Buddy by the book – When I Left Home: My Story

Based on months of interviews conducted by ghostwriter David Ritz with Guy at his Chicago club Legends, When I Left Home: My Story is Guy‘s official autobiography, a wondrous tale of spectacles, dreams and the blues bled for and earned.

The book traces Guy’s footsteps from the hot cotton fields of Lettsworth to the campus of LSU to the cold streets of the Windy City and beyond and is shot through with Guy’s own funky meter.

“He’s a spirit,” Ritz says of Guy. “When you interview musicians, you start to realize the rhythm and rhyme of the music comes from their speaking voice, so with Buddy I wanted to be quiet and simply capture his voice on the page. He is the blues. Embraced the blues. Chased the blues. Changed the blues. Ultimately, he turned the blues into joy.”

“Blues can bring you up or put you down, but in almost every blues, somewhere in the song there’s a female in the room, a female about to do you wrong, do you right, storm out of your life, or let you love her down… I felt that place during my teen years in Baton Rouge. The blues had stormed by soul…”

—BUDDY GUY, excerpt from When I Left Home: My Story, courtesy of Da Capo Press