Buddy Guy “Damn Right Farewell” with special guests Christone “Kingfish” Ingram & Jontavious Willis
Schedule
Sun Mar 26 2023 at 04:00 pm
Location
Trustees Garden | Savannah, GA
Experience Buddy Guy on his final tour at two special outdoor concerts on opening weekend of the 2023 Savannah Music Festival! Bring a lawn chair or blanket, grab some food from the food trucks and enjoy two days of spectacular blues anchored by electric blues pioneer and living legend, Buddy Guy. Sunday, March 26 performances begin with Jontavious Willis and Christone “Kingfish” Ingram.“Buddy Guy is one of our last links to the golden age of the blues.” -Uproxx
At age 86, Buddy Guy is a Rock & Roll Hall of Fame inductee, a major influence on rock titans like Jimi Hendrix, Eric Clapton, and Stevie Ray Vaughan, a pioneer of Chicago’s fabled West Side sound, and a living link to the city’s halcyon days of electric blues. Buddy Guy has received 8 Grammy Awards, a 2015 Lifetime Achievement Grammy Award, 38 Blues Music Awards (the most any artist has received), the Billboard Magazine Century Award for distinguished artistic achievement, a Kennedy Center Honor, and the Presidential National Medal of Arts. Rolling Stone Magazine ranked him #23 in its “100 Greatest Guitarists of All Time.”
In July of 2021, in honor of Buddy Guy’s 85th birthday, PBS American Masters released “Buddy Guy: The Blues Chase The Blues Away”, a new documentary following his rise from a childhood spent picking cotton in Louisiana to becoming one of the most influential guitar players of all time. Though Buddy Guy will forever be associated with Chicago, his story actually begins in Louisiana. One of five children, he was 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. Buddy was just seven years old when he fashioned his first makeshift “guitar”—a two-string contraption attached to a piece of wood and secured with his mother’s hairpins.
In 1957, he took his guitar to Chicago, where he would permanently alter the direction of the instrument, first on numerous sessions for Chess Records playing alongside Howlin’ Wolf, Muddy Waters, and then on recordings of his own. His incendiary style left its mark on guitarists from Jimmy Page to John Mayer. “He was for me what Elvis was probably like for other people,” said Eric Clapton at Guy’s Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction in 2005. “My course was set, and he was my pilot.”
Buddy Guy remains a genuine American treasure and one of the final surviving connections to an historic era in the country’s musical evolution.
“Kingfish is one of the most exciting young guitarists in years, with a sound that encompasses B.B. King, Jimi Hendrix and Prince.” -Rolling Stone
Since the release of Kingfish, his Grammy-nominated 2019 debut album, guitarist, vocalist and songwriter Christone “Kingfish” Ingram has quickly become the defining blues voice of his generation. From his hometown of Clarksdale, Mississippi to stages around the world, Ingram has already headlined two national tours and performed with artists including Vampire Weekend, Jason Isbell and Buddy Guy. Right as his career was taking off, he lost his mother and biggest champion, the late Princess Pride Ingram. Christone toured for 13 months non-stop, until the pandemic halted live performances and forced him to take stock. As he was thinking about the man he was becoming and the new directions his life was taking, he began writing songs for his next album, 662. The number 662 is the telephone area code for Ingram’s northern Mississippi home, and it first came into use the same year he was born—1999. According to Ingram, “662 is a direct reflection of my growth as a musician, a songwriter, a bandleader, and as a young man. This album was written during the pandemic, shortly after I returned home from a whirlwind year and a half of touring and promoting Kingfish. It was an incredible time of change and growth, moments both good and bad, and I am a better and stronger person for it.”
“Only a few like him [Jontavious Willis] emerge every decade or so, when even the most hard core blues fans realize immediately that this is the real deal.” -Living Blues
Hailing from Greenville, Georgia outside of Columbus, Jontavious Willis grew up singing gospel music at the Mount Pilgrim Baptist Church with his grandfather. At the age of 14, he came across a YouTube video of Muddy Waters playing “Hoochie Coochie Man” and was hooked. That’s when he set his course on the blues. All types—Delta, Piedmont, Texas, gospel. As a fingerpicker, flat-picker, and slide player. On guitar, harmonica, banjo, and cigar box. And four years later he was playing on Taj Mahal’s stage. Jontavious has played at the SMF season kick-off in 2019 with William Bell, at the annual festival beer release with Southbound Brewing, for an SMF-produced episode of The Kennedy Center’s virtual “Arts Across America” during the pandemic, and on a co-bill with Amythyst Kiah in the May 2021 series. This is his first Savannah show with a full band.
Where is it happening?
Trustees Garden, 660 East Broughton Street,Savannah,GA,United States