George "Buddy" Guy (born July 30, 1936) is an American blues and rock guitarist and singer. Known as an inspiration to Jimi Hendrix, Eric Clapton and other 1960s blues and rock legends, Guy is considered an important exponent of Chicago blues.

Guy is known for his showmanship; for example, he plays his guitar with drumsticks, or strolls into the audience while jamming and trailing a long guitar cord.

While Buddy Guy's music is often labeled Chicago blues, his style is unique and separate. His music can vary from the most traditional, deepest blues to a creative, unpredictable and radical gumbo of the blues, avant rock, soul and free jazz that morphs at each night’s performance.

Some blues fans and music critics believe that Guy's 1960–1967 Chess catalog remains his most satisfying body of work. This view discounts the pathfinding music Buddy was creating since his early live performances, some of which is captured in the American Folk Blues Festival albums. Eric Clapton, Jeff Beck and Jimmy Page appreciated this more radical side of Guy's music, in the early 1960s.

Guy’s songs have been covered by Led Zeppelin, Eric Clapton, the Rolling Stones, Stevie Ray Vaughan, John Mayall, Jack Bruce, and others. Several of Guy’s early songs and licks were allegedly stolen by the late Willie Dixon and Guy’s early record companies. Regardless, Guy is perhaps better known for his creative interpretation of the work of other songwriters.

Traditional blues fans may appreciate the albums, The Very Best of Buddy Guy, Blues Singer, Junior Wells' Hoodoo Man Blues, A Man & The Blues and I Was Walking Through The Woods. Contemporary blues and rock fans may appreciate Slippin’ In, Sweet Tea, Stone Crazy, Buddy's Baddest: The Best Of Buddy Guy, Damn Right, I’ve Got The Blues, and D.J. Play My Blues. Guy's live show is featured in the video Live! The Real Deal and he performs in the DVDs Lightning In a Bottle, Crossroads Guitar Festival, Eric Clapton: 24 Nights, Festival Express, and A Tribute to Stevie Ray Vaughan.

Guy’s dramatic live shows used to involve much leaping off amplifiers; playing guitar with his feet, teeth, a handkerchief or a drumstick; playing guitar behind his back; playing guitar while hanging from the rafters by his ankles; and going on a walkabout into the audience on the end of a 150 foot guitar cord: cordless guitars were not yet available. Guy would sometimes begin his sets from inside the men’s washroom, all the while shaking up the house with his wild multi-fret bends and piercing, string-snapping attack. He would then get on stage and dive into his solos, maybe capping a run by flipping his guitar backwards and sliding the pickups over his T-shirt, laughing all the way.

Buddy Guy has been called the bridge between the blues and rock and roll. He is one of the historic links between Chicago electric blues pioneers Muddy Waters and Howlin' Wolf and popular musicians like Eric Clapton, Jeff Beck, Jimi Hendrix and Jimmy Page as well as later revivalists like Stevie Ray Vaughan.

In addition, Guy's pathfinding guitar techniques also contributed greatly to rock and roll music. Guy’s guitar playing was loud and aggressive; used pioneering distortion and feedback techniques; employed longer solos; had shifts of volume and texture; and was driven by emotion and impulse. These lessons were eagerly learned and applied by the new wave of 1960s British artists and later became basic attributes of blues-rock music and its offspring, hard rock and heavy metal music.

Guy could arguably be considered the inspiration, directly or indirectly, for every rock power trio format since Cream (i.e., bands such as the Jeff Beck Group, the Jimi Hendrix Experience, Rush, Nirvana). Clapton admitted that he got his idea for a blues-rock power trio during his teenage years while watching Buddy Guy's trio perform in England in 1965. Clapton later formed the rock band Cream, which was “the first rock supergroup to become superstars” and was also “the first top group to truly exploit the power-trio format, in the process laying the foundation for much blues-rock and hard rock of the 1960s and 1970s.”

Guy previously served on the Hall of Fame’s nominating committee. Guy has won five Grammy awards both for his work on his electric and acoustic guitars, and for contemporary and traditional forms of blues music. By 2004, Buddy Guy had also earned 23 W.C. Handy Awards (the most any one blues artist has received), Billboard Magazine's prestigious The Century Award (Guy was its second recipient) for “distinguished artistic achievement,” the title of Greatest Living Electric Blues Guitarist, and the Congressional Medal of Arts (awarded by the President to those who have made extraordinary contributions to the creation, growth and support in the arts in the United States).

Guy was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame on March 14, 2005 by Eric Clapton and B.B. King. Clapton recalled in 1965, seeing Guy perform in London’s The Marquee Club and was impressed by Guy’s playing, his looks, his star power. He remembered seeing Guy pick the guitar with his teeth and play it over his head—two tricks that later influenced Jimi Hendrix. Seeing Guy’s power trio perform also gave him the idea for a power trio format Clapton later used in his rock band Cream. Guy’s acceptance speech was concise: “If you don’t think you have the blues, just keep living.”