Rhythm & Blues by Buddy Guy

Rhythm & Blues, Buddy Guy's 16th studio album, came out on RCA in July 2013, and the title reads like a mission statement as much as a genre tag. Tom Hambridge produced it, and he keeps the Chicago bluesman right up front where he belongs: the guitar still stings and snaps like it could strip paint, and the voice still has plenty of gravel in the low end. "I Go By Feel" is the tell, a song title that doubles as a description of how Guy has always played.

This is a man who learned the trade as a session guitarist for Muddy Waters at Chess in the 1960s and has long since been waved into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, yet he attacks these songs like he still has something to prove. People noticed: the record gave him the biggest first-week sales of his career in the SoundScan era, and it became his fourth album to top the Top Blues Albums chart, after Sweet Tea, Skin Deep and Living Proof.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.