This is the autobiography of blues legend Buddy Guy. According to Eric Clapton, John Mayer, and the late Stevie Ray Vaughn, Buddy Guy is the greatest blues guitarist of all time. An enormous influence on these musicians as well as Jimi Hendrix, Jimmy Page, and Jeff Beck, Guy is the living embodiment of Chicago Blues. Buddy's story stands at the absolute nexus of modern blues. He came to Chicago in the fifties at the very moment when urban blues were electrifying our culture. He was a regular session player at Chess Records. Willie Dixon was his mentor. He was a sideman in the bands of Muddy Waters and Howlin' Wolf. He and Junior Wells formed a band of his own. In the sixties, he became a recording star in his own right. By the seventies, he was opening for the Rolling Stones. "When I Left Home" tells Buddy's picaresque story in his own unique voice, that of a storyteller who remembers everything, including blues masters in their prime, and the exploding, evolving culture of music that happened all around him. "I want you to know these people like I knew them", Buddy says. "I want them to jump off the page and talk to you just like they talked to me.
Want you to see them for who they really were - crazy wild geniuses, sometimes sweet as pie, sometimes mean as rattle snakes. I'm talking about Muddy, Wolf, Big Mama Thornton, Lightnin' Hopkins, John Lee Hooker. I've lived the story, now I got to tell the story so you can see what I've seen, feel what I've felt, learn what I've learned".