Buddy Guy “Damn Right Farewell” with special guests Christone “Kingfish” Ingram and Jontavious Willis

Experience Buddy Guy on his final tour at two special outdoor concerts on opening weekend of the 2023 Savannah Music Festival! Bring a lawn chair or blanket, grab some food from the food trucks and enjoy two days of spectacular blues anchored by electric blues pioneer and living legend, Buddy Guy. Sunday, March 26 performances begin with Jontavious Willis and Christone “Kingfish” Ingram.

“Buddy Guy is one of our last links to the golden age of the blues.” -Uproxx

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. Buddy Guy has received 8 Grammy Awards, a 2015 Lifetime Achievement Grammy Award, 38 Blues Music Awards (the most any artist has received), the Billboard Magazine Century Award for distinguished artistic achievement, a Kennedy Center Honor, and the Presidential National Medal of Arts. Rolling Stone Magazine ranked him #23 in its “100 Greatest Guitarists of All Time.”

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. Though Buddy Guy will forever be associated with Chicago, his story actually begins 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 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.”

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

“Kingfish is one of the most exciting young guitarists in years, with a sound that encompasses B.B. King, Jimi Hendrix and Prince.” -Rolling Stone

Since the release of Kingfish, his Grammy-nominated 2019 debut album, guitarist, vocalist and songwriter Christone “Kingfish” Ingram has quickly become the defining blues voice of his generation, winning a Grammy Award for his second album, 662. From his hometown of Clarksdale, Mississippi to stages around the world, the 23-year-old has already headlined three US tours, performed at Australia’s largest music festival, amazed fans across Europe and the UK, and was selected to open for The Rolling Stones in London’s Hyde Park. Kingfish has also performed with friends including Vampire Weekend, Jason Isbell and Buddy Guy. In July 2021, NPR’s Morning Edition featured Kingfish in a seven-minute story. In April 2022, Kingfish made his national television debut on CBS Saturday Morning, performing three songs as well as being featured in an in-depth interview segment. Kingfish debuted on the Billboard Blues Chart in the #1 position and remained on the chart for an astonishing 91 weeks. Born to a talented family, he fell in love with music as a child, initially playing drums and then bass. At a young age, he got his first guitar and quickly soaked up music from Robert Johnson to Lightnin’ Hopkins, from B.B. King to Muddy Waters, from Jimi Hendrix to Prince. Through classes at the Delta Blues Museum, he learned the history of the blues. Under the tutelage of Richard “Daddy Rich” Crisman and Bill “Howl-N-Madd” Perry, Christone “Kingfish” Ingram creates contemporary blues music that speaks to his generation and beyond, delivering the full healing power of the blues. 

“Only a few like him [Jontavious Willis] emerge every decade or so, when even the most hard core blues fans realize immediately that this is the real deal.” -Living Blues

Hailing from Greenville, Georgia outside of Columbus, Jontavious Willis grew up singing gospel music at the Mount Pilgrim Baptist Church with his grandfather. At the age of 14, he came across a YouTube video of Muddy Waters playing “Hoochie Coochie Man” and was hooked. That’s when he set his course on the blues. All types—Delta, Piedmont, Texas, gospel. As a fingerpicker, flat-picker, and slide player. On guitar, harmonica, banjo, and cigar box. And four years later he was playing on Taj Mahal’s stage. Jontavious has played at the SMF season kick-off in 2019 with William Bell, at the annual festival beer release with Southbound Brewing, for an SMF-produced episode of The Kennedy Center’s virtual “Arts Across America” during the pandemic, and on a co-bill with Amythyst Kiah in the May 2021 series. This is his first Savannah show with a full band.

Please note: This concert does not qualify for the Savannah Music Festival Explorer Pass. No seating is provided to any Trustees’ Garden ticket holder, VIP or GA. All patrons can bring their own seating to this event.