Keeper of the Blues Chicago musician Buddy Guy keeps the music he loves alive in Maine

The blues have been very, very good to Buddy Guy. The melancholy musical style has taken the former sharecropper’s son from the cotton fields of Louisiana to the far reaches of the globe. It will bring him to the Maine Center for the Arts on Saturday, for a sold-out 8 p.m. concert to be opened by Shemekia Copeland. At 64, the famed blues guitarist could opt to preside at his Chicago club, Legends, and let the world come to him. But Guy is a man with a mission, so he keeps touring.

“It’s this music I love so well,” he explained by phone from Chicago. “There’s not many of us left anymore. We’ve got to keep it going, keep it alive. Our music is not exposed like it used to be, not on radio or MTV. A young person is not going to know about it if we don’t show it to him.”

Guy is a club owner for this same reason.

“There used to be thousands of blues clubs in Chicago, and now they’re all gone,” he said. “Where would the next young [blues player] be discovered if I didn’t keep a club? It’s my way of trying to help, to keep it going.”

For the past 50 years, Guy has seen it all in the world of blues.

He began playing on a homemade guitar with a lighter-fluid can as a body. At 16, he got his first real guitar from his father. He gigged around the Baton Rouge area in the early 1950s, then relocated to the blues hotbed of Chicago in 1957.

In 1958, he made a name for himself by beating Magic Sam and Otis Rush in a club-sponsored “battle of the blues.” That led to a record deal with Artistic. When that company folded, he moved to Chess Records in 1960, working as an in-demand session musician and recording his own music as well.

He switched to Vanguard in 1967 and earned a glowing reputation with such albums as “A Man and the Blues,” “This Is Buddy Guy” and “Hold That Plane!” At Vanguard, he also formed a lasting partnership with harmonica player Junior Wells.

Guy spent the next two decades flying under the radar, playing at blues clubs in the United States and blues festivals in Europe. But two events changed that.

In 1989, he opened Legends, with blues legends and blues-influenced rockers regularly stopping by to jam. Then, in 1991, Eric Clapton invited Guy to perform with him at Royal Albert Hall in London. His performances there led to a recording deal with the Silvertone label and an acclaimed comeback album, “Damn Right, I’ve Got the Blues,” with cameos by Clapton, Jeff Beck and Mark Knopfler. That album, and his next two, resulted in three Grammy Awards in the 1990s.

Guy admits that acknowledgement of their influences by many classic rockers gave blues musicians a boost.

“The Stones, Clapton, Beck, Stevie Ray Vaughan did more for us than any record company,” he said.

Still, the success of such rockers with blues songs helps to point out an inherent racism in the music industry. For example, Guy explained that B.B. King’s recent release with Clapton, “Riding With the King,” was the best-selling album of King’s long and illustrious career.

“If I play a song, you can count the number of radio stations that will play it,” Guy said. “If Clapton plays the same song, it’s on all the stations. Why that is, I do not know.”

A similar situation exists when it comes to remembering the past. Cleveland has the much-ballyhooed Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. But in Chicago, there’s no museum to celebrate the Windy City’s rich blues history.

“Some of the greatest blues musicians are being forgotten,” Guy said sadly.

Guy has gone back to his roots for his latest album, “Sweet Tea.” The album features his covers of Delta blues songs written by such musicians as R.L. Burnside, Junior Kimbrough and T-Model Ford, and was recorded in Mississippi with producer Dennis Herring (Counting Crows, Cracker, Jars of Clay).

Guy seemed lukewarm about the album.

“It was the record company’s idea, and I didn’t like it at first,” he said. “I don’t know yet [if he likes it now]. I let the public decide.”

His opening act, Copeland, is a second-generation blues musician, and Guy had toured Europe and played in New York with her late father, Johnny.

Guy enjoys the younger blues players, but he questions whether they will have the commitment to keep the music alive.

“They’re looking at airplay, they’re not looking at it the way we did,” he said. “We didn’t care if we got paid. We just played because we loved the music.”

So Guy will stay out on the road spreading the gospel of the blues. “I’m going to be with it until the end of my time,” he said.