Buddy Guy – Live 1965
Introduction
In 2001, recommended of my friend Bram, I bought the Sweet Tea album by Buddy Guy. He thought I would probably like it. He was absolutely right, again! What an album, the rawness of the blues, a wonderful sound, one of the highlights of 2001.
Buddy Guy
George “Buddy” Guy was born on July 30, 1936. He learned to play guitar on a homemade two-string diddley bow (a primitive African instrument that proved to be highly influential on the blues). A bit later, he got an acoustic guitar. In 1957, he recorded his first demos, which led to nothing.
After moving to Chicago, where blues legend Muddy Waters became one of his great heroes, and after recording a single with Ike Turner, Buddy Guy signed with Chess Records in 1959. Guy’s own music was dismissed as “just making noise,” and he was categorized as a soul, R&B, and jazz artist. None of his recordings were released. Finally, in 1967, Guy’s debut album I Left My Blues In San Francisco was released. During his time at Chess, Guy was often used as a session musician for artists such as Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf, Sonny Boy Williamson, and others.
In 1968, A Man And The Blues was released, four years later followed by Hold That Plane!. It took no less than seven years before Guy released another album: Stone Crazy!.
In the 1980s, he released Breaking Out (1980) and DJ Play My Blues (1982). His career struggled to gain momentum until the early 1990s, when Eric Clapton invited Guy to perform in his 24 Nights project. Guy was signed by the Silvertone Records label and released Damn Right, I’ve Got The Blues, his first real breakthrough, which also earned him a Grammy Award for Best Contemporary Blues Album.
After three more studio albums in the same decade, two of which, Feels Like Rain and Slippin’ In, again earned him Grammys, and both the live album Live! The Real Deal and Heavy Love receiving Grammy nominations, it was time for a different sound.
Buddy Guy – Sweet Tea
Sweet Tea
Buddy Guy was 64 years old when he entered the Sweet Tea studio together with the owner of the studio, who served as the album’s producer.
On May 15, 2001, Sweet Tea was released. It was one of the heaviest blues albums of all time. Raw, swampy, almost punk in its approach, Guy lets his guitar wail over the backbeat of a wonderfully driving backing band, giving the songs a laid-back vibe.
Buddy Guy was nearly 65 years old when the album was released, and only on the opening track, Done Got Old, does Guy sound his age: “Well, I done got old / Can’t do the things I used to / ‘Cause I’m an old man”. On the other tracks, Guy rocks, grinds, and plays as if his life depends on it. Like a young dog, he tears it up from Baby Please Don’t Leave Me onward with his voice and guitar. His solos are fierce and razor-sharp. On I Gotta Try You Girl, Guy is the seducer driven by lust. On the self-written It’s A Jungle Out There, Guy shows his social and political awareness: “Everybody’s in a hurry / And there ain’t nobody going nowhere”.
Liner notes
The album included liner notes, which are included below.
Country boy, city man: Buddy Guy and Sweet Tea
You hit “play” and a mournful voice half-sings, half-mutters over a softly plucked acoustic guitar.
Well, I done get old
Can’t do the things I used to do
‘Cause I’m a old man
And I’m not the same…It’s a shocking confession. Can this “old man” really be Buddy Guy, the daredevil guitarist and impassioned shouter? Has the weight of unforgiving Time finally capped that bottomless well of electrifying energy, dimmed the blue flame that has ignited audiences from Baton Rouge to Berlin for nearly 50 years?
“Can’t to the things I used to do…” Is it possible? Can it be true? Buddy Guy – who, in the summer of 1969, I saw leap 20 feet from an outdoor stage in New York’s Central Park, fracture his foot and keep right on playing – has that Buddy Guy “done got old” at last?
The singer exhales and lays the last riff to rest. But the song isn’t over. In fact, it’s just begun.
From somewhere in the sonic distance, a rolling drum pattern – part juke joint and part parade ground – looms into audible range. A disembodied voice counts off “one…two…” as electric guitars and rumbling bass enter, fused in an immense, pounding riff. “You got me, baby/You got me where you want me,” pleads Buddy Guy. “Oh baby, please don’t leave me…”
The words almost don’t matter. Hell, he could be singing a Chinese takeout menu. The total impact is devastating.
Turn it up louder…no, louder. Buddy slices off a wickedly distorted guitar solo that could gouge a hole in the heavens, the way the headstock of his battered Stratocaster once gouged holes in the ceiling tiles of ghetto blues bars. A towering one-chord wave of sound, “Baby Please Don’t Leave Me” crashes relentlessly on the backbeat shore for the next seven minutes. And it’s only the second song.
On July 30, 2001, Buddy Guy will turn 65 years of age. He’s made a lot of albums. But with Sweet Tea, he may have made the album of his life.
I don’t mean to imply that this blues life is anywhere near through – not while Buddy’s still playing over 100 gigs every year and running Legends, the most popular and successful blues club in all Chicago. I don’t intend to donwgrade any of his past classic recordings, from those great early-sixties Chess singles (“First Time I Met The Blues,” “My Time After Awhile”) to the nineties trio of Silvertone albums – Damn Right, I’ve Got The Blues, Feels Like Rain and Slippin’ In – that earned Buddy his first gold record and no less than three Grammyh Awards. Live! The Real Deal remains an exciting document of a galvanizing performer. Heavy Love was another well-crafted studio set and a strong seller.
But Sweat Tea surpasses any Buddy Guy album we’ve heard in extracting and recombining the pure essence of two artists who are one and the same. Meet Janus from the South Side: “City” Buddy Guy, the prince of Chicago, wise in its ways, who can blast the blues (and jazz, and Hendrix and more) with the best of them; and “Country” Buddy Guy, raised on a Lettsworth, Louisiana plantation, the boy who watched Lightnin’ Slim sit down on the front porch of the Lettsworth general store and play John Lee Hooker’s “Boogie Chillun” on the first electric guitar that boy had ever seen.
Between the music off that front porch and the music of Sweet Tea is nothing and there is a man’s whole life.
Now Buddy Guy turns loose his incendiary guitar and fiercely expressive voice on a set of dirt-road blues songs originating from the hill country of North Mississippi. Sweet Tea could be sub-titled “… Sings Fat Possum,” for seven of its nine titles are taken from the repertoires of hill-country stalwarts like Robert Cage, T-Model Ford and the late Junior Kimbrough. The recording careers of these artists – along with those of R.L. Burnside, Paul “Wine” Jones and Robert Belfour, among others – were either initiated or revived by the iconoclastic Fat Possum Records of Oxford, Mississippi. It’s an unvarnished, even crude music, rife with intimations of lust and violence. Some call it “the only blues that matters,” and they might be right.
Dennis Herring is the proprietor of Sweet Tea, the Oxford, Mississippi studio, and the producer of Sweet Tea, the album. Credit Herring with freeing Buddy Guy from twelve-bar strictures and sixties soul standards and turning him loose on the elongated lines and trance-inducing modal forms Of North Mississippi. To this end, Herring assembled an extraordinary band combining black Mississippi veterans (both drummers, T-Model Ford’s man Spam and Sam Carr of the Jelly Roll Kings) and younger white players (rhythm guitarist Jim “Jimbo” Mathus of Squirrel Nut Zippers, bassist Davey Faragher, drummer Pete Thomas from Elvis Costello’s Attractions).
This is no “super group” – Guy himself is Sweet Tea‘s only soloist – but a seamless unit of subtle power. The band moves through a version of Lowell Fulson’s “Tramp”, ominous and inevitable as a summer storm front in the Delta, as their leader shoots lightning-bolt phrases from the frets. Twelve minutes of “I Got To Try You Girl” seem to pass in one-third the time. Nothing is forced or frantic. The music doesn’t get louder or faster – it just gets deeper.
The sound and style of Sweet Tea, says Buddy Guy, “reminds me of…the Smokey Hoggs, the Sonny Boy Williamsons, the Lightnin’ Hopkins. All those people just playin’ for a drop of the dime in the hat. The Saturday night fish fries…you had fun, you woke up the next morning with a headache, you just drank the wine or the beer, grab the guitar go doin’ it again.”
Tramp
Call me country
Right from the woods
I’ll answer when you call me, baby
If that make you feel good…A desperate, impoverished young musician moved to Chicago, Illinois in 1957 and brought a piece of Lettsworth, Louisiana with him. Now Sweet Teabrings Buddy Guy back home – and the North Mississippi sound fits him sharp as a tailored silk suit, natural as a pair of worn overalls.
“You never lose things like that. That’s the way music was before it got too much tech and too many people…If you came up in that time like I did, you don’t lose that. Ever.”
Andy Schwartz (Gramercy7@yahoo.com) lives and writes in New York City.
Buddy Guy – Sweet Tea, liner notes, Andy Schwartz
Review
For me personally, Sweet Tea‘s a summer album. Partly because I still vividly remember driving with my friend Bram toward the Schoorl dunes with this album blasting at full volume. The romance of music and being on the road.
I’m so glad I got to see Buddy Guy in 2023 on his Damn Right Farewell Tour at the North Sea Jazz Festival. A highlight of that day, just before his 87th birthday. Energetic and playing unbelievably well. An example to many! Unfortunately, he didn’t play anything from Sweet Tea, the best Buddy Guy album I know.
Buddy Guy – Sweet Tea – Back cover
Songs
- Done Got Old (¥)
- Baby Please Don’t Leave Me (¥)
- Look What All You Got (§)
- Stay All Night (¥)
- Tramp (µ)
- She Got The Devil In Her (¢)
- I Gotta Try You Girl (¥)
- Who’s Been Foolin’ You (±)
- It’s A Jungle Out There (φ)
¥ written by Junior Kimbrough
§ written by James Ford
µ written by Lowell Fulson, Jimmy McCracklin
¢ written by CeDell Davis
± written by Robert Cage
φ written by Buddy Guy
Musicians
- Buddy Guy – vocals, guitar
- Davey Faragher – bass
- Tommy Lee Miles – drums
- James “Jimbo” Mathus – guitar
Guest musicians
- Sam Carr – drums
- Craig Krampf – percussion
- Pete Thomas – drums
- Bobby Whitlock – piano
Buddy Guy – North Sea Jazz Festival – July 7, 2023
After Sweet Tea
It’s incredible but true: Sweet Tea was nominated for a Grammy, but did not win. Of the Buddy Guy albums I know, Sweet Tea is my absolute favorite. In 2008, Buddy Guy himself looked back on Sweet Tea with mixed feelings.
What hurts the most is, nobody knows about it because they don’t play it like they used to do on the AM stations. If they could have played it, I think I could have sold a couple more copies. Now I sell all my records in the club. I’ve had disc jockeys and record people come in and ask me, “You haven’t had anything out for a while.” I say, “Yeah, I have. Sweet Tea is out.” “Well, I never heard of it!”
That’s kind of frustrating to have a CD out and a disc jockey don’t know it’s out! In the good old days, every disc jockey in the country knew about that record whether he played it or not but nowadays program directors tell that disc jockey what to play and what not to play.
I still have to let people like you tell me that, [that Sweet Tea is a great album], because if I knew what was my best I probably could make a hit record every time I go in the studio. But I have to wait ‘til the record comes out and get the response from the fans and they let me know what’s the best. I think I’ve had one of the best write ups in the magazines about that album but it still didn’t sell as well as Damn Right I Got The Blues, [which] came out and they still was playing it a little bit on the radio. It was fading away then. You just don’t get that album played. If you don’t get that album played you just don’t sell no records.
© 2008, Buddy Guy interview, Rhythms (Australian roots music magazine)
In 2014, Buddy Guy stopped touring after completing his “Damn Right Farewell Tour”. On July 30, 2025, Guy’s 89th birthday, he released Ain’t Done With The Blues, which on February 1, 2026, (once again) earned him a Grammy. From July 15 through September 18, 2026, Buddy Guy will go on tour again. He will be 90 years old by then. His passion for music, and the blues in particular, allows Guy to grow old with dignity. The experience, the intensity, the emotion, and the beauty: it’s all still there.
Long live Buddy Guy!
In closing
What do you think of Buddy Guy, and Sweet Tea in particular?
Video/Spotify
This story contains an accompanying video. Click on the following link to see it: Video: Buddy Guy impresses with the raw Sweet Tea. The A Pop Life playlist on Spotify has been updated as well.
