Sweet Tea

There are not many people who wait until they are sixty-five years old before they release the album that many consider to be their best, but that is what Buddy Guy did when he released "Sweet Tea". Dennis Herring had hoped to do an album with Buddy after hearing him a few years earlier in a live radio performance that sounded "incredible". Herring listened to the local hill-country blues artists and felt Buddy could work his magic on their songs and do a great job. Over the preceding few years Buddy's recordings had not been up to the standards of his earlier solo releases and he had started filling his albums with 'star' guests, often a sign that the fires that burn within, and the creative juices they inspire, were not what they had once been. Where Herring triumphed was in getting Buddy to travel south, away from his Chicago base, to record in the Sweet Tea Studios, Oxford, Mississippi. This was a masterstroke as the studio still had a selection of vintage amps. Guy was enthused as "those things got a tone, a tone like you can't find in amplifiers anymore now. When Dennis brought those amps out down there, the hair stood up on my head."

Seven of the nine songs on the album were written by North Mississippi Hill-Country Blues artists: Junior Kimbrough, T-Model Ford, CeDell Davis and Robert Cage. This imparts an overall 'sound' across the album, as they all capture the insistent, almost trance-like, rhythm and beat that is characteristic of the Hill-Country music. The tone of the amps, combined with a cutting edge mix, creates an atmosphere thick enough that Guy's guitar seems like a cut-throat razor slashing through it. The few days rehearsal that the band had before Buddy arrived also paid dividends, giving the tight sound of a road band that has played together countless times. The stand out tracks are "Baby Please Don't Leave Me", an impassioned tour-de-force of a song, and his reworking of the Lowell Fulson/Jimmy McCracklin classic "Tramp", which is the best version of it ever recorded...in my opinion. Opening track "Done Got Old" is completely different to the rest of the album. A more traditional acoustic blues song, in which Buddy bemoans the fact he can no longer do the things that he used to do, that he can't perform, that he's too old, it is the perfect set-up job for the rest of the album to show that he is anything but too old!

Tracklist

1. Done Got Old  3:23

2. Baby Please Don't Leave Me  7:24

3. Look What All You Got  4:45

4. Stay All Night  4:10

5. Tramp  6:47

6. She Got the Devil in Her  5:10

7. I Gotta Try You Girl  12:09

8. Who's Been Foolin' You  4:55

9. It's a Jungle Out There  5:37

At the time of my writing this Buddy is still going strong, having recently been honoured by the 35th Kennedy Center Honors and in 2010 winning a Grammy Award for his album "Living Proof", to add to the four previous Grammy Awards he has won during his career. As a guitarist he has served as an inspiration to many of the great guitar players, as an artist he has produced some of the most electrifying and original blues of the modern era and as an ambassador for the Blues is still touring and spreading the music in the way he knows best...Live! His latest CD "Live At Legends" captures some of the essence of Buddy performing live, as well as offering three previously unreleased tracks from the "Living Proof" sessions. One thing is certain on both of these albums, "Sweet Tea" & "Live At Legends", they are proof, if it was ever needed, of the link between electric blues and modern rock.....it is Buddy Guy.

Done Got Old

Baby Please Don't Leave Me

Tramp