Eight-time Grammy winning blues legend Buddy Guy has announced a farewell Australian tour in April 2023.
Buddy Guy will return to Australia in 2023 for the final time on his ‘Damn Right Farewell’ tour. He plays headline shows at the Palais Theatre in Melbourne on Monday, 10th of April, and at the Enmore Theatre in Sydney on Wednesday, 12th of April.
At age 85, Guy has been inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, has influenced rock titans like Jimi Hendrix, Eric Clapton, Jimmy Page, Jeff Beck, Gary Clark Jr, John Mayer, Stevie Ray Vaughan, and just about every guitar player who has played the blues, blues rock, and hard rock over the past 70 years. He has pioneered Chicago’s fabled West Side sound and is still the living link to the city’s halcyon days of electric blues, from since the late 1950s when he was in Chess Records’ House Band.
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“It is the absolute truth to say that Guy is the last of the greats of the blues performing today, who also brought the Electric Blues to the world, alongside Muddy Waters, BB King, John Lee Hooker, Albert King and many others from that time,” Bluesfest’s Peter Noble, who is touring Guy, said about the Chicago legend.
While the Blues may have fallen somewhat out of favour in the 70s and 80s, Guy experienced a major comeback in the early 90s with his 1991 album Damn Right, I Got the Blues. This was his first recording in almost a decade, and features Eric Clapton, Jeff Beck and Mark Knopfler. Guy has released a steady stream of albums since then and has received eight GrammyAwards – winning his eighth and most recent Grammy Award in 2018 for his 18th solo LP, The Blues Is Alive And Well, and the Lifetime Achievement Grammy in 2015.
He has received 38 Blues Music Awards – the most any artist has ever achieved – and the Presidential National Medal of Arts. Plus, Rolling Stone Magazine has ranked him number 23 in its “100 Greatest Guitarists of All Time.” The year 2012 proved to be one of Guy’s most remarkable, ever. That was the year he received the Kennedy Center Honour for his lifetime contribution to American culture; and earlier in the year during a performance at the White House, he persuaded Barack Obama (a fellow Chicagoan) to join him on a chorus of “Sweet Home Chicago.” He also published his long-awaited memoir, When I Left Home, in 2012.
In honour of Guy’s 85th birthday last July, 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.
As for what Melbourne and Sydney “folks” can expect from this living legend on the live stage…
“[They] can expect the best that I got,” he told the Union Leader, New Hampton. “My dad told me this and I’ll tell you the same thing he told me before I learned how to play, when I was driving the tractor and ploughing the fields in Louisiana. He said, ‘Son, don’t be the best in town. Just be the best until the best come around.”
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