SOUND PROJECTIONS
AN ONLINE QUARTERLY MUSIC MAGAZINE
EDITOR: KOFI NATAMBU
WINTER, 2016
VOLUME TWO NUMBER TWO
NINA SIMONE
AN ONLINE QUARTERLY MUSIC MAGAZINE
EDITOR: KOFI NATAMBU
WINTER, 2016
VOLUME TWO NUMBER TWO
Featuring the Musics and Aesthetic Visions of:
NAT KING COLE
January 2-8
ETTA JAMES
January 9-15
JACKIE MCLEAN
January 16-22
TERRI LYNE CARRINGTON
January 23-29
NANCY WILSON
January 30-February 5
BOB MARLEY
February 6-12
LOUIS ARMSTRONG
February 13-19
HORACE SILVER
February 20-26
SHIRLEY HORN
February 27-March 4
T-BONE WALKER
March 5-11
HOWLIN’ WOLF
March 12-18
DIANNE REEVES
March 19-25
Biography: Howlin' Wolf (aka Chester Burnett)
(1910-1976)
Howlin' Wolf was a seminal figure in the development of the Chicago blues style. His fierce, growling voice, punctuated by his trademark falsetto 'howl,' carried with it the primitive energy of the country blues he learned as a young man on the Delta. He successfully made the transition between the country style and the urban style, and in doing so, he was one of a handful of artists who shaped and defined the emerging urban blues sound. Literally hundreds of artists (his contemporaries included) have claimed him as an influence, and equal numbers have recorded their own versions of his songs.
Howlin' Wolf was born Chester Arthur Burnett on June 10, 1910 somewhere between West Point and Aberdeen, Mississippi. At age 13, his family moved to a plantation on the Mississippi River Delta near Ruleville, Mississippi. Prior to this move, Burnett's musical experience had been confined to singing in the Baptist church on Sundays. At age 18, his father gave him a guitar and around the same time he met Charley Patton, an influential blues performer. Taking a liking to the young man, Patton showed Burnett the basics of the Delta Blues style. For the next five years, Burnett farmed full time with his family while occasionally singing and playing at weekend fish fries and Saturday night parties.
In 1933, the Burnett family moved onto a plantation near Parkin, Arkansas, where Burnett learned to play harmonica from Sonny Boy Williamson, another influential Delta blues musician. He teamed up with Williamson, abandoned farming, and began moving around the Delta. Playing in bars and on the streets, Burnett became “well known amongst the itinerant musicians of Mississippi....” During his wanderings, Burnett crossed paths with “almost every major Mississippi artist” but he seemed most impressed with Patton's brand of showmanship. Burnett incorporated some of Patton's act into his own, performing tricks such as dropping to his knees, or lying on his back while whooping and hollering.
Burnett continued to roam the Delta, singing and playing until 1941 when he was drafted. After his discharge in 1945, Burnett returned to Parkin for a brief period of time. He then farmed on his own in Penton, Mississippi for two years. In 1948, Burnett moved to West Memphis, Arkansas, formed a band of his own, and gave up farming in favor of a career in music. Touring Arkansas and Mississippi, Burnett and his band “built a solid reputation for themselves in the Delta jukes.”
Burnett's career-making break came at age 38, when he was given the chance to perform a weekly show on a West Memphis radio station, KWEM. In between songs, the program advertised grain and farm implements. The show was so successful, that Burnett was offered a job selling advertising to local store owners, a job he held until leaving for Chicago in 1952.
It was during his stint at KWEM that Burnett first began using the name, Howlin' Wolf, which he had heard on a Funny Papa Smith record. Up until that time, Burnett performed under various stage names, including Big Foot Chester and Bull Cow. However, the name Howlin' Wolf was particularly suited to his “fierce singing style, which was punctuated with falsetto whoops and howls.”
The success of the radio program opened the door for Wolf's first phonograph recording, made in Memphis in 1950, and released on the Chess record label. The 78 RPM record, “How Many More Years,” and “Moanin' at Midnight,” sold 60,000 copies, a major hit at the time. The success drew the attention of a rival record label, RPM, and for a period of 18 months, both the Chess and RPM labels fought over the rights to Wolf's recordings. A contractual agreement was finally reached, and in the fall of 1952 Wolf settled down in Chicago, where he recorded exclusively for Chess for the remainder of his career.
In terms of sales, Wolf's recording career peaked in 1956, however he remained a featured artist at Chess. He enjoyed a renewed popularity during the mid-1960s, when he toured Europe extensively as part of a Chess blues revival show. During this period, popular British rock and roll bands such as the Rolling Stones began recording his songs and asking him to be the 'warm up' act on their tours. Standing six-foot, six inches, and weighing close to 300 pounds, Howlin' Wolf had a commanding stage presence that few who witnessed it could ever forget. Shouting in a voice born in the bottom of a gravel pit, whooping and hollering, furiously blowing into a harmonica over the wail of electrified instruments, Wolf was capable of bringing down the house while simultaneously “scaring its patrons out of their wits.”
Toward the end of his career, Wolf was plagued with chronic kidney trouble and would perform only in cities where he had access to a dialysis machine. A friend recalled, “after each exhaustive treatment, he'd go straight to his gig.”
Chester Arthur Burnett, a.k.a. The Howlin' Wolf, passed away on January 10, 1976, in Chicago, Illinois.
Source: James Nadal
Howlin' Wolf was a seminal figure in the development of the Chicago blues style. His fierce, growling voice, punctuated by his trademark falsetto 'howl,' carried with it the primitive energy of the country blues he learned as a young man on the Delta. He successfully made the transition between the country style and the urban style, and in doing so, he was one of a handful of artists who shaped and defined the emerging urban blues sound. Literally hundreds of artists (his contemporaries included) have claimed him as an influence, and equal numbers have recorded their own versions of his songs.
Howlin' Wolf was born Chester Arthur Burnett on June 10, 1910 somewhere between West Point and Aberdeen, Mississippi. At age 13, his family moved to a plantation on the Mississippi River Delta near Ruleville, Mississippi. Prior to this move, Burnett's musical experience had been confined to singing in the Baptist church on Sundays. At age 18, his father gave him a guitar and around the same time he met Charley Patton, an influential blues performer. Taking a liking to the young man, Patton showed Burnett the basics of the Delta Blues style. For the next five years, Burnett farmed full time with his family while occasionally singing and playing at weekend fish fries and Saturday night parties.
In 1933, the Burnett family moved onto a plantation near Parkin, Arkansas, where Burnett learned to play harmonica from Sonny Boy Williamson, another influential Delta blues musician. He teamed up with Williamson, abandoned farming, and began moving around the Delta. Playing in bars and on the streets, Burnett became “well known amongst the itinerant musicians of Mississippi....” During his wanderings, Burnett crossed paths with “almost every major Mississippi artist” but he seemed most impressed with Patton's brand of showmanship. Burnett incorporated some of Patton's act into his own, performing tricks such as dropping to his knees, or lying on his back while whooping and hollering.
Burnett continued to roam the Delta, singing and playing until 1941 when he was drafted. After his discharge in 1945, Burnett returned to Parkin for a brief period of time. He then farmed on his own in Penton, Mississippi for two years. In 1948, Burnett moved to West Memphis, Arkansas, formed a band of his own, and gave up farming in favor of a career in music. Touring Arkansas and Mississippi, Burnett and his band “built a solid reputation for themselves in the Delta jukes.”
Burnett's career-making break came at age 38, when he was given the chance to perform a weekly show on a West Memphis radio station, KWEM. In between songs, the program advertised grain and farm implements. The show was so successful, that Burnett was offered a job selling advertising to local store owners, a job he held until leaving for Chicago in 1952.
It was during his stint at KWEM that Burnett first began using the name, Howlin' Wolf, which he had heard on a Funny Papa Smith record. Up until that time, Burnett performed under various stage names, including Big Foot Chester and Bull Cow. However, the name Howlin' Wolf was particularly suited to his “fierce singing style, which was punctuated with falsetto whoops and howls.”
The success of the radio program opened the door for Wolf's first phonograph recording, made in Memphis in 1950, and released on the Chess record label. The 78 RPM record, “How Many More Years,” and “Moanin' at Midnight,” sold 60,000 copies, a major hit at the time. The success drew the attention of a rival record label, RPM, and for a period of 18 months, both the Chess and RPM labels fought over the rights to Wolf's recordings. A contractual agreement was finally reached, and in the fall of 1952 Wolf settled down in Chicago, where he recorded exclusively for Chess for the remainder of his career.
In terms of sales, Wolf's recording career peaked in 1956, however he remained a featured artist at Chess. He enjoyed a renewed popularity during the mid-1960s, when he toured Europe extensively as part of a Chess blues revival show. During this period, popular British rock and roll bands such as the Rolling Stones began recording his songs and asking him to be the 'warm up' act on their tours. Standing six-foot, six inches, and weighing close to 300 pounds, Howlin' Wolf had a commanding stage presence that few who witnessed it could ever forget. Shouting in a voice born in the bottom of a gravel pit, whooping and hollering, furiously blowing into a harmonica over the wail of electrified instruments, Wolf was capable of bringing down the house while simultaneously “scaring its patrons out of their wits.”
Toward the end of his career, Wolf was plagued with chronic kidney trouble and would perform only in cities where he had access to a dialysis machine. A friend recalled, “after each exhaustive treatment, he'd go straight to his gig.”
Chester Arthur Burnett, a.k.a. The Howlin' Wolf, passed away on January 10, 1976, in Chicago, Illinois.
Source: James Nadal
Howlin’ Wolf (1910-1976)
Biography
Biography
HOWLIN' WOLF
(1910-1976)
Howlin’ Wolf ranks among the most electrifying performers in blues history, as well as one of its greatest characters. He was a ferocious, full-bodied singer whose gruff, rasping vocals embodied the blues at its most unbridled. A large man who stood more than six feet tall and weighed nearly 300 pounds, Howlin’ Wolf cut an imposing figure, which he utilized to maximum effect when performing. In the words of blues historian Bob Santelli, “Wolf acted out his most potent blues, becoming the living embodiment of its most powerful forces.” Howlin’ Wolf cut his greatest work in the Fifties and early Sixties for the Chicago-based Chess Records. Many songs with which he is most closely identified – “Spoonful,” “Back Door Man,” “Little Red Rooster” and “I Ain’t Superstitious” – were written for him by bluesman Willie Dixon, a fixture at Chess Records who also funneled material to Wolf’s main rival, Muddy Waters. Howlin’ Wolf himself was an estimable songwriter, responsible for such raw classics as “Killing Floor,” “Smokestack Lightning” and “Moanin’ at Midnight.”
Howlin’ Wolf was born Chester Arthur Burnett on June 10, 1910, on a plantation between West Point and Aberdeen, Mississippi. “Howlin’ Wolf” was a nickname he picked up in his youth. He was exposed to the blues from an early age through such performers as Charley Patton and Willie Brown, who performed at plantation picnics and juke joints. Wolf derived his trademark howl from the “blue yodel” of country singer Jimmie Rodgers, whom he admired. Although he sang the blues locally, it wasn’t until he moved to West Memphis in 1948 that he put together a full-time band. Producer Sam Phillips recorded Howlin’ Wolf at his Memphis Recording Service (later Sun Records) after hearing him perform on radio station KWEM. Some of the material was leased to Chess Records, and in the early Fifties, Howlin’ Wolf signed with Chess and moved to Chicago.
His Chess recordings include such classics as “Sitting on Top of the World,” “Spoonful,” “Smokestack Lightnin’,” “Little Red Rooster,” “I Ain’t Superstitious,” “Back Door Man,” “Killing Floor” and “How Many More Years.” Howlin’ Wolf was a major influence on such blues-based rock musicians as the Rolling Stones and Eric Clapton. In fact, he recorded a pair of albums –The London Howlin’ Wolf Sessions and London Revisited – with his British disciples in the early Seventies. Howlin’ Wolf’s distinctive vocal style and rough-hewn approach to the blues can also be heard in the work of such diverse artists as Captain Beefheart and His Magic Band and Led Zeppelin. In 1971, Wolf received an honorary doctorate from Columbia College in Chicago.
Slowed down for much of the Seventies due to serious internal injuries suffered in an automobile accident, Howlin’ Wolf gave his last performance in Chicago in November 1975 with fellow blues titan B.B. King. He died of kidney failure two months later, on January 10, 1976.
http://www.biography.com/people/howlin-wolf-9345565
Howlin' Wolf
Biography
Guitarist, Songwriter, Singer (1910–1976)
Name
Howlin' Wolf
Occupation
Guitarist, Songwriter, Singer
Birth Date
June 10, 1910
Death Date
January 10, 1976
Place of Birth
West Point, Mississippi
Place of Death
Hines, Illinois
AKA
Chester Burnett
Nickname
Howlin' Wolf
Full Name
Chester Arthur Burnett
Synopsis
Background
Signs to Chess Records
Hits Like 'Smokestack Lightnin'' and 'Spoonful'
Revered by Rock Acts
Howlin' Wolf was one of blues music's all-time greats, known for his electric guitar-based style and hits like "Smokestack Lightnin'" and "Spoonful.”
Synopsis
Howlin' Wolf was born on June 10, 1910, in West Point, Mississippi. He studied with bluesmen Charley Patton and Sonny Boy Williamson before eventually signing with Chicago's Chess Records. An enthralling performer, he had hits like "The Red Rooster" and "Moanin' at Midnight," and by 1960, he had begun working with songwriter Willie Dixon. Revered by U.K. rock artists, Wolf died in Hines, Illinois, on January 10, 1976.
Background
Chester Arthur Burnett, who would become iconic blues musician Howlin' Wolf, was born on June 10, 1910, in the rural region of West Point, Mississippi, with the infant named after President Chester A. Arthur. Burnett received a guitar from his father when he was 18 and started to actively study and perform the blues. The moniker "Howlin' Wolf" was said to be earned during his childhood, with reports varying on what inspired the nickname.
Burnett learned his craft from renowned bluesmen like Charley Patton and Sonny Boy Williamson, the latter being a family in-law, and performed in clubs during the 1930s while working as a farmer. He was stationed with the Army in Seattle, Washington during World War II, and then returned home, devoting himself fully to his music by the end of the decade.
Signs to Chess Records
Wolf had generally accompanied himself at performances with a guitar and harmonica, and he opted to form a band, the House Rockers, in 1948 in Memphis, Tennessee. He had a radio spot, which enabled him to promote his appearances, and by the start of the 1950s, he was scouted by Ike Turner—then an A&R person for RPM Records—who would also play with Wolf in his band. Wolf eventually recorded with Sam Phillips and later signed with Chess Records. He then relocated to Chicago, Illinois, where he became highly known for his rousing, electric guitar-based style.
Hits Like 'Smokestack Lightnin'' and 'Spoonful'
Wolf was a large, statuesque man who had a forceful, animated presence on stage and who let loose with a rich, textured vocal style. His hits include "How Many More Years," "Smokestack Lightnin'," "Moanin' at Midnight" and "Sitting on Top of the World." By the start of the 1960s, Wolf was collaborating often with songwriter/singer/producer Willie Dixon, who penned most of Wolf's studio repertoire for the next few years, including classics like "Spoonful," "The Red Rooster" and "Shake for Me."
In contrast to his stage persona, it was said that Wolf was a quieter person who volunteered in the Chicago community and helped look out for his band members' finances. He had two daughters with his wife, Lillie.
Revered by Rock Acts
By the end of the '60s, Wolf's work was being hailed and covered by a number of popular British and U.S. rock acts, including the Doors, Cream and the Rolling Stones, who had a big U.K. hit with their remake of "Red Rooster" and appeared with Wolf on the TV show Shindig. Wolf traveled to the U.K. to record his 1971 album, The London Sessions, which featured background support from Eric Clapton and Ringo Starr, among others.
After suffering from severe heart problems and kidney disease, Wolf died on January 10, 1976, at the age of 65, in Hines, Illinois. Wolf, who had earned an honorary doctorate from Chicago's Columbia College, was posthumously inducted into the Blues Foundation Hall of Fame in 1980 and the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1991.
http://www.furious.com/perfect/wolf/hislife.html
Howlin' Wolf - His Life
by Tony Arnold
(thanks to Geoff Pullen)
Chester Arthur Burnett was born on 10th June 1910 in West Point, Mississippi. At 13 he moved with his family across the state to Ruleville and began working on the Young and Mara plantation. He became known as a 'difficult child' which earned him the nickname "Howlin' Wolf". Five years later, his father bought him a guitar and he began playing for country functions and also 'busking' on the streets of small local towns. Whilst continuing to also work on farms in Arkansas his travels became more far reaching and, during the early 1930's, he met seasoned blues entertainers including Sonny Boy Williamson II and Robert Johnson. Sonny Boy Williamson later became the Wolf's brother-in-law and taught him to play the harmonica. He also met the legendary Charlie Patton and recalls "It was he who started me off to playing. He took a liking to me, and I asked him would he learn me, and at night, after I'd get off work, I'd go and hang around".
During World War II, Wolf was called up for active service and after his return home he returned to a farmers life in Arkansas. However, this was not to last long and by 1948 he had formed his first 'electric' group with the likes of Junior Parker, James Cotton, Matt Murphy, Pat Hare and Willie Johnson. He also began working as a disc jockey and advertising salesman for the radio station KWEM in Memphis where his reputation brought him to the notice of Sam Phillips who organised Wolf's first recording session for Sun Records in 1951. The songs were "Moanin' at Midnight" and "How Many More Years" with Ike Turner playing piano and Willie Johnson on guitar. The songs became big hits on the rhythm 'n' blues charts.
Wolf was 41 now and he was recording alongside B.B. King who was at that time in his early twenties and had more interested in the 'modern' blues than the 20's and 30's blues which the Wolf was singing. He was now recording in Memphis with a regular band of Willie Johnson (guitar), Albert Williams (piano) and Willie Steel (piano).
In 1953, Wolf moved and settled in Chicago. This brought him in contention with Muddy Waters as they vied for position in Chicago's clubs and at Chess Records. Wolf differed from Muddy as he was reluctant to cast off his southern blues background and at that time, Willie Dixon saw Waters as more suitable for his new compositions "Hoochie Coochie Man" and "I Just Want To Make Love To You". Dixon had said "Muddy is the kind of person you can give any kind of lyric, he's what you call a quick study. Wolf, you can't give him too many words, because he gets 'em all jumbled up. And if he gets 'em right, he still ain't gonna get the right meaning". Wolf was therefore left to play southern blues looking 'backwards to the backwoods'. However, he kept alive in Chicago the sound of the South that many of the city's black residents had grown up with.
In 1956, Wolf recorded "Smokestack Lightnin'" with Willie Johnson and Hubert Sumlin on guitars, Hosea Lee Kennard on piano, Willie Dixon on bass and Earl Phillips on drums. Kennard and Sumlin gave Wolf's mid-50's recordings their essential character, Sumlin's guitar playing perfectly matching the contours of Wolf's chants, hollers and howls.
Through the 50's and 60's, Wolf was working regularly in the Chicago clubs such as the "708" and "Syvio's Lounge" and was frequently active at Chess recording sessions with great pianists like Otis Spann and Johnny Jones. It was in 1959/60 that the Wolf's songs began to take on new energy and moved with a Rock 'n' Roll pace. "Howlin' For My Baby", "Wang-Dang-Doodle" and "Shake For Me" were songs recorded at this time.
In the sixties, the Wolf began touring not only the States but also Europe, and in 1971 he recorded the "London Sessions" album with Eric Clapton, Stevie Winwood, Ringo Starr, Bill Wyman and Charlie Watts, English blues musicians who were almost 40 years his juniors. These musician's had been singing and recording southern blues for some time and in response to the view that they were "merely vampires, sustaining themselves on the stolen essence of other men's lives", Muddy Waters had said "Before the Rolling Stones, people didn't know anything about me and didn't want to know anything. I was making records that were called 'race records'. Then the Rolling Stones and other English bands came along, playing this music, and now the kids are buying my records and listening to them."
By 1975 he was tired and ill. He had had several heart attacks at the beginning of the decade and was now suffering from cancer. At the end of 1975 he went into the Veteran Administration Hospital in Illinois and died on 10th January 1976.
Big Foot Chester
Sam Phillips, on his first meeting with Howlin' Wolf, was bowled over. "When I heard him, I said, 'This is for me. This is where the soul of man never dies'. He was about six foot six, with the biggest feet I've ever seen on a human being. Big Foot Chester is one name they used to call him. He would sit there with those feet planted wide apart, playing nothing but the French harp, and I tell you, the greatest show you could see today would be Chester Burnett doing one of those sessions in my studio. God, what would it be worth to see the fervor in that man's face when he sang. His eyes would light up and you'd see the veins on his neck, and buddy, there was nothing on his mind but that song. He sang with his damn soul."
http://www.allmusic.com/artist/howlin-wolf-mn0000276085/biography
Artist Biography by Cub Koda
In the history of the blues, there has never been anyone quite like the Howlin' Wolf. Six foot three and close to 300 pounds in his salad days, the Wolf was the primal force of the music spun out to its ultimate conclusion. A Robert Johnson may have possessed more lyrical insight, a Muddy Waters more dignity, and a B.B. King certainly more technical expertise, but no one could match him for the singular ability to rock the house down to the foundation while simultaneously scaring its patrons out of its wits.
He was born in West Point, MS, and named after the 21st President of the United States (Chester Arthur). His father was a farmer and Wolf took to it as well until his 18th birthday, when a chance meeting with Delta blues legend Charley Patton changed his life forever. Though he never came close to learning the subtleties of Patton's complex guitar technique, two of the major components of Wolf's style (Patton's inimitable growl of a voice and his propensity for entertaining) were learned first hand from the Delta blues master. The main source of Wolf's hard-driving, rhythmic style on harmonica came when Aleck "Rice" Miller (Sonny Boy Williamson) married his half-sister Mary and taught him the rudiments of the instrument. He first started playing in the early '30s as a strict Patton imitator, while others recall him at decade's end rocking the juke joints with a neck-rack harmonica and one of the first electric guitars anyone had ever seen. After a four-year stretch in the Army, he settled down as a farmer and weekend player in West Memphis, AR, and it was here that Wolf's career in music began in earnest.
By 1948, he had established himself within the community as a radio personality. As a means of advertising his own local appearances, Wolf had a 15-minute radio show on KWEM in West Memphis, interspersing his down-home blues with farm reports and like-minded advertising that he sold himself. But a change in Wolf's sound that would alter everything that came after was soon in coming because when listeners tuned in for Wolf's show, the sound was up-to-the-minute electric. Wolf had put his first band together, featuring the explosive guitar work of Willie Johnson, whose aggressive style not only perfectly suited Wolf's sound but aurally extended and amplified the violence and nastiness of it as well. In any discussion of Wolf's early success both live, over the airwaves, and on record, the importance of Willie Johnson cannot be overestimated.
Wolf finally started recording in 1951, when he caught the ear of Sam Phillips, who first heard him on his morning radio show. The music Wolf made in the Memphis Recording Service studio was full of passion and zest and Phillips simultaneously leased the results to the Bihari Brothers in Los Angeles and Leonard Chess in Chicago. Suddenly, Howlin' Wolf had two hits at the same time on the R&B charts with two record companies claiming to have him exclusively under contract. Chess finally won him over and as Wolf would proudly relate years later, "I had a 4,000 dollar car and 3,900 dollars in my pocket. I'm the onliest one drove out of the South like a gentleman." It was the winter of 1953 and Chicago would be his new home.
When Wolf entered the Chess studios the next year, the violent aggression of the Memphis sides was being replaced with a Chicago backbeat and, with very little fanfare, a new member in the band. Hubert Sumlin proved himself to be the Wolf's longest-running musical associate. He first appears as a rhythm guitarist on a 1954 session, and within a few years' time his style had fully matured to take over the role of lead guitarist in the band by early 1958. In what can only be described as an "angular attack," Sumlin played almost no chords behind Wolf, sometimes soloing right through his vocals, featuring wild skitterings up and down the fingerboard and biting single notes. If Willie Johnson was Wolf's second voice in his early recording career, then Hubert Sumlin would pick up the gauntlet and run with it right to the end of the howler's life.
By 1956, Wolf was in the R&B charts again, racking up hits with "Evil" and "Smokestack Lightnin'." He remained a top attraction both on the Chicago circuit and on the road. His records, while seldom showing up on the national charts, were still selling in decent numbers down South. But by 1960, Wolf was teamed up with Chess staff writer Willie Dixon, and for the next five years he would record almost nothing but songs written by Dixon. The magic combination of Wolf's voice, Sumlin's guitar, and Dixon's tunes sold a lot of records and brought the 50-year-old bluesman roaring into the next decade with a considerable flourish. The mid-'60s saw him touring Europe regularly with "Smokestack Lightnin'" becoming a hit in England some eight years after its American release. Certainly any list of Wolf's greatest sides would have to include "I Ain't Superstitious," "The Red Rooster," "Shake for Me," "Back Door Man," "Spoonful," and "Wang Dang Doodle," Dixon compositions all. While almost all of them would eventually become Chicago blues standards, their greatest cache occurred when rock bands the world over started mining the Chess catalog for all it was worth. One of these bands was the Rolling Stones, whose cover of "The Red Rooster" became a number-one record in England. At the height of the British Invasion, the Stones came to America in 1965 for an appearance on ABC-TV's rock music show, Shindig. Their main stipulation for appearing on the program was that Howlin' Wolf would be their special guest. With the Stones sitting worshipfully at his feet, the Wolf performed a storming version of "How Many More Years," being seen on his network-TV debut by an audience of a few million. Wolf never forgot the respect the Stones paid him, and he spoke of them highly right up to his final days.
Dixon and Wolf parted company by 1964 and Wolf was back in the studio doing his own songs. One of the classics to emerge from this period was "Killing Floor," featuring a modern backbeat and a incredibly catchy guitar riff from Sumlin. Catchy enough for Led Zeppelin to appropriate it for one of their early albums, cheerfully crediting it to themselves in much the same manner as they had done with numerous other blues standards. By the end of the decade, Wolf's material was being recorded by artists including the Doors, the Electric Flag, the Blues Project, Cream, and Jeff Beck. The result of all these covers brought Wolf the belated acclaim of a young, white audience. Chess' response to this was to bring him into the studio for a "psychedelic" album, truly the most dreadful of his career. His last big payday came when Chess sent him over to England in 1970 to capitalize on the then-current trend of London Session albums, recording with Eric Clapton on lead guitar and other British superstars. Wolf's health was not the best, but the session was miles above the earlier, ill-advised attempt to update Wolf's sound for a younger audience.
As the '70s moved on, the end of the trail started coming closer. By now Wolf was a very sick man; he had survived numerous heart attacks and was suffering kidney damage from an automobile accident that sent him flying through the car's windshield. His bandleader Eddie Shaw firmly rationed Wolf to a meager half-dozen songs per set. Occasionally some of the old fire would come blazing forth from some untapped wellspring, and his final live and studio recordings show that he could still tear the house apart when the spirit moved him. He entered the Veterans Administration Hospital in 1976 to be operated on, but never survived it, finally passing away on January 10th of that year.
But his passing did not go unrecognized. A life-size statue of him was erected shortly after in a Chicago park. Eddie Shaw kept his memory and music alive by keeping his band, the Wolf Gang, together for several years afterward. A child-education center in Chicago was named in his honor and in 1980 he was elected to the Blues Foundation Hall of Fame. In 1991, he was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. A couple of years later, his face was on a United States postage stamp. Howlin' Wolf is now a permanent part of American history.
http://www.furious.com/perfect/wolf/harmonica.html
Howlin' Wolf
A Personal Recollection
Photo: Brian Smith
by Terry Sexton
In the dark pre-digital world of 1967, I purchased (the price was $2.50) a standard 10-hole Hohner Marine Band (key of C) to help me tune the cheap guitar I was trying to teach myself to play.
Janis Joplin, Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, and the new duet of Porter Wagoner and Dolly Parton pulsed through transistor radios, Jim Lonborg faced Julian Javier in the World Series, Vietnam exploded, and, after my paper route, I kept trying to get a "D" chord to sound right.
I kept struggling between, and sometimes with, schoolwork and that inevitable series of part-time teenage employments with a succession of guitars that would constantly settle into a tuning of their own making. In 1969 I purchased another harmonica (key of G - $4.75), we moved to Wisconsin, and I, through an oscillation of very tangential incidents, was introduced and began listening to some fine exponents of a style of music called the blues.
An early high school blues hero was Lightnin' Hopkins. Late evenings and later weekend nights, I would take the vinyl discs three doors down the street, my friend and I would seclude ourselves in his basement, open some cold bottles of 7-Up, and become very serious and attentive to what Lightnin' said and the ways he would musically phrase each piece. Having by this time been conditioned to tangential incidents, it, therefore, did not surprise me when, in a few subsequent years, I met Townes Van Zandt in a Nashville hotel bar only to discover that he, too, was not only a fan of Lightnin' Hopkins, but a personal friend.
College arrived, I had several more harmonicas, found second position (cross harp) after reading Tony Glover's Blues Harp book, and began performing with a small blues/rock combo. And as surely as the flatted fifth follows the flatted third, I would observe simple conversations between blues fans inevitably escalate into debates, with every originally non-involved bystander freely and emotionally tendering opinions, as to who was the best - Muddy or the Wolf?
On March 17, 1973, I was one week into my twenties and this Irish kid treated himself to a Muddy Waters performance at a Milwaukee club called Teddy's on Farwell Avenue. Muddy, by this time, had developed a presentation consisting of two sets that followed a very specific outline. The band would play for about half an hour and then Muddy would be introduced, he'd play three tunes and leave, and the band would close the set with another number. I don't care how good the band was (and they were great), I wanted to see and hear more of Mr. Morganfield.
I was fortunate to catch Muddy a few more times over the next few years, and each time, the performance followed the same map. However, he was interesting. Band members changed, but the music did not. It fitted the lounge. It drifted into corners and settled into the evening. It was very tangible. Muddy did get intense - "She's 19," "Got My Mojo Working," "Mannish Boy" - but the musical expression was always under strict control, contained. The Wolf's music chased you into corners and demanded from you the stamina to attempt an accommodation of the energy springing at you from the stage.
I had made my first observation of the Wolf a few years earlier at an outdoor blues fest at Milwaukee's State Fair Park in the late summer of either 1970 or '71. He was wearing a short-sleeve pink shirt with brown slacks and his right forearm was wrapped in gauze bandages. He performed about 5 o'clock that evening in the bright haze of a setting sun that flamed the edges of approaching thunderstorm clouds. The band played one number and then the Wolf took over. He stalked around the makeshift flatbed truck stage on some numbers, and when he got tired he would deliver a song seated on a guitar amp. It lasted an hour. He didn't say much between songs, he did glare at us a few times. I had never seen anything like it. The impression was that of watching a caged, defiant, and very proud beast. I began purchasing every Wolf record I could find. Some older blues enthusiasts clued me into the power of the Wolf's performances in the '50's and '60's.
I saw him again in Milwaukee at Teddy's on Thanksgiving Day night in 1974. I had started to assemble a collection of autographed harmonicas (I take an old blown-out Marine Band and a nail to performances and get players to scratch their names across the front of the wooden comb - I have an "MW" from Muddy Waters, Musselwhite, Carey Bell Harrington, John Hammond Junior, to drop a name or four) and this night I was hoping to get the Wolf to scratch. I got there early, before the place could fill up, and waited. I listened as a bartender told a waitress about how he had delivered a plate of Thanksgiving turkey and trimmings to the Wolf's motel room that afternoon. Apparently, the dialysis treatment the Wolf had received the previous day made him tired.
The band arrived and I hopped off the barstool and sort of fell in with their procession to the back. I looked up at a weary Wolf and asked if he would sign my harmonica. His chin rested on his chest and he muttered, "Come on back." I accompanied the Wolf past the bouncer to a small dimly lit back room. Without removing his topcoat, the Wolf sighed down into a wooden chair by a small card table.
As I drew forth the harp and nail I suddenly realized that we - the Wolf and myself - were alone in this room. The harmonica disappeared into his massive hands and I started to perspire. I had never before, or since, experienced such a thorough awe. He quietly scratched his name in the wood and I nervously blurted, "How did you get your name?" The trove of information this man possessed about music and travel and other international musicians, and all I could think of to ask was, "How did you get your name?"!
He didn't look up, somewhere in a lengthy exhale he quietly muttered, "That's a long story, son." The words ended, but the breath continued, slowly and audibly, to flow out of that still massive frame. He completed the task, placed the harp and nail in front of me, and sat, chin on chest, in the silence of that little room. I gathered in my new treasure, stood, and thanked him. He didn't move or speak as I shakily walked back out past the stage area to the bar.
An hour later, the band cranked into the opening number. When it was completed, the Wolf was introduced and he slowly ambled to center stage and heaved his body down into a chair. Guitarist Hubert Sumlin with Eddie Shaw on the sax started to grind into the next number and the Wolf's eyes started to gleam. During the second set, some guy at the bar would scream out "I Walked All the Way from Dallas" between the Wolf's numbers. After the fourth shout the Wolf muttered, "We better do this, this son of a bitch 'bout to drive me crazy!" And during the number he stood and waded into and towered above the collection of dancing, spinning, and undulating kids in front of the stage.
He took full possession of the energy of the music and did not relinquish it over the two and a half-hours of what turned into an exemplary model of the power the blues can serve. Several hundred people witnessed and responded to that power.
I saw him one more time, a few months later, 1975, in his lair in Chicago. It was a brutally cold late January night. My friend's Volkswagen would run, so Bill and I headed south from Kenosha, WI to Eddie Shaw's place at 1815 West Roosevelt. It was a good-sized room and already crowed by the time we arrived. Except for an Asian student from the nearby University of Chicago campus, Bill and I were the only other light-skinned patrons that evening.
"You boys here to see Wolf?" an older lady inquired. We affirmed her suspicion and she smiled, "You boys gonna enjoy yourselves. Make yourselves to home." We walked down to the end of the bar nearest the stage and ordered our beer. The Wolf came out of the back and sat down next to us. He looked in relatively good shape and spirits as the bartender tossed a little bag of Cheetos on the bartop for him. The Wolf opened the bag and started to munch. The bartender then placed a glass of Coke in front of him as I somehow found some courage and began to ask Wolf about the development of his music and influences. He was very gracious and talkative. Hubert walked up to the Wolf and told him everyone was ready. "Thank god!" the Wolf winked, "This young man about to ask my ears off!"
The next few hours were like a dream. The Wolf looked and sounded strong. During one tune he stood and dangled the microphone between his legs as a waitress walked past. He even played guitar on a few numbers. Wolf and Hubert made a point of talking about the blues to us during the break. When we got back to our town at four in the morning we were both still so wound into the performance we hit an all-night diner, downed coffee, and recounted for each other impressions of the experience.
It was hard to believe that within a year he would be gone.
It's hard to explain the sensation of the presence of the man to people who never saw him. The reason for this is, quite simply, the Wolf cannot be compared to anyone. I think the closest we can get to just a hint of the power of a Wolf performance was captured by Alan Lomax's cameras after hours at the 1966 Newport Folk Festival, now available as part of the video entitled Devil Got My Woman.
And, thankfully, we still have the recordings. I purchased a new Hohner Blues Harp (key of A - $17.99) over this Christmas season and began breaking in the bass reeds last night by playing along with "Smokestack Lightning."
January 10, 2001 - it marks the 25th anniversary of his death.
I am more than 25 years from my old paper route, war remains in the world, drivel passes as pop music, my guitar stays in tune a little longer now, and I still have a harmonica on which a mythical figure scratched the words "Howlin Wolf."
http://www.npr.org/2012/04/26/150964315/howlin-wolf-a-blues-legend-with-an-earthy-sound
Howlin' Wolf: A Blues Legend With An Earthy Sound
Listen Now
7:48
With his growling vocals, Howlin' Wolf fought his way to the top of the cutthroat Chicago blues scene.
Frank Driggs Collection
When your father has worked a good piece of bottomland into producing crops that support the family and he dies young, if you're the oldest son you have to take over, no matter what. That's one theory of why Chester Arthur Burnett didn't make his first recording until he was 41. Other bits of the story, which are still falling into place, have him learning music from Charley Patton, maybe spending some time in prison and having a bad time in the Army during the war. But by 1951, the farm was in safe hands, and Burnett, performing on the radio as Howlin' Wolf, caught the ear of Sam Phillips, who was running the Memphis Recording Service and talent-scouting for blues labels like Chess and Modern.
These early recordings were earthy, a quality which provided the foundation for Wolf's style and his appeal. Chess had its first hit with Wolf's "How Many More Years" in 1951, and it cracked the national R&B Top 10.
This was Wolf's regular Memphis band: Willie Johnson on guitar, Wolf on harmonica and Willie Steele on drums, with piano possibly by Ike Turner. Chess wanted him to move to Chicago so it could record him itself and use some of its house band, so in 1953, he packed a Cadillac with his stuff and took off north. By March, he was in Chess Studios, letting everyone know he'd arrived in the song "I'm the Wolf."
What is "Smokestack Lightning," anyway? What's going on in this song? Who knows? Who cares? The towering vocal delivery means that Wolf knows, and he passes that knowledge along, utterly bypassing the listener's intellect. It just missed the R&B Top 10 in March, but it was competing with a lot of modern rock 'n' roll. Wolf wouldn't be rock 'n' roll until a few years later, when the Brits discovered him, but he was a law unto himself — and very few Chicago bluesmen except Muddy Waters dared challenge him.
The fact was, blues was fading as the audience for it aged and younger men — and a couple of women — were updating its sound in Chicago. Wolf's records fell off the charts, but he continued to record and tour, and he was one of the few blues artists whose albums Chess put out, confident that it could sell them. One problem he faced, though, was that his songwriting didn't seem to be clicking with record buyers anymore, so in 1960, Chess put him in the studio with a trio of Willie Dixon's tunes: "Back Door Man," "Spoonful" and "Wang Dang Doodle," which was a hit for KoKo Taylor.
Howlin' Wolf still had a big chapter of his life to go, and he'd live until 1976. Great records lay around the corner, as well as a revival of his career as the folkies and the rock crowd discovered him. I hope Universal sees fit to issue a second volume dedicated to more music by the one and only Howlin' Wolf.
Featured Artist
AUDIO: <iframe src="http://www.npr.org/player/embed/150964315/151435312" width="100%" height="290" frameborder="0" scrolling="no" title="NPR embedded audio player"></iframe>
TERRY GROSS, HOST:
Sam Phillips once referred to Howlin' Wolf's voice as where the soul of man never dies. And Phillips, who worked with dozens of great Memphis talents, never changed his mind. Along with B.B. King and Muddy Waters, Wolf was one of the three greatest Postwar bluesmen. And with the release of his "Complete Chess" recordings, between 1951 and 1960, rock historian Ed Ward takes a listen to the evolution of a singular talent.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "MOANIN' AT MIDNIGHT")
HOWLIN' WOLF MUSICIAN: (Singing) Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Yeah, somebody's knocking on my door.
ED WARD, BYLINE: When your father has worked a good piece of bottomland into producing crops that support the family and he dies young, if you're the oldest son you have to take over, no matter what. That's one theory of why Chester Arthur Burnett didn't make his first recording until he was 41 years old. Other bits of the story, which are still falling into place, have him learning music from Charley Patton, maybe spending some time in prison and having a bad...
...was 41 years old. Other bits of the story, which are still falling into place, have him learning music from Charley Patton, maybe spending some time in prison and having a bad time in the Army during the war. But by 1951, the farm was in safe hands, and Burnett, performing on the radio as Howlin' Wolf, caught the ear of Sam Phillips, who was running the Memphis Recording Service and talent-scouting for blues labels like Chess and Modern.
The early recordings were earthy, the quality which was the foundation of Wolf's style and his appeal. Chess had their first hit with in 1951, and it cracked the national Rhythm & Blues Top 10.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "HOW MANY MORE YEARS")
HOWLIN' WOLF: (Singing) How many more years have I got to let you dog me around? How many more years have I got to let you dog me around? I'd as soon rather be dead, sleeping six feet in the ground.
WARD: This was Wolf's regular Memphis band: Willie Johnson on guitar, Wolf on harmonica and Willie Steele on drums, with piano possibly by Ike Turner. Chess wanted him to move to Chicago so they could record him themselves and use some of their house band. So in 1953, he packed a Cadillac with his stuff and took off north. By March, he was in Chess Studios, letting everyone know he'd arrived.
WOLF: (Singing) You know I'm the wolf, baby. You know I stays in the woods. You know I'm the wolf, baby. You know I stays in the woods. Well, when you get in trouble, you call the wolf out of the woods.
WARD: Not his most compelling songwriting, but he had the A-team behind him - Otis Spann on piano and Willie Dixon on bass - and he was just getting warmed up.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "44")
WOLF: (Singing) I wore my .44 so long, I made my shoulder sore. I wore my .44 so long, I done made my shoulder sore. Well, I'm wondering, everybody, where baby go.
WARD: With the band now containing Hubert Sumlin, a very young guitarist Wolf called his adopted son and the musician who'd shape his sound and stick with him until Wolf died, he took to the road, barnstorming the South and then returning to Chicago's South Side clubs in triumph. He only recorded four sides in 1955, but started 1956 with one of the most enduring pieces of folk poetry ever written, "Smokestack Lightning."
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "SMOKESTACK LIGHTNING")
WOLF: (Singing) Oh, smokestack lightning shining just like gold. Why don't you hear me crying? Whoo-hoo. Whoo-hoo. Whoo. Whoa, tell me, baby, what's the matter with you? Why don't you hear me cry? Whoo-hoo. Whoo-hoo. Whoo.
WARD: What is "Smokestack Lightning," anyway? What's going on in this song? Who knows? Who cares? The towering vocal delivery means that Wolf knows, and he passes that knowledge along, utterly bypassing the listener's intellect.
It just missed the Rhythm & Blues Top 10 in March, but it was competing with a lot of modern rock 'n' roll. Wolf wouldn't be rock 'n' roll until a few years later, when the Brits discovered him, but he was a law unto himself - and very few Chicago bluesmen except Muddy Waters dared challenge him.
The fact was, blues was fading as the audience for it was aging and younger men - and a couple of women - were updating its sound in Chicago. Wolf's records fell off the charts, but he continued to record and tour, and he was one of the few blues artists Chess put out albums by, confident that they could sell them.
One problem he faced, though, was that his songwriting didn't seem to be clicking with record buyers anymore, so in 1960, Chess put him in the studio with a trio of Willie Dixon's tunes: "Back Door Man," "Spoonful" and this song, which was a hit for Koko Taylor.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "WANG DANG DOODLE")
WOLF: (Singing) Tell automatic Slim, tell razor-toting Jim, tell butcher-knife toting Annie, tell fast talking Fanny that we gonna pitch a ball a down to that Union Hall. We going to romp and tromp till midnight. We're gonna fuss and fight till daylight. We gonna pitch a wang dang doodle all night long. All night long. All night long.
WARD: Howlin' Wolf still had a big chapter of his life to go, and he'd live until 1976. Some great records lay around the corner, as well as a revival of his career as the folkies and the rock crowd discovered him. I hope Universal sees fit to issue a second volume dedicated to post-1960 recording by the one and only Howlin' Wolf.
GROSS: Ed Ward reviewed "Howlin' Wolf Smokestack Lightning, the Complete Chess Masters 1951 to 1960." You can see a video of him singing "Smokestack Lightning" on our website freshair.npr.org. This is FRESH AIR.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
Sam Phillips once referred to Howlin' Wolf's voice as where the soul of man never dies. And Phillips, who worked with dozens of great Memphis talents, never changed his mind. Along with B.B. King and Muddy Waters, Wolf was one of the three greatest Postwar bluesmen. And with the release of his "Complete Chess" recordings, between 1951 and 1960, rock historian Ed Ward takes a listen to the evolution of a singular talent.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "MOANIN' AT MIDNIGHT")
HOWLIN' WOLF MUSICIAN: (Singing) Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Yeah, somebody's knocking on my door.
ED WARD, BYLINE: When your father has worked a good piece of bottomland into producing crops that support the family and he dies young, if you're the oldest son you have to take over, no matter what. That's one theory of why Chester Arthur Burnett didn't make his first recording until he was 41 years old. Other bits of the story, which are still falling into place, have him learning music from Charley Patton, maybe spending some time in prison and having a bad...
...was 41 years old. Other bits of the story, which are still falling into place, have him learning music from Charley Patton, maybe spending some time in prison and having a bad time in the Army during the war. But by 1951, the farm was in safe hands, and Burnett, performing on the radio as Howlin' Wolf, caught the ear of Sam Phillips, who was running the Memphis Recording Service and talent-scouting for blues labels like Chess and Modern.
The early recordings were earthy, the quality which was the foundation of Wolf's style and his appeal. Chess had their first hit with in 1951, and it cracked the national Rhythm & Blues Top 10.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "HOW MANY MORE YEARS")
HOWLIN' WOLF: (Singing) How many more years have I got to let you dog me around? How many more years have I got to let you dog me around? I'd as soon rather be dead, sleeping six feet in the ground.
WARD: This was Wolf's regular Memphis band: Willie Johnson on guitar, Wolf on harmonica and Willie Steele on drums, with piano possibly by Ike Turner. Chess wanted him to move to Chicago so they could record him themselves and use some of their house band. So in 1953, he packed a Cadillac with his stuff and took off north. By March, he was in Chess Studios, letting everyone know he'd arrived.
WOLF: (Singing) You know I'm the wolf, baby. You know I stays in the woods. You know I'm the wolf, baby. You know I stays in the woods. Well, when you get in trouble, you call the wolf out of the woods.
WARD: Not his most compelling songwriting, but he had the A-team behind him - Otis Spann on piano and Willie Dixon on bass - and he was just getting warmed up.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "44")
WOLF: (Singing) I wore my .44 so long, I made my shoulder sore. I wore my .44 so long, I done made my shoulder sore. Well, I'm wondering, everybody, where baby go.
WARD: With the band now containing Hubert Sumlin, a very young guitarist Wolf called his adopted son and the musician who'd shape his sound and stick with him until Wolf died, he took to the road, barnstorming the South and then returning to Chicago's South Side clubs in triumph. He only recorded four sides in 1955, but started 1956 with one of the most enduring pieces of folk poetry ever written, "Smokestack Lightning."
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "SMOKESTACK LIGHTNING")
WOLF: (Singing) Oh, smokestack lightning shining just like gold. Why don't you hear me crying? Whoo-hoo. Whoo-hoo. Whoo. Whoa, tell me, baby, what's the matter with you? Why don't you hear me cry? Whoo-hoo. Whoo-hoo. Whoo.
WARD: What is "Smokestack Lightning," anyway? What's going on in this song? Who knows? Who cares? The towering vocal delivery means that Wolf knows, and he passes that knowledge along, utterly bypassing the listener's intellect.
It just missed the Rhythm & Blues Top 10 in March, but it was competing with a lot of modern rock 'n' roll. Wolf wouldn't be rock 'n' roll until a few years later, when the Brits discovered him, but he was a law unto himself - and very few Chicago bluesmen except Muddy Waters dared challenge him.
The fact was, blues was fading as the audience for it was aging and younger men - and a couple of women - were updating its sound in Chicago. Wolf's records fell off the charts, but he continued to record and tour, and he was one of the few blues artists Chess put out albums by, confident that they could sell them.
One problem he faced, though, was that his songwriting didn't seem to be clicking with record buyers anymore, so in 1960, Chess put him in the studio with a trio of Willie Dixon's tunes: "Back Door Man," "Spoonful" and this song, which was a hit for Koko Taylor.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "WANG DANG DOODLE")
WOLF: (Singing) Tell automatic Slim, tell razor-toting Jim, tell butcher-knife toting Annie, tell fast talking Fanny that we gonna pitch a ball a down to that Union Hall. We going to romp and tromp till midnight. We're gonna fuss and fight till daylight. We gonna pitch a wang dang doodle all night long. All night long. All night long.
WARD: Howlin' Wolf still had a big chapter of his life to go, and he'd live until 1976. Some great records lay around the corner, as well as a revival of his career as the folkies and the rock crowd discovered him. I hope Universal sees fit to issue a second volume dedicated to post-1960 recording by the one and only Howlin' Wolf.
GROSS: Ed Ward reviewed "Howlin' Wolf Smokestack Lightning, the Complete Chess Masters 1951 to 1960." You can see a video of him singing "Smokestack Lightning" on our website freshair.npr.org. This is FRESH AIR.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
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http://www.rollingstone.com/music/lists/100-greatest-artists-of-all-time-19691231/howlin-wolf-20110420
100 Greatest Artists
#54
Howlin' Wolf
http://www.rollingstone.com/music/lists/100-greatest-artists-of-all-time-19691231/howlin-wolf-20110420
100 Greatest Artists
#54
Howlin' Wolf
Illustration by Owen Smith
By Buddy Guy
That man was the natural stuff. When I first heard Howlin' Wolf's records, I thought that deep, scratchy voice was a fake voice, just the way he sang — until I met him. He said, "Hello," and I thought, "Uh-oh, this isn't fake. This is for real." Wolf's conversation was the same as his singing. Matter of fact, the first time I met him, I started tapping my feet as he was talking.
His first big records, like "Moanin' at Midnight" and "How Many More Years" — I'd hear them on the radio when I was still in Louisiana, on WLAC out of Nashville. We had an old battery-powered radio, and we'd listen to this half-hour program that came on at night. I'd hear the man's voice and try to picture what he looked like. I thought he was a big, light-skinned guy. Then I went up to Chicago — September 25th, 1957. The next year, I was meeting all of the great blues musicians: Muddy Waters, Sonny Boy Williamson, Howlin' Wolf. And when I saw Wolf, yes, he was a big guy. But he wasn't light-skinned at all. Boy, was I wrong.
And he used to put on such a show. He would get down on the floor, crawl like a wolf and sing in that voice: "I'm a tail dragger." He would do this boogie-woogie thing, around and around — like the kids used to do with the hula hoops, where you had to go around and around at your waist, to keep the hoop going. That was the kind of shit he was doing. I'd see that and think, "Man, there goes the Wolf."
He was so exciting to be on a show with. Wolf was a big man, but he could really move. It was like when the Chicago Bears had that player the Refrigerator. People think football players can't move when they're that big. And people expected the Wolf, because he was such a big guy, to just sit in a chair and belt it out. No, man, he had all that action. He had everything you wanted to see. He'd crawl around, jump around. His fists were as big as a car tire. And he would ball that fist up. When I started getting calls to come and play on some cuts behind him, I'd think, "Oh, shit, I better play right." I'd heard he was mean. I was told that. But, you know, I never had a cross word with the man the whole time, right up to when he passed away.
The reason I got a chance to play on sessions with him — on songs like "Killing Floor," "Built for Comfort" and "300 Pounds of Joy" — and a lot of musicians better than me didn't get those dates, was because they would come in thinking, "This is my opportunity to blow the Wolf offstage." There was no way I could say that. This was my opportunity to learn something from the Wolf. But Wolf was not a demanding person. If you played something that made him smile, he would look back at you with that smile. When he did, to me, I was getting paid.
I played with Muddy, too, and it was so great to play with both of them. I heard a rumor that Wolf and Muddy didn't get along — I never saw that. Jimmy Rogers, who played in Muddy's band, used to laugh and joke about what Wolf had to say about Muddy and what Muddy would say back. But all of them talked bad about each other, calling everyone "motherfucker." That was their thing. With musicians, " motherfucker" was the love word. And when Wolf said, "Motherfucker, you can't play," what he was really saying was, "I'm gonna fire your ass up. If I tell you you can't play, then you're gonna bring it on." This is the way Wolf treated you. That would signify for you to show your shit.
Everything you wanted was right there, touchable to me, in that voice — even when Wolf wasn't singing. We used to have these Blue Mondays in Chicago that would start at seven o'clock in the morning. That's when we'd all get together after playing and just do a conversation, man. I would sit and listen to Wolf talk. It didn't have to be about music. He loved fishing, he loved sports. To me, it all sounded like music from heaven.
People don't know him the way they should now. When Muddy died, they interviewed me on television, and they asked me, "What should be done?" I said most cities with famous musicians, like Chicago — they end up naming a street or something after them. And they got the street that Muddy lived on most of his life named after him. But it never happened for Wolf. And the younger generation coming up now — if you don't talk about the music or the artists, they don't know them. My children didn't know who I was until they were 21 and were able to come in the clubs and see me.
We got to go back and do some digging. We have to let people know that Howlin' Wolf — and Muddy and Little Walter and all these cats — made Chicago the world capital of the blues. Chess Records is a landmark. But who made Chess Records? What about those people we done forgot about, like Wolf?
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/07/16/news/song-laughter-the-wolf-man-howls.html
July 16, 2002
Song & Laughter: The Wolf Man Howls
by PETER GURALNICK
New York Times
IT was a little bit like the kind of dream where you get to see Cool Papa Bell run the bases or the Wright brothers fly.
It was May 20, 1965, and the great blues singer Howlin' Wolf was on ''Shindig!,'' the first (and best) of the weekly rock 'n' roll shows on TV.
Let me backtrack a little. Howlin' Wolf was not just a great blues singer -- he was an incomparable blues singer, raw, uncompromising, a force of nature as indisputably real as everything that the artifice and production values of network TV were not. And, in 1965, network television was the last place you would expect to find any kind of blues singer, incomparable or not.
I wasn't even sure he was going to be on. The TV schedule that morning indicated that the Rolling Stones would be appearing, along with a number of pop acts plus a ''Chester Burnett.'' That was the 55-year-old Howlin' Wolf's given name, to be sure, but it was not one he had ever used professionally -- so I could only wonder if this might not be some terrible misunderstanding, or perhaps a cruel joke.
My doubts were erased when Wolf came striding out on stage, all 6-foot-3 and 300 pounds of him, and without preamble launched into his magisterial ''How Many More Years (Have I Got to Let You Dog Me Around)?'' There was not the slightest hint of self-consciousness or hesitation as he ripped into the song, his broad, handsome face providing dramatic counterpoint to the buzz-saw rasp of his voice, the unabashed gusto of his performance. He looked as if he were about to swallow the tiny harmonica in his mouth, he waggled his enormous hips in a wildly elephantine dance, then he leapt up and down, with the Stones sitting at his feet, and it appeared as if not just the stage but the entire world would shake.
It was a revolutionary moment -- unscripted, unmediated, unbound. And in an era before VCR's, it was gone, like a dream, almost as quickly as it had begun. Yet when I finally saw it again some 30 years later, unlike most dreams, it was exactly the same. The music retained its hypnotic power; the image of Wolf surrounded by all those relentlessly cheerful ''Shindig'' dancers remains unfaded; the sheer enthusiasm and conviction of his performance never fails to bring a smile to the lips.
Photo: ON THE SET -- Howlin' Wolf performs as the Rolling Stones, seated, listen with the perky cheerleaders of ''Shindig.'' (Michael Ochs Archives.com)
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/07/16/news/song-laughter-the-wolf-man-howls.html
July 16, 2002
Song & Laughter: The Wolf Man Howls
by PETER GURALNICK
New York Times
IT was a little bit like the kind of dream where you get to see Cool Papa Bell run the bases or the Wright brothers fly.
It was May 20, 1965, and the great blues singer Howlin' Wolf was on ''Shindig!,'' the first (and best) of the weekly rock 'n' roll shows on TV.
Let me backtrack a little. Howlin' Wolf was not just a great blues singer -- he was an incomparable blues singer, raw, uncompromising, a force of nature as indisputably real as everything that the artifice and production values of network TV were not. And, in 1965, network television was the last place you would expect to find any kind of blues singer, incomparable or not.
I wasn't even sure he was going to be on. The TV schedule that morning indicated that the Rolling Stones would be appearing, along with a number of pop acts plus a ''Chester Burnett.'' That was the 55-year-old Howlin' Wolf's given name, to be sure, but it was not one he had ever used professionally -- so I could only wonder if this might not be some terrible misunderstanding, or perhaps a cruel joke.
My doubts were erased when Wolf came striding out on stage, all 6-foot-3 and 300 pounds of him, and without preamble launched into his magisterial ''How Many More Years (Have I Got to Let You Dog Me Around)?'' There was not the slightest hint of self-consciousness or hesitation as he ripped into the song, his broad, handsome face providing dramatic counterpoint to the buzz-saw rasp of his voice, the unabashed gusto of his performance. He looked as if he were about to swallow the tiny harmonica in his mouth, he waggled his enormous hips in a wildly elephantine dance, then he leapt up and down, with the Stones sitting at his feet, and it appeared as if not just the stage but the entire world would shake.
It was a revolutionary moment -- unscripted, unmediated, unbound. And in an era before VCR's, it was gone, like a dream, almost as quickly as it had begun. Yet when I finally saw it again some 30 years later, unlike most dreams, it was exactly the same. The music retained its hypnotic power; the image of Wolf surrounded by all those relentlessly cheerful ''Shindig'' dancers remains unfaded; the sheer enthusiasm and conviction of his performance never fails to bring a smile to the lips.
Photo: ON THE SET -- Howlin' Wolf performs as the Rolling Stones, seated, listen with the perky cheerleaders of ''Shindig.'' (Michael Ochs Archives.com)
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/13/books/delta-force.html?_r=0
Delta Force
by DAVID GATES
JUNE 13, 2004
Book Review:
MOANIN' AT MIDNIGHT
The Life and Times of Howlin' Wolf
by James Segrest and Mark Hoffman
Illustrated. 397 pp.
Pantheon Books. $26.95
He was arguably the greatest artist the blues ever produced, but when he wasn't singing, Howlin' Wolf was not ordinarily an eloquent man. James Segrest and Mark Hoffman's indispensable yet frustrating new biography, ''Moanin' at Midnight,'' quotes an interview in which he said: ''You don't need no book learnin'. . . . Common sense, that's all a man needs.'' (In fact, he spent years taking adult education classes, and finally learned to read and write at a sixth-grade level.) Wolf struck one uncharitable recording engineer as ''two steps ahead of an idiot''; when a nervous breakdown ended his brief Army hitch in 1943, the examining physician pronounced him a ''mental defective.'' But in the summer of 1968, after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., Howlin' Wolf gave a remarkable interview to a journalist from Los Angeles's Open City magazine, in which his metaphors morphed from those of a small businessman -- which he was; he even took money for Social Security out of his band members' pay -- to those of John the Revelator. ''Somebody has been cashing checks and they've been bouncing back on us,'' Wolf told the unidentified reporter. ''And these people, the poor class of Negroes and the poor class of white people, they're getting tired of it. And sooner or later it's going to bring on a disease on this country, a disease that's going to spring from midair and it's going to be bad. It's like a spirit from some dark valley, something that sprung up from the ocean. . . . Like Lucifer is on the earth.''
Wolf's Blakean sociopolitical prophecy -- not unusual in those naïvely apocalyptic days -- seems quaint in George Bush's America, where the comparatively wretched of the earth fantasize not about revolution but about becoming apprenticed to Donald Trump. But in the world of music, his vision of working-class blacks and whites rising up from the dark valleys of America to trouble the mighty had already been fulfilled, and Wolf himself, a crucial influence on everyone from the Rolling Stones to the D.J. Wolfman Jack (whose trademark growl came as much from Wolf as from Lon Chaney Jr.), was partly responsible. Even by 1968, the black-hillbilly hybrid called rock 'n' roll had swept away most of popular music's middle-class gentility; today, we still live in essentially the same musical landscape of sonic rawness and emotional directness. If Wolf were to come up out of his grave -- when you're listening to his records, that doesn't seem so unlikely -- he might be baffled by 50 Cent or the White Stripes; in 1972, when he opened for Alice Cooper, the sight of a stage-prop guillotine gave him a minor heart attack. ''I just don't understand,'' he kept muttering. On the other hand, he got on just fine with the long-haired British bands who backed him on tours of Britain in the 60's and 70's, and with such then-young white acolytes as Eric Clapton. He might recognize raspy-voiced rappers and faux-primitive post-punk guitarists as his spiritual children.
Howlin' Wolf, born Chester Burnett in 1910 and named after President Chester Alan Arthur, had blues credentials so authentic they seem parodic. As a teenager in the Mississippi Delta, he really did pester Charley Patton -- Mississippi's seminal blues singer -- for lessons, and took on Patton's grainy voice and powerful, elemental slide guitar style. In the 30's and 40's, he became one of the Delta's many wandering entertainers, using the nom de guerre he derived from a childhood nickname, and he really did team up with Patton and such now-legendary figures as Robert Johnson and Son House. In his latter days -- he was only 65 when he died in 1976 -- Wolf presented himself as a musical nostalgic. He complained that bands were getting too loud, and in a 1966 Newsweek profile said that ''all the electric stuff'' couldn't touch the traditional acoustic guitar. ''That one with the hole in it, it got a good, sweet sound. But . . . in this here modern world you got to keep up with modern people.'' In fact, he was an archmodernist himself: like his friend and rival Muddy Waters, he transformed Mississippi's archaic country blues into the electric urban blues of Chicago, his adopted home. His early electric groups, with just a couple of cranked-up guitars, took pride in blasting larger bands, with their swing-era horn sections, right off the stage. And the master sidemen he hired, notably Willie Johnson and Hubert Sumlin, overdrove their amplifiers to achieve those burry, distorted textures that are still the lingua franca of rock guitar.
Wolf's music never lost its primal quality: some of his best songs, such as ''Smokestack Lightning,'' ''Commit a Crime'' and ''I Asked for Water, but She Gave Me Gasoline,'' are trancelike one-chord vamps reaching back to African-American music's pre-Western roots. ''That's something I got from the old music,'' he said. But this was a deliberate, even stubborn, artistic choice, as much as Wolf tried to commodify himself. (''If you don't like the way I play the blues,'' he said, ''don't order me no more.'' As one of his musicians commented, ''He made it sound like you just kind of ordered him right out of a catalog or somethin'.'') Wolf wasn't a primitive, with no sense of a wider musical world: he eventually learned to read music and to play such pop songs as ''I'm in the Mood for Love,'' and even made Sumlin study at the Chicago Conservatory of Music. He was a primitivist, who made a consciously modern music by emphasizing the intense weirdness of ''the old music,'' and a deliberate innovator in a far-from-nurturing environment: ''I always tried to play a different sound from the other fellow.'' As Vaan Shaw, the son of Wolf's manager, explained: ''You gotta remember, these guys didn't have blueprints. . . . The thing that makes Wolf so magical is that you see a person create a whole genre of music through just their mind, and you ain't supposed to do it. You're supposed to have a sheet of paper, a desk, a quiet room. . . . And here's a guy using just his ego, creating lyrics in a room full of smoke, alcohol, four-letter words and intimidating individuals -- and yet he still creates.'' Sam Phillips, the first to record him -- in 1951, in that Memphis storefront studio where he later discovered Elvis Presley, Jerry Lee Lewis and Johnny Cash -- sometimes spoke of Wolf as his greatest find. ''When I heard Howling’ Wolf, I said: 'This is for me. This is where the soul of man never dies.' ''
For others, though, Wolf was all about the body. ''When you're a little pre-teenage girl,'' Bonnie Raitt has said, ''and you imagine what a naked man in full arousal is like, it's Howlin' Wolf. . . . He was the scariest, most deliciously frightening bit of male testosterone I've ever experienced in my life.'' Wolf had an unforgettable physical presence: around 6-foot-5 (Segrest and Hoffman offer conflicting figures) and 300 pounds in his prime, with incongruous blue-gray eyes and velvety black skin, which, as his fellow bluesman Johnny Shines recalled, ''looked like it would ripple if you would blow on it, like a vial of black oil.'' In a different interview, Shines said: ''I first met Wolf, I was afraid of Wolf. Just like you would be of some kind of beast or something.'' Onstage, he would crawl like a kingsnake and howl like his namesake; on at least one occasion, he told an audience he had an actual wolf's tail, and a few believed him enough to come backstage to check it out. Among the people he scared was his own son, Floyd, who feared Wolf was a damned soul. Shortly after Wolf's death, Floyd Burnett thought he heard his father's voice in the kitchen asking him for water. ''And from the Bible speaking, that's hell-bound.'' He sometimes carried a gun (not uncommon in the Chicago blues scene), took part in countless fights and told Hubert Sumlin he'd once killed a man by slicing off the top of his head with a hoe. Yet those who knew him best -- Floyd, whom Wolf did not see for years, wasn't one -- found him shy and surprisingly gentle. ''He was just really a big pet,'' the drummer Sam Lay said. ''I would go so far (hey, I'm not funny or nothing -- don't get me wrong) and say he was one of the sweetest people you ever saw in your life.''
Segrest and Hoffman, noting that Wolf had often been beaten by the uncle who raised him, argue that in this mix of violence and tenderness he ''exhibited the classic symptoms of the abuse survivor.'' To their credit, this passing remark is their only attempt to get Wolf on the couch. Mostly they stay out of the way of the research, testimony and anecdotes they've collected -- so thoroughly that this book should scare off any rival biographers until everyone who ever knew Wolf is dead. But even blues obsessives are apt to bog down in the book's undigested, repetitive and often unnecessary information, including God knows how many similar accounts of Wolf onstage, and a capsule description of seemingly every song he ever recorded. ('' 'Dorothy Mae,' a down-home Delta blues, again featured James Cotton on harp. 'Sweet Woman' was a slow blues in which Wolf sang the praises of his woman.'') Paragraph after paragraph ticks away in pointless Wolf sightings, stuck in for no apparent reason. ''East St. Louis bluesman Little Cooper, born in Prattsville, Ark., in 1928,'' one non-anecdote begins, ''was a teenager when he first heard Wolf. 'Wolf, he was playing in Woodson, Ark. That's the first time I come in contact with a professional blues player. There was a club they had in Woodson called the Woodson Hall and he and his band come in there. He was in Arkansas awhile and he was doing a show there every Friday, Saturday and Sunday night.''Little Cooper may be a heck of a guy, but few people (including me) have heard of him, and he had nothing to do with Howlin' Wolf's life. So who cares where and when he was born, whether Wolf was the first professional blues player he saw -- or indeed, about any of this? And where was the editor who should have cut it (along with probably a quarter of the book) and helped these first-time biographers shape their narrative? In places you sorely miss editorial guidance, as when they quote wildly varying testimony about whether or not Wolf was a good guitar player. Since Hoffman is a musician, and he and Segrest have both written for such magazines as Blues Access, they must have the expertise to settle the point; as biographers, they certainly have the obligation. (It would have been simple enough to say that Wolf played powerfully within a limited technique. Listen to his lead slide guitar on the splendid 1961 recording of ''Down in the Bottom.'') In other places, you wish they'd butt out, as when they tell us what key such and such a song is in; musicians intent on learning the song can easily find this out, and the general reader doesn't need to know. ''Moanin' at Midnight'' is this generation's first and probably last full portrait of one of the giants of American music -- a figure who belongs in the company of Duke Ellington, Hank Williams and Bob Dylan. Since it's essential reading, it's heartbreaking that it's not more readable.
Still, this book offers more than enough information to satisfy anyone who loves the music, and it might tantalize some of the uninitiated into seeking out Wolf's scary, magisterial recordings. Oh well. Probably no biographer short of Samuel Johnson, the Great Cham of book learnin', could have wrestled with Wolf on equal terms, and gotten his titanic spirit into something like the right words.
That man was the natural stuff. When I first heard Howlin' Wolf's records, I thought that deep, scratchy voice was a fake voice, just the way he sang — until I met him. He said, "Hello," and I thought, "Uh-oh, this isn't fake. This is for real." Wolf's conversation was the same as his singing. Matter of fact, the first time I met him, I started tapping my feet as he was talking.
His first big records, like "Moanin' at Midnight" and "How Many More Years" — I'd hear them on the radio when I was still in Louisiana, on WLAC out of Nashville. We had an old battery-powered radio, and we'd listen to this half-hour program that came on at night. I'd hear the man's voice and try to picture what he looked like. I thought he was a big, light-skinned guy. Then I went up to Chicago — September 25th, 1957. The next year, I was meeting all of the great blues musicians: Muddy Waters, Sonny Boy Williamson, Howlin' Wolf. And when I saw Wolf, yes, he was a big guy. But he wasn't light-skinned at all. Boy, was I wrong.
And he used to put on such a show. He would get down on the floor, crawl like a wolf and sing in that voice: "I'm a tail dragger." He would do this boogie-woogie thing, around and around — like the kids used to do with the hula hoops, where you had to go around and around at your waist, to keep the hoop going. That was the kind of shit he was doing. I'd see that and think, "Man, there goes the Wolf."
He was so exciting to be on a show with. Wolf was a big man, but he could really move. It was like when the Chicago Bears had that player the Refrigerator. People think football players can't move when they're that big. And people expected the Wolf, because he was such a big guy, to just sit in a chair and belt it out. No, man, he had all that action. He had everything you wanted to see. He'd crawl around, jump around. His fists were as big as a car tire. And he would ball that fist up. When I started getting calls to come and play on some cuts behind him, I'd think, "Oh, shit, I better play right." I'd heard he was mean. I was told that. But, you know, I never had a cross word with the man the whole time, right up to when he passed away.
The reason I got a chance to play on sessions with him — on songs like "Killing Floor," "Built for Comfort" and "300 Pounds of Joy" — and a lot of musicians better than me didn't get those dates, was because they would come in thinking, "This is my opportunity to blow the Wolf offstage." There was no way I could say that. This was my opportunity to learn something from the Wolf. But Wolf was not a demanding person. If you played something that made him smile, he would look back at you with that smile. When he did, to me, I was getting paid.
I played with Muddy, too, and it was so great to play with both of them. I heard a rumor that Wolf and Muddy didn't get along — I never saw that. Jimmy Rogers, who played in Muddy's band, used to laugh and joke about what Wolf had to say about Muddy and what Muddy would say back. But all of them talked bad about each other, calling everyone "motherfucker." That was their thing. With musicians, " motherfucker" was the love word. And when Wolf said, "Motherfucker, you can't play," what he was really saying was, "I'm gonna fire your ass up. If I tell you you can't play, then you're gonna bring it on." This is the way Wolf treated you. That would signify for you to show your shit.
Everything you wanted was right there, touchable to me, in that voice — even when Wolf wasn't singing. We used to have these Blue Mondays in Chicago that would start at seven o'clock in the morning. That's when we'd all get together after playing and just do a conversation, man. I would sit and listen to Wolf talk. It didn't have to be about music. He loved fishing, he loved sports. To me, it all sounded like music from heaven.
People don't know him the way they should now. When Muddy died, they interviewed me on television, and they asked me, "What should be done?" I said most cities with famous musicians, like Chicago — they end up naming a street or something after them. And they got the street that Muddy lived on most of his life named after him. But it never happened for Wolf. And the younger generation coming up now — if you don't talk about the music or the artists, they don't know them. My children didn't know who I was until they were 21 and were able to come in the clubs and see me.
We got to go back and do some digging. We have to let people know that Howlin' Wolf — and Muddy and Little Walter and all these cats — made Chicago the world capital of the blues. Chess Records is a landmark. But who made Chess Records? What about those people we done forgot about, like Wolf?
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/07/16/news/song-laughter-the-wolf-man-howls.html
July 16, 2002
Song & Laughter: The Wolf Man Howls
by PETER GURALNICK
New York Times
IT was a little bit like the kind of dream where you get to see Cool Papa Bell run the bases or the Wright brothers fly.
It was May 20, 1965, and the great blues singer Howlin' Wolf was on ''Shindig!,'' the first (and best) of the weekly rock 'n' roll shows on TV.
Let me backtrack a little. Howlin' Wolf was not just a great blues singer -- he was an incomparable blues singer, raw, uncompromising, a force of nature as indisputably real as everything that the artifice and production values of network TV were not. And, in 1965, network television was the last place you would expect to find any kind of blues singer, incomparable or not.
I wasn't even sure he was going to be on. The TV schedule that morning indicated that the Rolling Stones would be appearing, along with a number of pop acts plus a ''Chester Burnett.'' That was the 55-year-old Howlin' Wolf's given name, to be sure, but it was not one he had ever used professionally -- so I could only wonder if this might not be some terrible misunderstanding, or perhaps a cruel joke.
My doubts were erased when Wolf came striding out on stage, all 6-foot-3 and 300 pounds of him, and without preamble launched into his magisterial ''How Many More Years (Have I Got to Let You Dog Me Around)?'' There was not the slightest hint of self-consciousness or hesitation as he ripped into the song, his broad, handsome face providing dramatic counterpoint to the buzz-saw rasp of his voice, the unabashed gusto of his performance. He looked as if he were about to swallow the tiny harmonica in his mouth, he waggled his enormous hips in a wildly elephantine dance, then he leapt up and down, with the Stones sitting at his feet, and it appeared as if not just the stage but the entire world would shake.
It was a revolutionary moment -- unscripted, unmediated, unbound. And in an era before VCR's, it was gone, like a dream, almost as quickly as it had begun. Yet when I finally saw it again some 30 years later, unlike most dreams, it was exactly the same. The music retained its hypnotic power; the image of Wolf surrounded by all those relentlessly cheerful ''Shindig'' dancers remains unfaded; the sheer enthusiasm and conviction of his performance never fails to bring a smile to the lips.
Photo: ON THE SET -- Howlin' Wolf performs as the Rolling Stones, seated, listen with the perky cheerleaders of ''Shindig.'' (Michael Ochs Archives.com)
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/07/16/news/song-laughter-the-wolf-man-howls.html
July 16, 2002
Song & Laughter: The Wolf Man Howls
by PETER GURALNICK
New York Times
IT was a little bit like the kind of dream where you get to see Cool Papa Bell run the bases or the Wright brothers fly.
It was May 20, 1965, and the great blues singer Howlin' Wolf was on ''Shindig!,'' the first (and best) of the weekly rock 'n' roll shows on TV.
Let me backtrack a little. Howlin' Wolf was not just a great blues singer -- he was an incomparable blues singer, raw, uncompromising, a force of nature as indisputably real as everything that the artifice and production values of network TV were not. And, in 1965, network television was the last place you would expect to find any kind of blues singer, incomparable or not.
I wasn't even sure he was going to be on. The TV schedule that morning indicated that the Rolling Stones would be appearing, along with a number of pop acts plus a ''Chester Burnett.'' That was the 55-year-old Howlin' Wolf's given name, to be sure, but it was not one he had ever used professionally -- so I could only wonder if this might not be some terrible misunderstanding, or perhaps a cruel joke.
My doubts were erased when Wolf came striding out on stage, all 6-foot-3 and 300 pounds of him, and without preamble launched into his magisterial ''How Many More Years (Have I Got to Let You Dog Me Around)?'' There was not the slightest hint of self-consciousness or hesitation as he ripped into the song, his broad, handsome face providing dramatic counterpoint to the buzz-saw rasp of his voice, the unabashed gusto of his performance. He looked as if he were about to swallow the tiny harmonica in his mouth, he waggled his enormous hips in a wildly elephantine dance, then he leapt up and down, with the Stones sitting at his feet, and it appeared as if not just the stage but the entire world would shake.
It was a revolutionary moment -- unscripted, unmediated, unbound. And in an era before VCR's, it was gone, like a dream, almost as quickly as it had begun. Yet when I finally saw it again some 30 years later, unlike most dreams, it was exactly the same. The music retained its hypnotic power; the image of Wolf surrounded by all those relentlessly cheerful ''Shindig'' dancers remains unfaded; the sheer enthusiasm and conviction of his performance never fails to bring a smile to the lips.
Photo: ON THE SET -- Howlin' Wolf performs as the Rolling Stones, seated, listen with the perky cheerleaders of ''Shindig.'' (Michael Ochs Archives.com)
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/13/books/delta-force.html?_r=0
Delta Force
by DAVID GATES
JUNE 13, 2004
Book Review:
MOANIN' AT MIDNIGHT
The Life and Times of Howlin' Wolf
by James Segrest and Mark Hoffman
Illustrated. 397 pp.
Pantheon Books. $26.95
He was arguably the greatest artist the blues ever produced, but when he wasn't singing, Howlin' Wolf was not ordinarily an eloquent man. James Segrest and Mark Hoffman's indispensable yet frustrating new biography, ''Moanin' at Midnight,'' quotes an interview in which he said: ''You don't need no book learnin'. . . . Common sense, that's all a man needs.'' (In fact, he spent years taking adult education classes, and finally learned to read and write at a sixth-grade level.) Wolf struck one uncharitable recording engineer as ''two steps ahead of an idiot''; when a nervous breakdown ended his brief Army hitch in 1943, the examining physician pronounced him a ''mental defective.'' But in the summer of 1968, after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., Howlin' Wolf gave a remarkable interview to a journalist from Los Angeles's Open City magazine, in which his metaphors morphed from those of a small businessman -- which he was; he even took money for Social Security out of his band members' pay -- to those of John the Revelator. ''Somebody has been cashing checks and they've been bouncing back on us,'' Wolf told the unidentified reporter. ''And these people, the poor class of Negroes and the poor class of white people, they're getting tired of it. And sooner or later it's going to bring on a disease on this country, a disease that's going to spring from midair and it's going to be bad. It's like a spirit from some dark valley, something that sprung up from the ocean. . . . Like Lucifer is on the earth.''
Wolf's Blakean sociopolitical prophecy -- not unusual in those naïvely apocalyptic days -- seems quaint in George Bush's America, where the comparatively wretched of the earth fantasize not about revolution but about becoming apprenticed to Donald Trump. But in the world of music, his vision of working-class blacks and whites rising up from the dark valleys of America to trouble the mighty had already been fulfilled, and Wolf himself, a crucial influence on everyone from the Rolling Stones to the D.J. Wolfman Jack (whose trademark growl came as much from Wolf as from Lon Chaney Jr.), was partly responsible. Even by 1968, the black-hillbilly hybrid called rock 'n' roll had swept away most of popular music's middle-class gentility; today, we still live in essentially the same musical landscape of sonic rawness and emotional directness. If Wolf were to come up out of his grave -- when you're listening to his records, that doesn't seem so unlikely -- he might be baffled by 50 Cent or the White Stripes; in 1972, when he opened for Alice Cooper, the sight of a stage-prop guillotine gave him a minor heart attack. ''I just don't understand,'' he kept muttering. On the other hand, he got on just fine with the long-haired British bands who backed him on tours of Britain in the 60's and 70's, and with such then-young white acolytes as Eric Clapton. He might recognize raspy-voiced rappers and faux-primitive post-punk guitarists as his spiritual children.
Howlin' Wolf, born Chester Burnett in 1910 and named after President Chester Alan Arthur, had blues credentials so authentic they seem parodic. As a teenager in the Mississippi Delta, he really did pester Charley Patton -- Mississippi's seminal blues singer -- for lessons, and took on Patton's grainy voice and powerful, elemental slide guitar style. In the 30's and 40's, he became one of the Delta's many wandering entertainers, using the nom de guerre he derived from a childhood nickname, and he really did team up with Patton and such now-legendary figures as Robert Johnson and Son House. In his latter days -- he was only 65 when he died in 1976 -- Wolf presented himself as a musical nostalgic. He complained that bands were getting too loud, and in a 1966 Newsweek profile said that ''all the electric stuff'' couldn't touch the traditional acoustic guitar. ''That one with the hole in it, it got a good, sweet sound. But . . . in this here modern world you got to keep up with modern people.'' In fact, he was an archmodernist himself: like his friend and rival Muddy Waters, he transformed Mississippi's archaic country blues into the electric urban blues of Chicago, his adopted home. His early electric groups, with just a couple of cranked-up guitars, took pride in blasting larger bands, with their swing-era horn sections, right off the stage. And the master sidemen he hired, notably Willie Johnson and Hubert Sumlin, overdrove their amplifiers to achieve those burry, distorted textures that are still the lingua franca of rock guitar.
Wolf's music never lost its primal quality: some of his best songs, such as ''Smokestack Lightning,'' ''Commit a Crime'' and ''I Asked for Water, but She Gave Me Gasoline,'' are trancelike one-chord vamps reaching back to African-American music's pre-Western roots. ''That's something I got from the old music,'' he said. But this was a deliberate, even stubborn, artistic choice, as much as Wolf tried to commodify himself. (''If you don't like the way I play the blues,'' he said, ''don't order me no more.'' As one of his musicians commented, ''He made it sound like you just kind of ordered him right out of a catalog or somethin'.'') Wolf wasn't a primitive, with no sense of a wider musical world: he eventually learned to read music and to play such pop songs as ''I'm in the Mood for Love,'' and even made Sumlin study at the Chicago Conservatory of Music. He was a primitivist, who made a consciously modern music by emphasizing the intense weirdness of ''the old music,'' and a deliberate innovator in a far-from-nurturing environment: ''I always tried to play a different sound from the other fellow.'' As Vaan Shaw, the son of Wolf's manager, explained: ''You gotta remember, these guys didn't have blueprints. . . . The thing that makes Wolf so magical is that you see a person create a whole genre of music through just their mind, and you ain't supposed to do it. You're supposed to have a sheet of paper, a desk, a quiet room. . . . And here's a guy using just his ego, creating lyrics in a room full of smoke, alcohol, four-letter words and intimidating individuals -- and yet he still creates.'' Sam Phillips, the first to record him -- in 1951, in that Memphis storefront studio where he later discovered Elvis Presley, Jerry Lee Lewis and Johnny Cash -- sometimes spoke of Wolf as his greatest find. ''When I heard Howling’ Wolf, I said: 'This is for me. This is where the soul of man never dies.' ''
For others, though, Wolf was all about the body. ''When you're a little pre-teenage girl,'' Bonnie Raitt has said, ''and you imagine what a naked man in full arousal is like, it's Howlin' Wolf. . . . He was the scariest, most deliciously frightening bit of male testosterone I've ever experienced in my life.'' Wolf had an unforgettable physical presence: around 6-foot-5 (Segrest and Hoffman offer conflicting figures) and 300 pounds in his prime, with incongruous blue-gray eyes and velvety black skin, which, as his fellow bluesman Johnny Shines recalled, ''looked like it would ripple if you would blow on it, like a vial of black oil.'' In a different interview, Shines said: ''I first met Wolf, I was afraid of Wolf. Just like you would be of some kind of beast or something.'' Onstage, he would crawl like a kingsnake and howl like his namesake; on at least one occasion, he told an audience he had an actual wolf's tail, and a few believed him enough to come backstage to check it out. Among the people he scared was his own son, Floyd, who feared Wolf was a damned soul. Shortly after Wolf's death, Floyd Burnett thought he heard his father's voice in the kitchen asking him for water. ''And from the Bible speaking, that's hell-bound.'' He sometimes carried a gun (not uncommon in the Chicago blues scene), took part in countless fights and told Hubert Sumlin he'd once killed a man by slicing off the top of his head with a hoe. Yet those who knew him best -- Floyd, whom Wolf did not see for years, wasn't one -- found him shy and surprisingly gentle. ''He was just really a big pet,'' the drummer Sam Lay said. ''I would go so far (hey, I'm not funny or nothing -- don't get me wrong) and say he was one of the sweetest people you ever saw in your life.''
Segrest and Hoffman, noting that Wolf had often been beaten by the uncle who raised him, argue that in this mix of violence and tenderness he ''exhibited the classic symptoms of the abuse survivor.'' To their credit, this passing remark is their only attempt to get Wolf on the couch. Mostly they stay out of the way of the research, testimony and anecdotes they've collected -- so thoroughly that this book should scare off any rival biographers until everyone who ever knew Wolf is dead. But even blues obsessives are apt to bog down in the book's undigested, repetitive and often unnecessary information, including God knows how many similar accounts of Wolf onstage, and a capsule description of seemingly every song he ever recorded. ('' 'Dorothy Mae,' a down-home Delta blues, again featured James Cotton on harp. 'Sweet Woman' was a slow blues in which Wolf sang the praises of his woman.'') Paragraph after paragraph ticks away in pointless Wolf sightings, stuck in for no apparent reason. ''East St. Louis bluesman Little Cooper, born in Prattsville, Ark., in 1928,'' one non-anecdote begins, ''was a teenager when he first heard Wolf. 'Wolf, he was playing in Woodson, Ark. That's the first time I come in contact with a professional blues player. There was a club they had in Woodson called the Woodson Hall and he and his band come in there. He was in Arkansas awhile and he was doing a show there every Friday, Saturday and Sunday night.''Little Cooper may be a heck of a guy, but few people (including me) have heard of him, and he had nothing to do with Howlin' Wolf's life. So who cares where and when he was born, whether Wolf was the first professional blues player he saw -- or indeed, about any of this? And where was the editor who should have cut it (along with probably a quarter of the book) and helped these first-time biographers shape their narrative? In places you sorely miss editorial guidance, as when they quote wildly varying testimony about whether or not Wolf was a good guitar player. Since Hoffman is a musician, and he and Segrest have both written for such magazines as Blues Access, they must have the expertise to settle the point; as biographers, they certainly have the obligation. (It would have been simple enough to say that Wolf played powerfully within a limited technique. Listen to his lead slide guitar on the splendid 1961 recording of ''Down in the Bottom.'') In other places, you wish they'd butt out, as when they tell us what key such and such a song is in; musicians intent on learning the song can easily find this out, and the general reader doesn't need to know. ''Moanin' at Midnight'' is this generation's first and probably last full portrait of one of the giants of American music -- a figure who belongs in the company of Duke Ellington, Hank Williams and Bob Dylan. Since it's essential reading, it's heartbreaking that it's not more readable.
Still, this book offers more than enough information to satisfy anyone who loves the music, and it might tantalize some of the uninitiated into seeking out Wolf's scary, magisterial recordings. Oh well. Probably no biographer short of Samuel Johnson, the Great Cham of book learnin', could have wrestled with Wolf on equal terms, and gotten his titanic spirit into something like the right words.
