Buddy Guy Heads Out on Tour with Jonny Lang
Legendary bluesman Buddy Guy will be heading out on the road next month for a North American tour along with Jonny Lang.
The tour will kick off at the Horseshoe Casino and Hotel in Bossier City, La. on Feburary 2, 2013, and is scheduled to continue through an April 20 date at Massey Hall in Toronto. In between those dates, the two blues guitarists will visit cities including Robinsonville, Miss.; Buffalo; Detroit; Peoria, Ill.; Minneapolis; Baton Rouge; Ridgefield, Conn. and Montreal.
By the time the tour begins, Guy – who is 76 years old – will have received a prestigious Kennedy Center Honor. He will be awarded at a December ceremony alongside other honorees including Led Zeppelin, Dustin Hoffman, David Letterman and Natalia Makarova. This will be the 35th year in a row that the Kennedy Center Honors have been given, and the prestigious awards have been compared to receiving the French Legion of Honor or knighthood in Britain.
“When I picked up the guitar, learning how to play it was for the love of music – not the love of money or the love of awards,” Guy told the Chicago ABC affiliate WLS-TV recently. Guy’s career has spanned nearly 60 years, and when he first arrived in Chicago back in 1957, he nearly immediately joined Muddy Waters’ band. He’s worked with countless musicians since, and has recently performed some dates with Lang.
In the PBS series “American Roots Music,” he described playing meeting Jimi Hendrix in the late 1960s.
“I think it was 1967, and I was going wild as usual, and somebody kept hollering, ‘There’s Hendrix, there’s Hendrix,” he said in the show. “We became pretty close from that night on. And everything I went through New York or somewhere, he would show up and we would jam together.”