When I Left Home

by Guy, Buddy

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Preface

  Before I Left Home

  Flour Sack

  Light

  Mitchell

  The Rouge

  Where Is He? Where the Hell Is He?

  Love in the Mud

  The Day I Left Home

  September 25, 1957

  After I Left Home

  Shorty

  Chapter 708

  Wild Little Nigger from Louisiana

  One Whole Chicken

  A Copyright? What’s a Copyright?

  Night Shift

  Chess Moves

  “She’s Nineteen”

  First Time I Met the Blues

  The Mighty Mojo

  Brother, Brother

  Flying High, Flying Low

  The Creeper

  Daddy’s Eyes

  “Who the Hell Are These Guys?”

  Jailhouse Blues

  Checkerboard

  Mud in the Burbs

  Sixty-Three

  Weeds Keep Growing

  Alpine Valley

  Hoodoo Men

  Selected Discography

  Acknowledgments

  Index

  Copyright Page

  In memory of Muddy, father to us all

  Preface

  I get up at break of dawn. Been doing that my whole life. That’s what happens when you grow up on the farm. Circumstances might change, but if you a country boy like me, you still hear the rooster.

  My house is way on the outskirts of town in the far suburbs of Chicago on fourteen acres of land. Looking out the backyard I see trees everywhere. Got a thing for trees. I like watching how the leaves turn color in the fall, how winter frosts over the branches, how little buds break out in spring and new leaves come to life in summer. The seasons got a rhythm that connects me to the earth.

  First thing on my mind are beans. Thinking about going to the store to buy beans. If I find some freshly shelled beans, I’ll jump over the counter to get ’em. Get to the supermarket when the doors first open. Someone might recognize me, might say, “Buddy, what you doing here?” I say, “Hey, man, I gotta eat like everyone else. Gotta get me some fresh beans.”

  When the weather’s warm, I want melon. But you can’t sell me melon without seeds. Just like you can’t sell me white-and-yellow corn. I don’t fool with no food that’s messed over by man. On the way home, if I see a stand on the side of the road, I’ll stop to see what they got. If they got corn and I spot a little worm crawling over the top, I’ll buy it. That means the corn hasn’t been sprayed with chemicals. It’s easy to clean out the worm, but how you gonna clean out the chemicals?

  I’ll spend the rest of the day in the kitchen. Maybe I’ll cook up a gumbo with fresh crayfish. When I was a boy, crayfish tail was bait. Now it’s a delicacy. The rice, the spice, the greens, the beans—when I get to cooking, when the pots get to boiling and the odors go floating all over the house, my mind rests easy. My mind is mighty happy. My mind goes back to my uncle, who made his money on the Mississippi River down in Louisiana where we was raised. My uncle caught the catfish and brought it home to Mama. That fish was so clean and fresh, we didn’t need to skin it. Mama would just wash it with hot water before frying it up. I can still hear the sound of the sizzle. And when I bit into that crispy, crackling skin and tasted the pure white of the sweet fish meat, I was one happy little boy.

  That’s the kind of food I’m looking for. I’m looking today, and I’m looking tomorrow, and I’ll be looking for the rest of my life.

  My life is pretty simple. If I’m off the road and not getting ready to go off to New York or New Delhi, I’ll spend my day shopping and cooking. Maybe the kids will come over. Maybe I’ll eat alone. At 2 p.m. I’ll take me a good long nap. After dinner I’ll get in my SUV and see that I’ve put some 200,000 miles on the thing. If it’s low on gas, I’ll take the time to drive over to Indiana where gas is a couple of cents cheaper. I’ll remember that one of my first jobs off the farm was in Baton Rouge pumping gas. Back then the average sale was $1. Today it’ll cost me $120 to fill the tank. Ain’t complaining—just saying I’ve seen some changes in these many years I’ve been running this race.

  Around 7:30 I’ll head into Chicago. My club, Legends, sits on the corner of Wabash and Balbo, right across from the huge Hilton Hotel on the south end of the Loop. It’s a big club that can hold up to five hundred people, and I’m pleased to say that I own the building that houses it.

  I go in and take a seat on a stool in the back. I say hello to the men and women who work there. Two of my daughters run the place, and they’re usually upstairs going over the books. Occasionally a customer will recognize me, but to most everyone I’m just a guy at the bar. That’s how I like it. I don’t need no attention tonight—I’m not playing, I’m just kicking back. I’m feeling good that I got a place to go at night and that Chicago still has a club where you can hear the blues. Live blues every night. Can’t tell you how that warms this old man’s heart.

  Funny thing about the blues: you play ’em cause you got ’em. But when you play ’em, you lose ’em. If you hear ’em—if you let the music get into your soul—you also lose ’em. The blues chase the blues away. The true blues feeling is so strong that you forget everything else—even your own blues.

  So tonight I’m thinking about how the blues change you and how they changed me. Thinking about how I followed the blues ever since I was a young child. Followed the blues from a plantation way out in the middle of nowhere to the knife-and-gun concrete jungle of Chicago. The blues took my life and turned it upside down. Had me going places and doing things that, when I look back, seem crazy. The blues turned me wild. They brought out something in me I didn’t even know was there.

  So here I am—a seventy-five-year-old man sitting on a bar stool in a blues club, trying to figure out exactly how I got here. Any way you look at it, it’s a helluva story.

  Before I Left Home

  Flour Sack

  You might be looking through a book of pictures or walking through a museum where they got photographs of people picking cotton back in the 1940s. Your eye might be drawn to a photo of a family out in the fields. There’s a father with his big ol’ sack filled with cotton. There’s a woman next to him—maybe his wife, maybe his sister. And next to them is a boy, maybe nine years old. He got him a flour sack. That’s all he can manage. After all, it’s his first day picking.

  That little boy could be me. I started picking at about that age. I stood next to my daddy, who showed me how to do the job right.

  Depending where you coming from, you could feel sorry for that little boy, thinking he’s being misused. You could feel he’s too young to work like that. You could decide that the world he was born into—the world of sharecropping—was cruel and unfair. And you wouldn’t be entirely wrong. Except that if that boy was me and you were able to get inside my little head, you’d find that I was happy being out there with my daddy, doing the work that the big people did. I wanted to be grown and help my family any way I could. Didn’t know anything else except the land and the sky and the seasons and the fruits and the fish and the horses and the cows and the pigs and the pecans and the birds and the moss and the white cotton that we prayed came up plentiful enough to give us enough money to make it through winter.

  I saw the world through the eyes of my mama and daddy. Their eyes were looking at the earth. The earth had to yield. If it did, we ate. If it didn’t, we scrambled. Because we didn’t have no electricity—not for the first twelve years of my life—we were cut off from what was happening outside our little spot in Louisiana called Lettsworth. I didn’t know it at the time, but we were living and farming like p
eople lived and farmed a hundred years before. When I got my little flour sack and went out in the field, I was doing something my people had been doing ever since we were herded up like cattle in Africa, sent out on slave boats, and forced to work the land of the southern states of America. That fact, though, was something that came into my mind when I was an adult playing my music in Senegal. Someone brought me to the Point of No Return, one of the places where slaves were sent off to make that terrible Atlantic crossing. Maybe that’s where the blues began.

  But to me—nine-year-old George Buddy Guy, son of Sam and Isabell Guy, born July 30, 1936—black history was not part of the elementary schooling I got at the True Vine Baptist Church. That’s where I was taught to use utensils and read little books about white children called Dick and Jane. Black people weren’t in those books. Blacks weren’t part of history. All we knew was the present time. We knew today, and today meant shuck the corn and feed the pig and go to school in the evenings after our chores were done.

  I had fears—snakes and lightning and ghosts who were said to haunt the graveyards. But I had something bigger than those fears—a feeling of family. Back then, family feeling was stronger than it is today. If you had a righteous mom and dad like I did, they could make you feel that, no matter what, everything was all right. If you had two older sisters like mine—Annie Mae and Fanny—and two younger brothers—Philip and Sam—who always had your back, you felt protected.

  We lived in a wooden shack built up on pillars. We didn’t have no indoor plumbing. When it was blistering hot and we wanted to escape the heat, we’d go under the cabin where the dirt was cool. The inside was just a couple rooms and a wood-burning stove. No running water. We pumped the water into a number-three tub for our weekly baths. We also used those tubs to soak the pecans we picked so that when we sold them by the pound, they weighed a little more.

  I didn’t know about glass windows. Our windows were made of wood. When it rained, we shut the windows and, if it was summertime, we sweated bullets. The crazy Louisiana weather had all kinds of storms rolling through. I once saw a killer hurricane tear the porch from the rest of our cabin and blow it some twenty feet away—with Daddy and Fanny standing right on it! When lightning ripped open the sky, I ran to Mama, who held me in her arms and whispered, “Don’t say nothing, boy, that’s just God doing his work.”

  Our work never stopped. The business broke down like this: a family owned the land and got half of everything we produced. When I was younger we lived on a smaller farm. But when I turned eight we moved to a larger plantation. That land was enormous. There were cattle and horses and acres of corn and cotton. On a good day I could pick seventy pounds of cotton. (My brother Sam got up to two hundred pounds.) I learned to rope the cow and ride the horse. I had a pony of my own. I ran around the land barefoot and learned to shoot a barrel shotgun. If I went out in the woods with my dog and came home with a bird or rabbit, I’d get a pat on the back from Daddy and a hug from Mama. During dinner that night I might get seconds.

  We farmed six days a week. There were no such things as parties on Saturday night. Sunday was the True Vine Baptist Church. Church was happy because the music was happy. I was taught that we didn’t use just our voices or tambourines to praise God—we used our whole bodies. Wasn’t no shame in jumping and shouting for the Lord. Jesus was so good, such a beautiful feeling of pure love in our lives, that he got all of us, body and soul.

  I believe it was Jesus that got us through the tough times. We didn’t have no irrigation. We didn’t have the technology people got today. Any long spell of bad weather meant disaster. And we had many a bad spell. I remember the look on Daddy’s face when a long drought killed the cotton crop. There were no other jobs to get—the land was all we had. There were five growing kids to feed. Seeing that they had to do something to keep us from starving, the landowners might give Daddy a few dollars to buy a sack of flour. Mama could make that flour go a long way.

  Mama grew the sweet potato, and when she cooked it in the wood stove it came out so sweet we didn’t need no sugar on top. Her biscuits were light and fluffy, and her cornbread put a taste in our mouths that had us smiling for the rest of the day. The greens came from the yard. If we had enough money to buy feed, the chicken grew until it was time to wring its neck. That was the kids’ job. With blood squirting and feathers flying, we plucked it clean. Then I’d drive the horse and wagon to fetch wood for Mama’s stove. She’d cook it juicy good and brown. You never did hear of the salmonella.

  You never did hear of the cancer. The food could be sparse, but it was fresh. Mama got up at 4:30 to cook for the sharecroppers, so when the troops—me, my brothers and sisters, and our dad—came in from the fields for lunch, those good beans and rice kept us going for the rest of the day. No one talked about peptic ulcers or irritable bowel syndrome. If someone got really sick, the landowners would rustle up a doctor from somewhere, but that could take days. Better stay healthy.

  We were isolated. No newspapers. In my early years, no radio. When I was five I heard talk about America being attacked at Pearl Harbor, but I didn’t really understand. The war was in another world. Our world was farming. Our shack was at least a mile away from our nearest neighbor. I could see their shack from the porch of our cabin when the corn wasn’t up. But when the crop came in, looking out from our porch I saw nothing but tall, yellow stalks waving at the sun.

  We ate fresh nonbird meat but once a year: pork at Christmas. Fact is that there were only two holidays on the plantation—Christmas and Easter. They didn’t tell us about Thanksgiving and turkey. And if the crops were right for picking, no one was about to take off no Fourth of July. Christmas was special, not because we had money for presents but because it was time to slaughter a pig.

  Because no one had refrigeration, meat had to be eaten quickly. Salt could preserve it some, but nothing tastes better than fresh pork. That meant everyone had to cooperate. My folks and our neighbors would get together a few weeks before Christmas to work out the pig-killing schedule. Mr. Johnson, for example, would slaughter his pig on December 10, keep a good chunk for his family, and give the rest to us neighbors. Five days later Mr. Smith would do the same. Then it was our turn. I spent so much time feeding our pig that he became a friend. Pigs have personalities. Some of them are real friendly and cute. When I was told to cut his throat, I had to pause. Had to think about it. Was the last thing in the world I wanted to do, but despite my feelings, I grabbed hold of the knife and did it.

  First music I heard—first music that touched my heart—wasn’t made by man. It was the music of the birds. They was singing in the morning and singing at night. They caught my ear and had me wondering about all the creatures made by God. Some crawled and hissed and poisoned you with their bite; others flew and sang and serenaded you with their sweetness. I could follow the different melodies made by different birds. How did they learn their songs? Why were they pretty? When they sang I’d close my eyes so that everything disappeared except those little chirpy songs that made me realize that the world was filled with beautiful sounds.

  My folks only had a third-grade education, but that doesn’t mean they didn’t appreciate talent. There was a man named Henry Smith who had talent. Daddy called him Coot and made sure he came over every Christmas with his two-string guitar. They’d give him wine and have him play. His was the first guitar I ever saw, the first one I ever touched. I watched him pick the thing with his fingers and produce a sound that gave me goose bumps. He sang a song called “Tomorrow Night.” Later I learned a blues singer called Lonnie Johnson recorded it. When I first heard Coot we still didn’t have no electricity, which meant no radio or records. Coot would take a wooden chair, sit himself down, put the guitar on his lap, and make it talk. Just two strings. His voice wasn’t big, but it went good with the music. Told a story. Made you stop and listen. Naturally he had no drummer, but when he kept time by stomping his foot on the wooden floor, you felt like dancing. You felt like playing and singing
yourself.

  You best believe I studied Coot. I saw how him and that guitar were connected. It was his woman, his baby, his friend. He stroked it like you stroke a dog. He made it cry and he made it laugh. He had it telling stories that I never heard before. He made me wanna get one.

  When Mama bought her first set of screens for our windows, I saw my chance. The screens were a blessing. They protected us from those Louisiana skeeters that were big enough to carry us out the room. Studying them closely, though, seemed like the screens were made from guitar strings. At least that’s how I saw it. When my folks were gone I’d take down a screen and pull out a couple of wires from the top. Then I’d string ’em between two tin cans and pretend it was a guitar. I saw how different degrees of tightness gave different sounds. But come morning, Mama and Daddy saw how we was eaten up by the skeeters.

  “Who been fooling with the screens?” asked Daddy.

  I kept quiet as his eyes darted from child to child before settling on me.

  “Why don’t you fix these, Buddy, and make sure it don’t happen again.”

  I fixed the screen, but the next day I was fixing up a new contraption—rubber bands stretched out and tacked to the wall. I kept plucking them just like I’d plucked the strings, looking to make the kind of melody that I heard from Coot. Late at night, under the light of a full moon, you’d find me out back sawing off chunks of wood, hoping to put together something that resembled a guitar. Every time, though, I made a mess of it.

  But those ringing sounds that Coot made, together with the sweet songs of the birds, never left my head. My head was filled up with music I couldn’t play.

  After doing our farm work, we walked many miles over gravel roads to school at the True Vine. On the way, a yellow school bus crowded with white kids passed us by. They was on their way to a regular schoolhouse. Sometimes those kids leaned out the window and threw rocks at us. All we could do was jump out the way. I wanted to throw rocks back at them: if a snake bites you, your natural reaction is to crush it dead. But in this case we were outnumbered twenty to one, and there wasn’t a chance in hell to retaliate. I didn’t think that much about it. I was taught that some white folks were decent and some were downright nasty—just like colored folks. I was taught to avoid the nasty folks of both races.