Blues legend Buddy Guy to perform at Rialto Square Theatre

Blues legend Buddy Guy will bring his “Buddy Guy: Damn Right Encore” to the Rialto Square Theatre in downtown Joliet on Saturday, June 28.

Guy, at age 87, is a Rock & Roll Hall of Fame inductee; a major influence on rock titans such as 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 days of electric blues, according to a news release.

Guy has received eight 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.

One of five children, Guy was born in 1936 in Louisiana to a sharecropper’s family and raised on a plantation near the small town of Lettsworth. He was only 7 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, Guy 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, according to the release.

Ticket prices start at $54 and are available online at Ticketmaster.com. For information, visit rialtosquare.com.