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About The Artist
Buddy Guy Tribute Concert and Award Presentation
Hometown:Featuring Jimmie Vaughan & The Tilt A Whirl Band
When: Sunday 8–10 pm
Where: Jay Pritzker Pavilion
For outstanding contributions to popular music and American culture, Buddy Guy receives the first Great Performer of Illinois award. A five-time Grammy Award winner, Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Inductee and Chicago blues legend, Guy has had a worldwide impact on music and musicians of all ages, and brought international attention to Chicago as the Blues Capital of the World.
At age seven, Louisiana-native, Buddy Guy, began practicing on a makeshift guitar that he fashioned out of two strings, a piece of wood and hairpins. Fourteen years later he moved to Chicago, where blues giants including Muddy Waters and Howlin’ Wolf took him under their wing. Throughout the 1960s, Guy recorded numerous albums with them on the famed Chess Records label, before charting new creative territory. His signature style of aggressive electric guitar playing and wild, impassioned vocals influenced a generation of blues and rock guitarists like Jimi Hendrix, Jeff Beck and Eric Clapton, who considers Guy “by far and without doubt the greatest guitarist alive today.”
Performing tonight’s special tribute concert is master blues guitarist Jimmie Vaughan, backed by The Tilt A Whirl Band, and acclaimed blues singer Lou Ann Barton. A Grammy Award winner and one of popular music’s most respected guitarists, Vaughan is “unbeatable when it comes to the blues,” proclaimed Buddy Guy, one of Vaughan’s greatest formative influences. Whether onstage with The Swinging Pendulums, The Chessman, Texas Storm or The Fabulous Thunderbirds; or on numerous albums with these and other bands, Vaughan captures the modern appeal of the blues while upholding its tradition and rhetoric, without which it would be “like throwing a lot of words into a bowl. It doesn’t make any sense. It’s just words.”
