Howlin’ Wolf [1910 - 1976] Chester Arthur Burnett
was born on June 10, 1910 in West Point, Mississippi:
a small town 30 miles south of Tupelo,
and from there another 75 miles to Memphis. He
moved west with his parents to the heart of the
Delta when he was 13, and farmed on a plantation
at Ruleville, close to CHARLEY PATTON’s home-base
near Cleveland, Mississippi, on Highway 61, driving
a plough pulled by mules. Except for a spell in
the army, he continued to farm, while performing
at fish fries and juke joints through the 1930s and
early 40s, turning professional only in the late
1940s.
In the blues-structured ‘Man of Peace’ (1983),
when Bob Dylan comes in the seventh stanza to
invoke images of imminent annihilation, he draws
on the blues to do so for him. The opening line,
‘Well, the howling wolf will howl tonight, the
king snake will crawl’, fuses two creatures long
since appropriated into blues poetry: the howling
wolf—which refers both to the mythic creature
from the backwoods feared by rural blacks when
darkness fell, and the fierce blues singer who took
its name for his own, the great Howlin’ Wolf himself—
and the king snake that will crawl, which
Dylan twists around but slightly out of BIG JOE
WILLIAMS’ threatening ‘Crawlin’ King Snake’,
made in 1941. Or perhaps the snake too comes to
Dylan via Howlin’Wolf, whose ‘New Crawlin’ King
Snake’ came out in 1966.
That Dylan’s images here might have come directly
from the old rural blues songs—balancing
the Big Joe Williams ‘Crawlin’ King Snake’ there
are two J.T. Funny Papa Smith cuts of ‘Howlin’
Wolf Blues’ from 1930, one of which was a hit—but
might equally have come to Dylan via their more
modern incarnations by Howlin’ Wolf himself,
tells us something about the special value of the
latter, and about the myth that there is a sharp
divide between the acoustic rural blues and the
electric city ‘Chicago’ blues.
Though he was one of the four or five real giants
of the tough, electric Chicago blues, and certainly
the roughest and vocally most ferocious, he grew
up in the pre-war country blues world, and was a
prime conduit through which much of this older
blues music passed across into the new. While he
was taught harmonica by SONNY BOY WILLIAMSON
II,Wolf learnt the guitar and much repertoire
from one of the most influential figures in the
history of the blues, CHARLEY PATTON, and even
played some dates with ROBERT JOHNSON in 1930.
His importance as a custodian, as much as a moderniser,
of this pre-war material is in part explained
by the fact that he didn’t record at all
until he was 41 years old. His early sides were
made at Sun Records in Memphis, blues capital of
the South in which he had lived his whole life.
HOWLIN’ WOLF
Most rural blacks who migrated north did so either
in their teens or early 20s. It was exceptional
that a man who had lived so long in the South
should then move to Chicago, blues capital of the
North, but Howlin’ Wolf did so within two years
of Sun Records’ Sam Phillips leasing some of his
first sides to Chess Records in Chicago. (MUDDY
WATERS, his great rival, and five years his junior,
was recorded as early as 1941, and moved to Chicago
in the 40s.) Accepting a cash advance from
Chess Records, he drove to Chicago: ‘the onliest
one drove out of the South like a gentleman,’ he
is quoted as saying.
A southern gentleman he remained. Wolf ’s
1952 ‘Saddle My Pony’ is based in detail on Patton’s
1929 ‘Pony Blues’, and Wolf ’s ‘Spoonful’ on
Patton’s ‘A Spoonful Blues’; 1952’s ‘Color and
Kind’, its remake ‘Just My Kind’ and 1968’s ‘Ain’t
Goin’ Down That Dirt Road’ all build on Patton’s
1929 ‘Down the Dirt Road Blues’. Even Howlin’
Wolf ’s biggest hit, 1956’s ‘Smokestack Lightnin’’,
a remake of his own earlier ‘Crying at Daybreak’,
was in turn a restatement of Patton’s 1930 ‘Moon
Going Down’. A later 1956 session yielded ‘I Asked
for Water’, based on Tommy Johnson’s 1928 ‘Cool
Drink of Water Blues’, and ‘Natchez Burning’, a
remake of a song recorded earlier by Gene Gilmore
and Baby Doo Caston about a dance-hall fire of 1940.
Wolf ’s 1952 ‘Bluebird (Blues)’, which he rerecorded
in 1957 and re-fashioned two years later
as ‘Mr. Airplane Man’, is a 1938 Sonny Boy Williamson
I song (quite possibly via nearby Yazoo City
singer Tommy McClennan: a singer whose vocal
fierceness prefigured Wolf ’s and whose personal
fierceness greatly exceeded it); 1952’s ‘Decoration
Day (Blues)’ is also from Sonny Boy Williamson I
(though written by CURTIS JONES). In 1957 Wolf
cut a splendid version of the 1930 MISSISSIPPI
SHEIKS standard ‘Sittin’ on Top of the World’,
which Bob Dylan was to record first with Big Joe
Williams; in 1966, the same year Wolf turned Big
Joe’s ‘Crawlin’ King Snake’ into his own ‘New
Crawlin’ King Snake’, he also recorded ‘Poor Wind
(That Never Change)’, which, to the tune of W.C.
Handy’s classic ‘Careless Love’, incorporated elements
of BLIND LEMON JEFFERSON’s 1926 ‘See
That My Grave Is Kept Clean’, Papa Harvey Hull &
Long Cleve Reed’s 1927 ‘Hey! Lawdy Mama—The
France Blues’ and/or Fred McMullen’s 1933 ‘Wait
and Listen’, and of the standard ‘St. James Infirmary
Blues’. The following year, Wolf cut ‘Dust My
Broom’, which comes, via Elmore James or not,
from Robert Johnson, who in turn had taken his
title phrase from the lyric of Kokomo Arnold’s ‘I’ll
Be Up Someday’.
You get some sense of how ‘country’ Wolf looked
in person too, through the eyes of these northern
city record executives, when you read Marshall
Chess recalling his sheer physical size: ‘Whenever
we shook hands, mine was a little nothing inside
his huge hand. He could never buy shoes that were
wide enough and he would cut the sides of his
new shoes with a razor. You could see his socks
sticking out.’
From 1959 or 1960 onwards, Chess was pressuring
Wolf into recording not his own material but
songs by the prolific Willie Dixon—but many of
these, like the material Dixon had recorded as a
member of the Big Three Trio in the 1940s, were
also strongly based on country blues songs from
the 1920s and 30s. While the label credits Dixon
with having composed Wolf ’s 1961 hit ‘The Red
Rooster’, Wolf himself said that the credit belonged
to Patton.
When Howlin’ Wolf ’s career and influence was
at it peak, therefore, which was from the mid-
1950s till the mid-1960s, he was as synonymous
with Chicago as Muddy Waters—and yet he never
really sounded like the city. The world he invoked,
in his uniquely spooky, surreal way, was in essence
that of the back roads, the Mississippi swamplands
made mythic and primeval, not far from Robert
Johnson’s crossroads, in the nighttime of country
soul. What he was bringing forward thunderously
into the 1950s and 60s, and making accessible to
the likes of ELVIS PRESLEY on through to THE
ROLLING STONES, and thus to the pop-buying public,
was a rich meld of country blues lyric poetry.
Wolf ’s 1954 side ‘Evil’ was transmuted into Elvis’
‘Trouble’ just four years later. In 1964, ‘Smokestack
Lightnin’’, reissued in Britain, reached the
charts, and Wolf appeared on the TV series ‘Ready
Steady Go!’ while he was over in Europe as part of
the American Folk Blues Festival. In 1965, as special
guest of the Rolling Stones, who performed
‘Little Red Rooster’, Wolf performed his early-
1950s Sun record ‘How Many More Years?’ on the
US ‘Shindig’ TV show.
By this time, Bob Dylan had already long been
familiar with his work: which is why at times it is
both impossible to tell, and perhaps unimportant
to know, whether Dylan takes a line, or an image,
or a flavour, from Howlin’ Wolf himself or from
somewhere in the earlier country blues, as Wolf
had done in turn. In early 1962, on the unedited
tape made for a New York radio, Dylan tells CYNTHIA
GOODING that he knows the work of both
Muddy Waters and Howlin’ Wolf: and goes on to
perform a country blues version of ‘Smokestack
Lightnin’’ that sounds closer in style to Charley
Patton than Wolf’s does. This says much for Dylan’s
recognition that Wolf was essentially a country
wolf in city clothing.
If Dylan had gained nothing from Howlin’ Wolf
except an early piece of repertoire, that would be
interesting. However, it seems as clear as such
things ever can be that there is some direct inspiration.
First, it’s unlikely that Dylan’s absorption
of the Charley Patton legacy was never through
Wolf, his last great pupil. Second, there must have
been a time in Dylan’s youth when, as for so many,
the comprehensible beat, electricity and audible
recording quality ofWolf and MuddyWaters made
for a far easier way into much of the blues than
the ‘old-fashioned’, gruesomely lo-fi recordings of
their pre-war country blues predecessors.
So, musically as well as lyrically,Wolf was a conduit.
His early band included Ike Turner and JUNIOR
PARKER—whose elegant, cool ‘Mystery Train’
was to be transformed in the same Sun studio, via
Elvis, into a founding classic for rock’n’roll—while
the main guitarist Wolf used from 1954 onwards
was the consummate Hubert Sumlin, whose best
work is amongst the finest electric guitar playing
in the universe. He plays solos of divine, deranged
descending notes, tense as steel cable, grungy as
hot-rod cars crashing, and as piercing as God
cracking open the sky. Howlin’ Wolf brought Sumlin
up to Chicago from the south. He hailed from
the Delta too: from Greenwood, Mississippi (where
Robert Johnson was murdered in 1937 and where
Bob Dylan commemorated the murder of MEDGAR
EVERS by singing ‘Only a
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