Buddy Guy
Buddy Guy is an actor, born 1936.
Buddy Guy's instrument is a guitar, not a camera, so a screen page for him is really a page of side effects. He was born in Lettsworth, Louisiana in 1936 and made his name in Chicago, playing session guitar behind Muddy Waters at Chess Records in the 1960s and forming a long partnership with the harmonica player Junior Wells. He has a Grammy for Best Blues Album. The list of guitarists who point back at him as a source runs from Jimi Hendrix and Eric Clapton through Stevie Ray Vaughan to Gary Clark Jr. and John Mayer.
Film mostly used him as himself. He is on stage in Martin Scorsese's Rolling Stones documentary Shine a Light, at Eric Clapton's Crossroads Guitar Festival in 2010, at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame's twenty-fifth anniversary concerts, and on Austin City Limits, which has been broadcasting performances since 1975.
The acting is a thin but interesting seam. He played Sam "Hogman" Patin in In the Electric Mist in 2009, and then, at an age when most musicians have stopped taking meetings, turned up as Old Sammie in Ryan Coogler's Sinners, a film that is largely an argument about what the blues does to the people who play it. That is a better use of Buddy Guy than any concert footage.
Movies (6)
TV (1)
Music (2)
Where to start with Buddy Guy
Go to Sinners first, and that would be the right call even if he had no other credits. Coogler built a horror film around Delta blues and then cast one of the last living links to it, which gives the whole thing a weight no amount of production design could buy.
For the playing, Eric Clapton's Crossroads Guitar Festival 2010 is the best-recorded document here, a stage full of people who learned from him. Shine a Light drops him in front of the Rolling Stones and Scorsese's cameras for one number that quietly takes the film over, and The 25th Anniversary Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Concerts is the all-star version of the same idea.
Austin City Limits is the long-running television archive to dig through if you want him in a room rather than a stadium. The one straight acting credit besides Sinners is In the Electric Mist, a swampy Louisiana crime picture that suits him.