When I left home: my story (2015)

After I Left Home

Hoodoo Men

If an artist tells you he don’t care nothing about prizes, chances are he’s lying. I’m not saying that making the music isn’t the important thing—it is. That’s the real pleasure. And I’m not saying that pleasing people ain’t also important—I always wanna do that. But there’s another kind of recognition that feels good: being called up to the stage for one of them Grammys is a thrill like nothing else. It happened to me at age fifty-five when I won a 1991 Grammy for Damn Right, I’ve Got the Blues. Thank you, Jesus.

Over the next twenty years, I’d win five more Grammys. I started getting a slew of recognition—Billboard magazine’s Century Award, membership into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, the Blues Foundation’s Keeping the Blues Alive Award. Every one of them was wonderful. Don’t take nothing for granted. But when these prizes came in, I felt like they really belonged to Guitar Slim or Lightnin’ Slim or Lightnin’ Hopkins—the cats who came before me and never got the right fame or the right money.

I was finally in the position I wanted: getting a good advance from an international music company that let me cut my kind of record. I also got fatter fees on the road. That let me invest more money back into my club until I finally moved it down the street and bought the building where it’s now housed at 700 South Wabash. I can’t say I’m at the top of the ladder, but I’ve moved up a lot of rungs since those days when no major label wanted to look at me.

These records on Silvertone, coming out so regularly, helped keep me in the public eye. Over the years Eric came back to play on some of my records—along with B. B., Carlos Santana, Keith Richards, Jonny Lang, Derek Trucks, Susan Tedeschi, Tracy Chapman, and John Mayer. All the different generations helped me out, and we blended together real natural.

I had great producers—John Porter, Eddie Kramer, Steve Jordan, David Z, Dennis Hering, Tom Hambridge. They knew to give me the fun and freedom I needed. Also glad that these records are all different, especially the one called Sweet Tea that I made around my sixty-fifth birthday. That let me go to Oxford, Mississippi, to Dennis Hering’s studio and record the acoustic feeling of the old guys I love so well. I played songs by Junior Kimbrough, who’d made beautiful albums on the Fat Possum label. I never did meet Junior—he passed in 1998—but the style he built in North Mississippi was something I felt deeply. Him and cats like James “T-Model” Ford wrote like the men I heard as a boy—the men sitting on the porch, making quiet magic with their guitars, and singing the sun to sleep behind those white and gold fields of cotton and corn.

If you want to understand friendship among men, listen to the last thing I did with Junior Wells. Silvertone put it out in 1998, the year Junior died. It’s called Last Time Around—Live at Legends.

Hadn’t played with Junior in six or seven years. So much water had passed under the bridge. There had been hurt feelings on both sides. I had my issues, and God knows, he had his. But I’ll be damned if playing with him still wasn’t the best feeling a man could have. Between us, the blues was a blood bond. Didn’t matter none what had been said in the past. We sang and played in the present, and that night we fell in love all over again.

I liked that our last session was stripped down. The music was naked, mainly my acoustic guitar and Junior’s harp, my voice and his. What I liked best was when we went back to visit “Hoodoo Man Blues,” the song that made the world see us as a team.

Maybe you’ll be thinking I’m bragging, but I do believe that the Buddy-Junior team will go down in the history of the blues as a combination that worked real well. He brought out my funk. I like to think that I brought out his. When he sang over what I played, tears rolled down my cheeks.

Tears rolled down my cheeks when I went to Junior’s funeral. The cancer had gotten to him like it had gotten to Muddy. He was tired and frail at the end. He was ready to go home. That day we put him to rest, I looked around and saw certain females from his life that I thought should be laying out in that coffin instead of him. But I didn’t say nothin’. I just thought good thoughts about the man who left behind a musical treasure. Wrong or right, he lived his blues. He was the blues. My brother.

Three years later, in 2001, another one of my daddies died. Talkin’’bout the great John Lee Hooker. Got to say that it was one of the wonders of my life that a man whose “Boogie Chillen” got me started as a child turned out to be a friend. When I think of Johnny and his way of walking through the world, I got to laugh. I look at him like a tribal chief, a guru, and a sacred spirit.

Back in the seventies Marvin Gaye put out an album called Let’s Get It On. I loved it, but then again I loved everything Marvin put out. At the end of the record he sang this song called “Just to Keep You Satisfied.” Talking to his lady, he says something like, “I put up with your all your jealousy and bitching too, but I forget it all once in bed with you.” He’s telling his wife goodbye and feeling terrible about how he couldn’t give her what she wanted. He keeps saying that it’s too late to save the thing. Man, I related.

That’s what happened with my first wife, Joan, and my second wife, Jennifer. I tried, but I failed. Both times I was a-wishing that this was the relationship to stay steady till the end. I don’t like drama. Don’t like arguments and split-ups, don’t like to see tears, and don’t like to feel no heartaches. But the heartaches came, and so did the split-ups.

My kids suffered. They suffered because their mothers and me couldn’t keep it together, and they suffered because I was out there on the road. Now they all grown up, and I have me a crew of grandkids, and I’ve been able, best as I can, to make up for lost time. Me and my kids are together a lot. We talk, we laugh, and they don’t mind when I fix ’em dinner. They know the old man can cook.

In recent years I lost my dear brother Phil, my bandmate and best friend for so many good years. Miss Phil every day.

Lately I been out there sharing dates with B. B. King. That’s a privilege. We get to talk about the days of picking and plowing. Just being in his company makes me shout with joy. B. B. played on my last record, Living Proof, on a song called “Stay Around a Little Longer.” We was singing to each other.

Another song on that album was “74 Years Young.” Now I’m seventy-five. My health is good. My fingers still work. My voice has held out. My fans haven’t left me. They accept what I offer and give back plenty love.

What else can a man want?

Good beans, good corn, fresh fruit, fish that ain’t polluted, pork that ain’t spoiled, and chicken without none of them crazy growth hormones.

If you see me walking up and down the aisle of the supermarket, you’ll know what I’m looking for. Food not pumped up with poisons and chemicals. Food that makes me think of Mama and Daddy and how they saw us through. It’s not that I think good food’s gonna let me live forever; it’s just that good food, like good blues, makes life better. It ain’t phony. It comes from nature. It nourishes and satisfies your hunger for something real.

So let me tell you goodbye the same way I said hello.

Let me invite you to Legends.

If you come by my club in Chicago, you probably won’t notice me sitting at the bar. Most people don’t. That’s okay. I’m happy to enjoy the music along with everyone else.

But if it’s a slow night at the counter where we sell my merchandise, I’ll get on stage to sing a song. That lets people know that I’m in the house and available to sign T-shirts, CDs, and my trademark guitars. I never mind drumming up business.

I also never mind thinking back on this long journey that keeps getting longer. I think about that train ride from Louisiana to Illinois on September 25, 1957, and the blues I found when I got to Chicago. Like me, that blues left home. The blues went traveling and wound up in every corner of the world.

I’m believing that the blues makes life better wherever it goes—and I’ll tell you why: even when the blues is sad, it turns your sadness to joy. And ain’t that a beautiful thing?