, very heavily toward the blues.