Buddy Guy celebrated at Radio City Music Hall with a sold-out 'Buddy's
Got the Blues' show
[October 02, 2026]
By HILLEL ITALIE
NEW YORK (AP) — Two months past his 90th birthday, Buddy Guy is still up
for a little bragging, a lot of cursing and a long night of partying.
The blues great was celebrated Thursday night with a sold-out show at
Radio City Music Hall in New York, where a lineup of guest musicians and
a house band led by Rolling Stones drummer Steve Jordan had the audience
on its feet for much of the three-hour-plus “Buddy's Got the Blues”
concert.
Guy himself was only on stage part of the time, but his name was heard
throughout, and his spirit always present. One of the last of the
Chicago bluesmen who thrived in the mid-20th century, Guy has become so
much the ideal of the genre that musicians didn't need to perform his
songs to summon his legend.
John Mayer, with an ache in his voice on Otis Redding’s “I’ve Got Dreams
to Remember,” and Eric Gales and Joe Bonamassa jamming on the Jimmy Reed
standard “Baby What You Want Me to Do,” seemed as fitting as Susan
Tedeschi and Derek Trucks reviving an old Guy-Junior Wells favorite,
“Messin’ with the Kid.”
But no one was going to top the guest of honor. Guy, wearing a dark cap,
dark pants and a polka dot shirt, opened the show with a long, raunchy
acoustic workout of John Lee Hooker's “I'm in the Mood” and only seemed
to get friskier after bringing out his electric guitar.
He leered and joked with longtime friend Shemekia Copeland on a duet of
“Rock Me Baby,” left no doubt about the meaning of “to buzz all night
long” in Slim Harpo's “I'm a King Bee” and carried on a lot more when
joined by one of his few contemporaries, Bobby Rush, just a month away
from his 93rd birthday. Everyone came on at the end for an all-out,
self-fulfilling “Got My Mojo Workin.'”
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Buddy Guy performs at Buddy's Got the Blues during a 90th Birthday
Concert Celebration at the Radio City Music Hall in New York,
Thursday, Oct. 1, 2026. (Photo by Charles Sykes/Invision/AP)
 Guy is still making plans. His team
announced this week that he has a new album out next year, produced
by Jordan and featuring multi-instrumentalist Ivan Neville, bassist
Willie Weeks and others who played at Radio City Music Hall.
Guy didn't seem at first to have a lot on his mind Thursday besides
the next double entendre or the next profanity. “Help me f—k up this
song,” he liked to call out. But the tributes offered by the younger
performers and the presence of Rush, who testified that he would
have walked from Mississippi just to be here, left him moved and
near tears.
“I didn’t think this many people would be coming out for a 90 year
old man,” Guy said, after confiding he didn't have the strength to
blow out that many “f—kin' candles” on the cakes brought out at the
end. “This is the greatest day I ever had in my life.”
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