pt; font-family: Arial">Buddy was all of seven years old, he recalls, when he fashioned his first makeshift "guitar"—a two-string contraption attached to a piece of wood and secured with his mother's hairpins.

There was usually no work to be done on the plantation on Saturday afternoons and Sundays, and the precious free time helped Buddy to develop the very skills that would one day bring him fame. It would be nearly another, decade, however, before Buddy would own an actual guitar—a Harmony acoustic that now proudly sits on display at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland.

But Guy's incredible story actually begins in Louisiana, not Chicago. Born in 1936 to a sharecropper's family and raised on a plantation near the small town of Lettsworth, located some 140 miles northwest of New Orleans, George "Buddy" Guy was one of five children born to Sam and Isabel Guy. His earliest years were marked by the all-too-familiar characteristics of the Jim Crow South: separate seating on public buses, whites-only drinking fountains, and restaurants where blacks—if even served at all—were sent around back. But the social order of the day notwithstanding, it was tolerance, not bitterness, instilled in the young Buddy Guy.

"There's a lot of stuff my parents kept from us kids," he says. "I know that my mom and dad—and also my grandparents—went through a lot worse than what I did. But they didn't want us knowing nothin' like that. They kept that hid from us because they figured that would just put pressure on us and worry us. They just tried to tell us the good things about life."

Guy's father used to point to examples like heavyweight champion Joe Louis and pioneering major leaguer Jackie Robinson, who broke baseball's long-standing color line in 1947 when Buddy was 11 years old. If you possess the talent, Sam Guy told his children, you couldn't be denied in this world, regardless of your skin color. "Before my parents passed away, they told me, 'Don't be the best in town. Just try to be the best until the best come around.'"

First Guitar

Buddy was all of seven years old, he recalls, when he fashioned his first makeshift "guitar"—a two-string contraption attached to a piece of wood and secured with his mother's hairpins. There was usually no work to be done on the plantation on Saturday afternoons and Sundays, and the precious free time helped Buddy to develop the very skills that would one day bring him fame. It would be nearly another, decade, however, before Buddy would own an actual guitar—a Harmony acoustic that now proudly sits on display at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland.

By late 1955, following a stint pumping gas, the 19-year-old Guy was working as a custodian at Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge, and earning the princely sum of $28 per week. ("Back then, you could go to the grocery store with just three dollars," Guy recalls with a laugh, "and you needed help to bring the groceries back!") His heart and mind were already firmly attached to the guitar and the blues sounds he heard emanating from the radio, but a future in Chicago, at least then, wasn't in the picture. At that point in his young life, Guy had never even been out of Louisiana.

But by the summer of 1957, the outlook had changed. "A friend of mine, a guy who was a cook in Chicago, he returned to Louisiana and said, 'Man, you could go to Chicago and do well playing the guitar! You could play at night and work in the daytime!'"

Chicago"All I thought about was that I could get the same work at a college in Chicago somewhere that I did at L.S.U.," Guy remembers. "Instead of $28 per week, I'd be making $68 or $78 a week, and that's what was really standing out in my head. I didn't leave Louisiana to be a professional musician. That didn't even cross my mind. I just wanted to go to work and come in a club at night and watch Howlin' Wolf, Muddy Waters and Little Walter and them play the blues like it's supposed to be done. I thought maybe I could learn something and then go home and play it. I didn't plan this. I still don't think I'm good enough to do it."