India, Sept. 13 -- There's a crackling video I return to on YouTube, whenever modern music begins to feel too sanitised. It is from March 1969, recorded in an abandoned linoleum factory in Staines, England. An intense, young Black man from Louisiana delivers a blistering, high-octane performance of Mary Had a Little Lamb, backed by a line-up of rock royalty: Jack Bruce on bass, Buddy Miles on drums, saxophonists Chris Mercer and Dick Heckstall-Smith. This man isn't just playing his Fender Stratocaster, he's wrestling with it; wielding feedback like a weapon, and coaxing a raw, howling distortion out of it that must have shocked purists of the era. While he was already famous in the underground club scene, for playing with his teeth and plucking strings with his elbows, this show saw him cast aside the stunts to let his explosive musical genius do the talking. The man was Buddy Guy. On July 30, he turned 90. This October, the music world will come together to pay tribute. At Radio City Music Hall in New York, a staggering line-up of disciples from across generations, ranging in age from 42 to 81 - including Eric Clapton, John Mayer, Gary Clark Jr, Derek Trucks and Susan Tedeschi - will gather for Buddy's Got the Blues: A 90th Birthday Concert Celebration. They are coming to honour a man who grew up without shoes in a Louisiana cotton field and ended up in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, with nine Grammy Awards. To understand the magnitude of his success, one has to look back to where the road began. George "Buddy" Guy was born in 1936 to sharecropper parents. This was the Deep South in the heart of the racist Jim Crow era. There was no money for instruments. As a boy, Buddy fashioned his first guitar out of screen wire and a tin can. The contraption didn't sound like much, but it let him practise the rhythms he heard humming through the cotton fields. When his father finally bought him a cheap acoustic guitar, they say Buddy practised until his fingers bled. By 1957, with the proverbial few dollars in his pocket, he caught a train north to Chicago. He was 21 years old. He hoped for a different future in the Windy City, but it wasn't easy to find. In his early days there, Buddy was starving. He walked the streets looking for work, his stomach growling. The turning point came one freezing night, when a stranger asked if he could play the guitar he was carrying. The stranger then took him to the legendary blues venue 708 Club. Buddy plugged in and poured all his hunger, desperation and raw talent into a single performance. Sitting in the audience, as luck would have it, was musician Muddy Waters. He was so impressed, he got the famished young guitarist a salami sandwich that, Buddy later said, tasted better than anything he's eaten since. Muddy adopted him into the royal lineage of the Chicago blues. He was soon house guitarist at Chess Records, playing behind titans like Muddy, Howlin' Wolf, Koko Taylor and Sonny Boy Williamson. But Chess Records boss Leonard Chess found Buddy's solo style too wild, too abrasive. It is one of music history's great ironies that the very sound Leonard Chess tried to suppress ended up rewriting the rulebook for rock 'n' roll. What really worked for Buddy was a quiet fan club building elsewhere: a swathe of young British musicians listening intently across the Atlantic. When he toured the UK in February 1965, now 29, he blew the minds of a generation of budding guitar gods. A young Eric Clapton would later describe Buddy Guy as "without a doubt, the best guitar player alive". Anecdotes of his influence are legendary. Jimi Hendrix once cancelled his own show to watch Buddy play. Jimmy Page, Keith Richards and Jeff Beck all imbibed deeply from the well of his fretboard pyrotechnics. Carlos Santana described him as a master who was able to "strike lightning with the guitar". And he wouldn't stop. In his 60s, Buddy simply accelerated. He toured relentlessly well into his 80s. When he released Born to Play Guitar in 2015 and The Blues Is Alive and Well in 2018, he was still delivering vocals that could peel paint off walls, and guitar solos that felt, as Santana said, like lightning strikes. I remember watching him live, 19 years ago, at Delhi's Siri Fort Auditorium. He was 71, sporting his signature polka-dot Stratocaster and matching cap. He prowled the stage. At one point, he looked out at the roaring crowd, smiled his infectious, gap-toothed grin, and teased: "I'm gonna play something so funky you can smell it." Then he delivered a solo so fierce, it left the audience breathless. I remember a friend going berserk with adulation - nearly supine, with folded hands - as Buddy took his now-famous walk through the auditorium's aisles while playing. The October concert to mark his 90th birthday is more than a celebration of longevity. It is a celebration of the triumph of human spirit over adversity, packaged in twelve bars and a polka-dot guitar. He didn't just survive the blues, he defined them, electrified them, and kept them alive for generations to come. Long live the King of Chicago....