When Buddy Guy jammed with Stevie Ray Vaughan at Buddy’s Legends Blues Club in Chicago
On July 29th, 1989, Stevie Ray Vaughan played a big show in suburban Chicago at a 20,000 capacity outdoor venue, with Stray Cats as his somewhat unusual opening act. Later that night, some time after midnight, he made a second, unannounced appearance in a much more intimate space downtown, in front of a few hundred people, paired with a much more suitable musical partner.
Just a few weeks earlier, Chicago blues legend Buddy Guy had opened a brand new club in the city, appropriately called Buddy Guy’s Legends. In the Chicago Tribune concert listings for July 29th, Buddy himself was listed as the sole performer on the club’s schedule, but some of the wiser blues fans in the city had a hunch that Buddy and his friend Stevie probably couldn’t be playing a few miles from one another on the same night without meeting up. The question was, would it be for a coffee and a chat, or a live jam session?
Fortunately, somebody in the audience at Legends had a handheld video camera on them that night, providing us with a unique glimpse into this brief moment in time, when two generations of blues guitar greats shared a stage, not for an awards show or a festival, but to have fun on a random Saturday night in Chicago. And that’s exactly what comes across in this eight-minute clip, as Vaughan wields one of Guy’s own axes and proceeds to show, without saying a word, how much he admired Buddy. In turn, Buddy, who refers to Vaughan as “my best friend”, takes pure joy in sharing the stage with his protégé and having a guitar-to-guitar “conversation” with him.
A year later, Vaughan would be gone, killed in a helicopter crash at the age of just 35. It was no surprise during his career that Vaughan had often praised Buddy Guy as one of his biggest influences (even Jimi Hendrix felt the same way), but it was somewhat more significant that Guy accepted the youngster as an equal.
“Well, I got to know him as one of my best friends before he passed away,” Guy recalled in a podcast interview in 2019. “He was so much like myself when it comes to that there wasn’t anybody he didn’t pick up on. You know, you could hear Otis Rush in him, you could hear BB King on him, you could hear Elmore James on him. And that’s what I think makes a good guitar player, a good horn player, whatever. You know, you get them all and you put them together. I guess that’s why gumbo tastes so good.”
Guy also addressed the loss of Vaughan in his 2012 autobiography, When I Left Home, in which he credits SRV with almost singlehandedly reviving public interest in the blues in the 1980s. Buddy tells the story of how Vaughan had suggested, just hours before his fatal helicopter crash, that the two of them ought to make a record together. “Rememberin’ Stevie,” Guy wrote. “I thought that if [making a record] did happen, it was gonna happen in blues heaven. I pictured the band: Muddy Waters, Otis Spann, Fred Belew, Little Walter, Stevie Ray Vaughan. That’s a band worth dying for.”
Watching the 1989 Legends video today, you probably get something even better than a studio-produced collaborative album between these two men would have delivered. Neither Guy nor Vaughan is trying to outplay the other; it’s not about fireworks or competition, nor about trying to put out something to appease a specific audience.
Instead, it’s an unscripted, playful, sometimes messy hangout, full of respect, humour, and love for the blues. And somebody filmed some of it; hardly a forgone conclusion back in the glorious technological dark ages of the 1980s.
