Phil Guy (April 28, 1940 – August 20, 2008) was an American blues guitarist. He was the younger brother of blues guitarist Buddy Guy. Phil and Buddy Guy were frequent collaborators and contribute both guitar and vocal performances on many of each other's albums.
Philip Guy was born at Lettsworth, near Baton Rouge, Louisiana, the youngest of five children of sharecroppers. As a boy he picked cotton and pecan nuts and helped raise pigs and chickens around the family's shack, which was fitted with electricity only when he was nine. When Buddy moved to Baton Rouge to attend high school, he left his battered Harmony f-hole guitar hanging from a nail, ordering his younger brother never to touch it – an injunction which Phil was unable to respect.
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A natural left-hander, he initially played the instrument upside down, but later taught himself to play right-handed. Thanks to the arrival of electricity, his parents had been able to install an old phonograph, and he began mimicking the music of bluesmen such as Muddy Waters, John Lee Hooker and Howlin' Wolf. On Buddy's occasional trips home he would help Phil develop his skills, and it wasn't long before Phil was able to take Buddy's place in Raful Neal's blues band. He stayed with Neal for almost a decade before striking out on his own, settling in Chicago. Four years younger than Buddy, Phil Guy created his own style, mingling the Cajun music of his native Louisiana with Mississippi Delta blues, jazz and soul to produce his own brand of blues; this was understated and unflashy, in contrast to the elder brother's flamboyant style.
He joined Buddy's band just before they embarked on a tour of Africa in 1970 and stayed with them for five years until Buddy, angered and frustrated at his inability to secure a record contract, retired from touring (albeit, as it turned out, temporarily). Phil managed to do what Buddy couldn't--get a record contract--and that year he recorded "The High Energy Blues" for JSP Records, and soon afterward began his own band, Phil Guy and the Chicago Machine.
To underline his own identity, Phil, who looked like a chubbier version of the late comedian Richard Pryor, became known for a wild Afro hairstyle as well as for the beloved Fender Telecaster he called "Ludella". He realised early on that he would remain firmly in his brother's shadow. "There's two Guys and one's on top," he said. "If the labels can't get the Big Man, they don't want to mess with me." Nevertheless, Phil became well known in Europe. In the United States he was particularly popular in his adopted hometown of Chicago, where he performed for 40 years, often at his brother's renowned club Buddy Guy's Legends.
Here’s “Tina Nu” from above album.
Guy recorded a number of albums under his own name in the 1980s and 1990s, branching out into soul and funk. Most of his albums were recorded by JSP Records, based in London. Among them was Say What You Mean (2000), which features what is perhaps his best-known song, (I'm the) Last of the Blues Singers, mourning the loss of such greats as Junior Wells and Howlin' Wolf. According to John Stedman, founder of JSP Records, Phil Guy was "one of the most impressive 'live' acts I've worked with in 30 years of legendary Americans".
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On what turned out to be Phil Guy's final album, He's My Blues Brother (2006), Buddy joined him on vocals and guitar on the title track. Although Buddy won five Grammys and had influenced artists such as Eric Clapton and Jimi Hendrix, it was his younger brother Phil who was named Blues Entertainer of the Year in 2007 at the 27th annual Chicago Music Awards.
In January of 2008 he was diagnosed with prostate cancer, and his health quickly deteriorated. He died on August 20 of the disease at Saint James Hospital in Chicago Heights, Illinois He was 68 years old.
(Edited from Wikipedia and The Telegraph)
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