📍Lettsworth, LA 70753, USA
1936 – 1957“George Guy was born in July 1936 near Lettsworth, a tiny farming community in Pointe Coupee Parish, Louisiana, between the Mississippi and Atchafalaya rivers, one of five children of a sharecropping family. They lived in a house on a plantation with no running water, no plumbing and no electricity, and they rarely had meat; Buddy worked in the cotton fields from a young age. The family got their first radio when he was a boy, and he heard the blues for the first time. He was obsessed with making music. At about seven, he made his first instrument, a diddley bow, from wire, a piece of wood and his mother's hairpins, and he pulled wire from his mother's new window screens and strung it across tin cans; his father made him fix the screens. Then his father paid a couple of dollars to a fieldhand called Coot for an old guitar with two strings, and Buddy taught himself to play, copying John Lee Hooker's Boogie Chillen' and Lightnin' Hopkins. He later got a proper acoustic guitar from a kind stranger. As a teenager he moved to Baton Rouge, where he worked as a custodian at Louisiana State University and played in clubs, watching Lightnin' Slim and Guitar Slim, whose wild showmanship amazed him. In September 1957, at twenty-one, he took the train to Chicago with his guitar, and he nearly starved before Muddy Waters gave him a salami sandwich and encouragement. He became one of the great Chicago blues guitarists, recording for Chess and inspiring Jimi Hendrix, Eric Clapton and Stevie Ray Vaughan. He opened his own club, Buddy Guy's Legends, in Chicago, and Lettsworth has a historical marker at his birthplace.”
🗺️ Approximate location today
📷 Location image · via Wikimedia Commons