New-Wave Blues Guitarist Buffalo Nichols Isn’t Anyone’s Savior

Bluesman Carl “Buffalo” Nichols doesn’t see himself as a guitar-strumming savior, even if he’s been described as such since gaining national notoriety with a refreshing interpretation of old-school blues on his 2021 self-titled debut.

With such songs as “Another Man” and “Living Hell,” Nichols established himself as a man of his people, bluntly chronicling what it means to be Black in modern America.

But “21st century don’t mean a thing to me ’cause it might as well be 1910, killing women, killing men,” he sings on “Another Man,” which also has a line that recalls how the police once pulled a gun on a seventeen-year-old Nichols.

“I could have been that man,” he croons. “ …  Don’t need to hide behind a white hood when a badge works just as good….