Buddy Guy
Sweet Tea

For the first time, I am writing about a blues album recorded in the new millennium by one of Chicago's greatest post-war guitarists: Buddy Guy.
I won't talk about Guy's history; if there's an opportunity, I'll do it when and if I examine his first recordings. Here, I will only mention that he was coming from a series of good quality albums, but ones where there was a lot already heard, perhaps for commercial reasons or due to a drop in creativity. But with the album in question, "Sweet Tea," recorded by Silverstone Records in 2001, Buddy, at 65, seems to have found a new creative streak and a new sound direction.
The title "Sweet Tea" is due to the name of the studio where the album was recorded (also photographed on the cover) because, musically speaking, there is practically nothing "sweet" about it; in fact, it is a wild blues rich with distortions.
It must also be mentioned that this album cannot be talked about without acknowledging that the tracks contained here are Delta blues covers and played in southern style. However, they are not covers of classic standards but primarily tracks from the '90s, almost all released by the commendable record label Fat Possum, and most are by a Delta bluesman, the great Junior Kimbrough.
The question arises naturally: why would a historic Chicago musician (even if he is southern-born) decide to record Delta blues tracks and even interpret as many as four songs (out of nine on the album) by a bluesman like Kimbrough?
The first part of the question is obvious; it's an homage to his homeland, while the choice of Junior, in my opinion, is due to the fact that Guy found in this bluesman an originality and a new way of making blues, and from his sound, he drew inspiration for the textures of this album.
The opening track "Done Got Old" is precisely by Kimbrough, recorded in his debut album "First Recordings" in 1966. Here, Buddy is solo, with voice and acoustic guitar; the six-string is an accompaniment for the penetrating vocal interpretation that, compared to the original, is decidedly sweeter and calmer but still retains all its underlying restlessness.
After this song, Guy permanently returns to the electric guitar, and the band comes in until the last track of the album, marking the new sound direction. The group is composed of James "Jimbo" Mathus on rhythm guitar, Davey Faragher on bass, Spam (Tommy Lee Miles) on drums, and on some tracks, you can also hear Bobby Whitlock on piano, Craig Krampf on percussion, Pete Thomas and Sam Carr on drums. The band offers a cohesive, brutal, raw, and hard sound driven by fuzz bass.
Also from Junior's songbook, but more recent (from the '90s), are "Baby Please Don't Leave Me" with whirling and acidic sound, the rocking "Stay All Night" and the lengthy, over 12 minutes, "I Gotta Try You" which is the closest to Kimbrough's typical sound's hypnotic, hallucinatory, and dark atmospheres. The song is a ride with a sinuous and intentionally repetitive rhythm, where Guy presents a series of layered guitar interventions, up until about the eighth minute where his six-string reaches maximum pressure to explode into a flaming and inspired solo that ends with a tribute to Jimi Hendrix (it is known that the two have also played together in jams).
From James T Model Ford is "Look What All You Got," in Guy's excellent version, distortion takes center stage. "Tramp" by Lowell Fulson and Jimmy McCracklin is another track from '66 with a funky blues flavor, but Buddy alters the melody and makes everything more rock. The highlight is the beautiful, boundless, distorted, and impetuous final solo, which also here carries the spirit of Hendrix. "She's Got The Devil In Her" is by Cedell Davis, revisited by Guy in a compact and hard version. "Who's Been Foolin' You" is a beautiful song by Robert Cage, which unfortunately Guy transforms into somewhat canonical blues rock without particular bursts of creativity, passable, much better the original.
The album closes with the only original by Buddy, namely "It's A Jungle Out There," an exciting slow piece where his indomitable guitar explodes in various colors.
This "Sweet Tea" is a record full of surprises, which suffers a little in sound output, which could have been even rougher and as spontaneous as a jam session given its intentions. But beyond small production flaws, it remains a great blues album and one of the best in Buddy's long and stellar career.