Howling Wolf and Bob Dylan

[really real]

Gemjack had an interesting analysis of the similarity of lifestyle and
vocal properties of Howling Wolf and Bob Dylan, but I lost the thread so
I'll respond here.

It all started with me chiding someone in the Beatles group for not
liking Dylan's voice, so I asked him if he liked Howling Wolf. Gemjack
wondered if both these singers had ruined their voices through a life of
hard smoking and drinking.

I think Howling Wolf always had a rough voice, where Bob, of course,
used to sing like an angel. Tom Waits always had a rough voice, though
it did get rougher through his hard times. Rod Stewart had an
interestingly rough voice, at least a sand-papery voice, but it got
smoothed out when he went to Vegas.

Bob's voice has definitely changed, though of course, it always used to
change. But I don't think it will ever get sweet again, despite Tempest
having some much sweeter sounding singing than the last albums.

It would be like a bald man growing hair again. Only Paul Simon could do
that.

[gemjack]

On Sat, 17 Nov 2012 14:20:38 -0800, really real <reall...@shaw.ca>
wrote:

>Gemjack had an interesting analysis of the similarity of lifestyle and
>vocal properties of Howling Wolf and Bob Dylan, but I lost the thread so
>I'll respond here.
>
>It all started with me chiding someone in the Beatles group for not
>liking Dylan's voice, so I asked him if he liked Howling Wolf. Gemjack
>wondered if both these singers had ruined their voices through a life of
>hard smoking and drinking.

Was listening to 'How Many More Years' just the other day and it
really has that late-term Bobortion delivery.
-gj

[Google at EDLIS]

http://www.howlinwolf.com/articles/dylan/dylan.htm

[Google at EDLIS]

http://dylanchords.info/00_misc/smokestack_lightning.htm

[Google at EDLIS]

Cynthia Gooding

You’re a very good friend of John Lee Hooker's, aren’t you?
Yeah, I’m a friend of his.
Do you sing any of his songs at all?
Well, no I don’t sing any of his really. I sing one of Howlin’ Wolf’s. You wanna hear that
one again?
Well, first I wanna ask you, um, why you don’t sing any of his because I know you like
them.
I play harmonica with him, and I sing with him. But I don’t do, sing, any of his songs
because, I might sing a version of one of them, but I don’t sing any like he does, ‘cause I
don’t think anybody sings any of his songs to tell you the truth. He’s a funny guy to sing
like.
Hard guy to sing like too.
This is, I’ll see if I can find a key here and do this one. I heard this one a long time ago.
This is one, I never do it.
This is the Howlin’ Wolf song
Yeah.



You like that?
Yeah, I sure do. You’re very brave to try and sing that kind of a howling song.
Yeah, it’s Howlin’ Wolf.

> http://dylanchords.info/00_misc/smokestack_lightning.htm

[Google at EDLIS]

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 Pawn in Their Game’ at
a civil rights rally in 1963). Hubert Sumlin’s influence
is as plain as lightning on MIKE BLOOMFIELD—
you can hear it on ‘Maggie’s Farm’, Dylan’s
electric de´but performance at the Newport Folk
Festival of 1965—and on ROBBIE ROBERTSON, as
you can hear equally on the 1966 Dylan concert
performances and the later album Planet Waves.
There is another Wolf-Dylan conjunction on
Planet Waves too, and it inhabits the boundary between
the written word and pronunciation. Early
on in his sleevenotes to the album (long since vanished:
see PlanetWaves, disappearing sleevenotes,
the), Dylan is recalling, with a careening and savage
impressionism, what the 1950s had felt like;
and he writes of ‘. . . priests in overhauls, glassy
eyed, Insomnia! Space guys off duty with big dicks &
ducktails all wired up & voting for Eisenhower . . .’
That pun on overhauls/overalls—clever because to
perform the one you put on the other—may have
come to him directly from Howlin’ Wolf. In his
‘Sitting on Top of the World’, instead of ‘overalls’,
Wolf sings the line that should include it as ‘Had
to make Christmas in my overhauls.’
Of course it may not come directly from Wolf: as
so often, Dylan could have picked it up from any
one of a number of blues records or performances
or white rural idiom. This poetic ellipse has become
common-stock among whites as well as blacks. It
is not a universal Americanism, however. Just
down the hills in Georgia, BLIND WILLIE McTELL,
for instance, sings in his version of BLIND BLAKE’s
‘That’ll Never Happen No More’: ‘Well it’s Chicago
women in the fall / Got to make your days in your
overalls’—and sings the word in the straight, unpunning,
one might say middle class, way. That
freedom, that ability to pun, to make one word
do two jobs—which need not be for a humorous
purpose—is of course characteristic of Dylan, who
usually exercises it, as Howlin’ Wolf and others do
there, orally rather than on the page, but whose
Planet Waves sleevenote shows that he can manage
it on the page too.
The same was true for Shakespeare, as CHRISTOPHER
RICKS pointed out in a 1980 Australian
radio broadcast about Bob Dylan. (Of course Shakespeare
could do this orally as well as via flexible
spelling, since most of his work was for the stage
rather than the page.) Ricks gave an example
taken from Dylan’s ‘Shelter from the Storm’: ‘He’ll
use his voice to get back some of the freedom
which a poet used to have in the old days before
spelling got finally fixed. I’m thinking of the way
in which Shakespeare could spell the word ‘‘travelled’’
so that it included ‘‘travailed’’ . . . included
worked as well as journeyed. So Dylan will sing
‘‘moaning dove’’ and then print ‘‘morning’’ . . .’
This illustration is especially interesting because
it too can be found in Howlin’ Wolf ’s work.
When Muddy Waters’ ‘Still a Fool’ (which as we’ve
noted, Dylan knew) was issued by Chess, it was
part of a triple set that also included Wolf ’s
‘Moanin’ at Midnight’. But this also ended up on
Chess’ rival label Modern—and was released by
them under the odd title ‘Morning at Midnight’: a
mistake of transcription that occurred because of
Wolf ’s ambiguity with the very same words as
Dylan. And just as Ricks picked up on it from ‘Shelter
from the Storm’ simply because he liked it—as
a pun it has, after all, no significant meaning in
the Dylan song: it just sounds good—so too it’s
likely that Bob Dylan picked this up from Howlin’
Wolf simply because he liked it. At least as likely
as that he invented it a` la Shakespeare.
A related feature of the blues that Howlin’ Wolf
distils as well as anyone is the warping of pronunciation
to make a rhyme. Dylan’s relish of this has
led him to surpass defiantly simple examples like
rhyming ‘hers’ with ‘yours’ in 1965’s ‘I Wanna Be
Your Lover’ by the spectacular rhyming of ‘January’
and ‘Buenos Aires’ in 1981’s great ‘The Groom’s
Still Waiting at the Altar’. However, the pleasure
of eccentric pronunciation in general and its use
to make counterfeit rhymes in particular is a fundamental
delight rock’n’roll picked up from the
blues. If FATS DOMINO was good at it (as when
rhyming ‘man’ with ‘ashamed’), so was Howlin’
Wolf. As with ‘moaning/morning’, in 1959’s
‘Howlin’ for My Darlin’’ he makes the verb and the
noun of the title rhyme (‘If you hear me howlin’ /
Callin’ on my darlin’’).
What this serves to remind us also is that
Howlin’ Wolf ’s records often built up the mythic,
fairytale-beast connotations of the name itself. His
song titles include ‘Moaning at Midnight’ and
‘Crying at Daybreak’; ‘Howlin’ for My Darlin’’ (a
remake of ‘Howlin’ for My Baby’ from seven years
previously); ‘The Red Rooster’; ‘Tail Dragger’; ‘I’m
the Wolf ’; ‘Moanin’ for My Baby’; ‘Call Me the
Wolf ’ and ‘Howlin’ Blues’. The last new album released
in his lifetime was called The Back Door Wolf.
He had been given the name at the age of three,
by his grandfather:
‘He just sit down and tell me tall stories about
what the wolf would do, you know,’ he told an
interviewer in 1968. ‘Cause I was a bad boy, you
know, and I was always in devilment. . . . So he
told me the story ’bout how the wolf done the Little
Red Rilin’ [sic] Hood.’ He goes on to recount a
splendidly garbled version of the story, in which
the fairytale and the existential reality of his own
childhood—the woods and the backwoods—are
bound up together:
‘. . . the girl would ask him, ‘‘Mr. Wolf, what
make your teeth so big?’’ He said ‘‘the better I can
eat you, my dear.’’ Then said ‘‘What make your
eyes so red?’’ ‘‘The better I can see you, my dear.’’
And so, you know, and then they finally killed the
wolf and drove him up to the house, you know,
and showed me the wolf. And I told him it was a
dog. He said no, that’s a wolf. I said well what do
a wolf do? Say he howl: he say ‘‘ooh-wyooooh!’’,
you know, and so I got afraid of this wolf.’
Granted Dylan’s familiarity with Howlin’Wolf ’s
records, and his own fusion of the singer’s name
with the beast-figure in ‘Man of Peace’, it isn’t surprising
that there should be special conjunctions
between the Wolf and the album by Bob Dylan
that is itself a glorious fusion of fairytale and nursery
rhyme with the blues and the Bible, 1990’s
Under the Red Sky.
Specifically, we can recognise flashes of Dylan’s
‘2 x 2’ and ‘10,000 Men’ in the chorus of Wolf ’s ‘I
Ain’t Superstitious’: ‘Well I ain’t superstitious, black
cat just crossed my trail . . . / Don’t sweep me with
no broom, Imight just get put in jail’; while another
line from ‘10,000 Men’, Dylan’s joke-exaggeration of
multiple negatives, ‘None of them doing nothing
that your mama wouldn’t disapprove’, goes far
enough to be impenetrable in meaning but barely
goes further in construction than the last line of
Wolf ’s 1954 song ‘Baby How Long’: ‘Ain’t nobody
never lived that didn’t do somebody wrong.’
The Dylan song on Under the Red Sky that most
successfully unifies children’s song and folktale,
intimations of Biblical retribution for our ‘devilment’
and the country blues world, is the sumptuously
phantasmagoric ‘Cat’s in the Well’. This
features the cat, the horse, the bull, the dogs and—
dramatically, as the first omen that the innocent
face imminent death—the wolf: ‘The cat’s in the
well, the wolf is looking down / He got his big
bushy tail dragging all over the ground.’ Dylan
doesn’t say why his tail drags on the ground, but
this is elucidated in one of Howlin’Wolf ’s best records,
1962’s shudderingly powerful ‘Tail Dragger’.
Its chorus runs: ‘I’m a tail dragger, I wipe out my
tracks / When I get what I want, I don’t come
sneakin’ back’, and the first of its two irregular
verses concludes with ‘The hunters they can’t find
him / Stealin’ chicks everywhere he go / Then draggin’
his tail behind him.’
The other verse calls up some more inhabitants
of the animal kingdom, as Dylan’s song does: ‘The
’cuda drags his tail in the sand / A fish wiggles
his tail in the water / When the mighty wolf come
along, draggin’ his tail / He done stole somebody’s
dog.’ So the wolf cannot be tracked, hunted down
or stopped. The cat has no chance.
This is not the last of the lyric conjunctions between
Dylan and Howlin’ Wolf, but it is the greatest,
as one piece of barnyard apocalypse draws
strength and meaning from another, from 28
years earlier. And there’s a general sense in which,
because of Wolf ’s towering primitivism, the style
he constructed, its psychic meld of electric power
and old country darkness, if there had been no
Howlin’ Wolf, an album like Under the Red Sky
would have been a different, thinner thing.
There’s another general gift that Wolf and his
contemporaries give to those like Dylan who come
later and from another culture. To hear Wolf ’s
massive voice singing ‘Well, mama done died and
left me, / Wooh, daddy done throwed me away’ is
to note the way that the age of the singer is so
utterly unimportant to these bluesmen when it
comes to the subject matter of their songs. They
have no truck with our modern self-conscious ageism
or apologism, and clearly when they sing
about the lives of themselves and their peers, they
experience those lives as unities. Furry Lewis as an
old man, and Howlin’ Wolf as a middle-aged one,
still sing out about the childhood trauma of parental
abandonment: they have no sense that they
‘should have got over all that’ in the contemporary
way. At the same time, they still sing too about romantic
love: they have no modern sense of the
shame of being politically incorrect ‘dirty old
men’.
Likewise they can sing out clear and free about
imminent death: they have no sense that this is
aerobically incorrect, or ‘not nice’. In 1961’s ‘Goin’
Down Slow’, which features what may be Hubert
Sumlin’s all-time best guitar solo, Howlin’ Wolf
proves himself a great singer about imminent
death, which will certainly have recommended
him to Bob Dylan.
Howlin’ Wolf himself died in the Hines district
of Chicago, on January 10, 1976. He was 65.
[Howlin’ Wolf: ‘New Crawlin’ King Snake’, Chicago,
11 Apr 1966, Change My Way, Chess LP 418, Chicago,
1977; ‘Sittin’ on Top of the World’, Chicago, Dec
1957, Chess 1679, Chicago, 1958; The Back Door Wolf,
Chicago 1973, Chess LP-50045, Chicago, 1973; ‘Tail
Dragger’, Chicago, 28 Sep 1962, The Real Folk Blues,
Chess LP-1502, Chicago, 1966, CD-reissued Chess MCA
CHD 9273, US, 1987. Wolf ’s ‘Red Rilin’ Hood’ story is
on his spoken reminiscence re ‘Ain’t Goin’ Down
That Dirt Road (By Myself)’, Chicago, Nov 1968, unissued
till the 3-CD The Chess Box, MCA CHD3-9332, US,
1991.
Big Joe Williams: ‘Crawlin’ King Snake’, Chicago,
27 Mar 1941, Big Joe Williams: Crawlin’ King Snake,
HUDSON, GARTH
RCA International INT-1087, London, 1970. J.T. Funny
Papa Smith: ‘Howlin’ Wolf Blues No.1’ & ‘Howlin’
Wolf Blues No.2’, Chicago, 19 Sep 1930, ‘Funny Papa’
Smith: The Original Howling Wolf, Yazoo L-1031, NY,
1972; there’s also his ‘Hungry Wolf ’, Chicago, c.Apr
1931, same LP. Blind Willie McTell: ‘That’ll Never
Happen No More’, Atlanta, Sep 1956; Blind Willie Mc-
Tell: Last Session, Prestige Bluesville 1040, US, 1961.
Marshall Chess quoted from undated interview by
Spencer Leigh, Baby, That Is Rock and Roll: American
Pop, 1954–1963, Folkestone, UK: Finbarr International,
p.50.]

On Saturday, 17 November 2012 22:20:23 UTC, really real wrote:

[Google at EDLIS]

https://groups.google.com/d/topic/rec.music.dylan/VuXCxRTdpZQ/discussion

On Saturday, 17 November 2012 22:20:23 UTC, really real wrote:

[gemjack]

lol, I have no memory of that. But this should mean that I have the
tracks... somewhere.
-gj

[Just Walkin']

On Nov 20, 9:06 am, gemjack <geminijackso...@yahoo.com> wrote:
> On Tue, 20 Nov 2012 05:28:49 -0800 (PST), Google at EDLIS
>

> <eduardomonteverdirica...@gmail.com> wrote:
> >https://groups.google.com/d/topic/rec.music.dylan/VuXCxRTdpZQ/discussion
>
> >On Saturday, 17 November 2012 22:20:23 UTC, really real  wrote:
> >> Gemjack had an interesting analysis of the similarity of lifestyle and
> >> vocal properties of Howling Wolf and Bob Dylan, but I lost the thread so
>
> lol, I have no memory of that.  But this should mean that I have the
> tracks... somewhere.
> -gj
>

Did howl like a wolf the other night at 11 when I fell and broke my
collarbone out on Nicollet.

He blames himself, but it's a small price to pay to have dinner with
my brother.

Don't believe me? Come, sit down, we'll have another...

[chris]

On Tuesday, November 20, 2012 3:39:17 PM UTC-5, Just Walkin' wrote:

> Did howl like a wolf the other night at 11 when I fell and broke my collarbone out on Nicollet.
He blames himself, but it's a small price to pay to have dinner with my brother.
> Don't believe me? Come, sit down, we'll have another...

awh, so sorry to hear about the collarbone........won't be carrying any turkey platters anytime soon! my moms never healed right, but my son's healed up just fine....i think age is a factor there.
as for taking WHATEVER the gods send your way just so you can visit with a brother is a concept i well know. my brother's gone now, but woowee, things just seem to happen around that guy, and always to someone else...lol.

um, and to the original post, yes, lifestyles can affect voice quality. but i think both bob and the wolf like/liked their scratchy ole voices.

[gemjack]

On Tue, 20 Nov 2012 12:39:17 -0800 (PST), "Just Walkin'"
<kens...@comcast.net> wrote:

>On Nov 20, 9:06�am, gemjack <geminijackso...@yahoo.com> wrote:
>> On Tue, 20 Nov 2012 05:28:49 -0800 (PST), Google at EDLIS
>>
>> <eduardomonteverdirica...@gmail.com> wrote:
>> >https://groups.google.com/d/topic/rec.music.dylan/VuXCxRTdpZQ/discussion
>>
>> >On Saturday, 17 November 2012 22:20:23 UTC, really real �wrote:
>> >> Gemjack had an interesting analysis of the similarity of lifestyle and
>> >> vocal properties of Howling Wolf and Bob Dylan, but I lost the thread so
>>
>> lol, I have no memory of that. �But this should mean that I have the
>> tracks... somewhere.
>> -gj
>>
>Did howl like a wolf the other night at 11 when I fell and broke my
>collarbone out on Nicollet.

Damn! Sorry to hear that!

>
>He blames himself, but it's a small price to pay to have dinner with
>my brother.

Well then let's hope you only dine together on rare occasions.
-gj

[Just Walkin']

First time up in 8 years; I guess (barely) escaping Sandy's surge on
the sound in CT made him feel his mortality. (Or maybe it was my 60th
year coming to pass that did that.)

In any case, I told baby brother I've got another shoulder if he's
thinking of coming back anytime soon...

[really real]

> Did howl like a wolf the other night at 11 when I fell and broke my
> collarbone out on Nicollet.
>
> He blames himself, but it's a small price to pay to have dinner with
> my brother.
>
> Don't believe me? Come, sit down, we'll have another...
>
>

Admittedly, it's been half a decade since I was a young 60 years old,
and my memory is shot, but why am I getting a deja vu about you slipping
on ice and breaking something in your body? Didn't this happen last
year? Or is this new icing on the cake of human frailty?

[Just Walkin']

I must have joined the accident of the year club somewhere along the
way. This year I won a steel plate and 9 screws to hold my collarbone
together.

Right out on front of The Dakota of all places. Night before Bruce
played too. Forever keeps me in stories.

No time for another verse though; looks like some kind of ship has
come in...