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BUDDY GUY – DAMN RIGHT FAREWELL TOUR COMING TO HISTORIC VIRGINIA THEATRE NOVEMBER 8, 2023

CHAMPAIGN – The Champaign Park District has announced that multi-Grammy Award-winning blues artist BUDDY GUY will perform in concert on Wednesday, November 8, 2023, 7:30 P.M., at the Virginia Theatre, 203 West Park Avenue, Champaign, Illinois 61820. Reserved seating tickets are $69.50 to $99.50, plus an additional per-ticket processing fee of $6.50 to $8.50, and go on sale at 10:00 A.M. Friday, June 23, 2023, at the Virginia Theatre box office, online at thevirginia.org, or charge by phone at 217/356-9063. Presented by True Endeavors and the Champaign Park District.

BUDDY GUY – DAMN RIGHT FAREWELL
Multi-Grammy Award-winning blues icon Buddy Guy is celebrating his seventh #1 album, “The Blues Don’t Lie,” released via Silvertone/RCA Records. Along with it, he bids adieu to extensive touring with the upcoming 2023 Damn Right Farewell Tour.

The recipient of the 2015 Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award, Buddy Guy’s incredible career spans over 50 years with just as many albums released. Highlights include 8 Grammy Awards, 38 Blues Music Awards (the most any artist has received), a Kennedy Center Honor, NARM Chairman’s Award for Sustained Creative Achievement, Billboard Music Awards’ Century Award for distinguished artistic development, a Presidential National Medal of Arts, and induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

Buddy Guy’s Damn Right Farewell Tour will see The Americana Music Association Lifetime Achievement Award-winner performing hits from throughout his career, in addition to his new #1 album.

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.

In 2019, Buddy Guy won his 8th and most recent GRAMMY Award for his 18th solo LP, “The Blues Is Alive And Well.”

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. The documentary features new interviews with Buddy Guy, Carlos Santana, Eric Clapton, John Mayer, Gary Clark Jr, and more.

Though Buddy Guy will forever be associated with Chicago, his story actually began 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 the rest of the label’s legendary roster, 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.”

Seven years later, 2012 proved to be one of Buddy Guy’s most remarkable years ever. He was awarded the 2012 Kennedy Center Honor for his lifetime contribution to American culture; earlier in the year, at a performance at the White House, he even persuaded President Obama to join him on a chorus of “Sweet Home Chicago.” Also in 2012, he published his long-awaited memoir, When I Left Home.

These many years later, Buddy Guy remains a genuine American treasure and one of the final surviving connections to an historic era in the country’s musical evolution.

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To purchase tickets, visit: thevirginia.org.