The pioneers of blues are often referred to as “giants,” but for Howlin’ Wolf, the term applies literally. By the time he started recording for Sam Phillips in 1951, Wolf had grown to a little over six-feet-three-inches tall and weighed in at―as one of his songs put it―“300 Pounds of Joy.”
The story of how Chester Burnett, who was born in West Point, Mississippi, on June 10, 1910―98 years ago―came to be called Howlin’ Wolf is obscured by time and by Wolf himself. He claimed occasionally that the nickname came from his fondness for “Little Red Riding Hood,” a story Burnett’s grandfather began spinning for him when he was three. Wolf also told a yarn about how his mama named him Howlin’ Wolf after he killed some of her chickens, “just like a wolf.” He also may have borrowed the name from the earlier bluesman John “Funny Papa” Smith, a Texan who began recording in the 1920s and sometimes called himself “Howlin’ Wolf.” In the fields on the Dockery Plantation near Ruleville, Mississippi, where Burnett toiled as a young man, he was also known as Bull Cow and, thanks to his size 16 shoes, Big Foot Chester.
Certainly Howlin’ Wolf was the name that perfectly fit his voice, one of the most distinctive ever recorded. Raspy, spiky, gravelly, smoky, rattling, and purely elemental, it’s what makes his greatest songs utterly arresting―that and the licks of his longtime guitar sidekick, the
shy but ridiculously inventive musician Hubert Sumlin. Their partnership is what made the greatest numbers Wolf recorded for Chess Records―
“Smokestack Lightnin’,” “Killing Floor” (which also sports Buddy Guy), “The Red Rooster,” “I Ain’t Superstitious,”
“Spoonful,” “Sittin’ on Top of the World,” and dozens more―resonate on a cosmic level that transcended time, place, and language to make Wolf among the most revered figures in blues.
Jimi Hendrix, Eric Clapton, the Rolling Stones,
Jeff Beck, the Doors, Cream, and the Blues Project are among the countless blues-based musicians who responded to Wolf’s allure by recording his songs. And Sam Phillips of Sun Records considered both Howlin’ Wolf and Ike Turner to be far more profound and inventive than his blue-ribbon discovery Elvis Presley. Phillips summed up the quality of Wolf’s singing with a beautiful and oft-repeated insight: “Howlin’ Wolf’s voice comes from a place where the soul of a man never dies.”
THE CHARLEY PATTON CONNECTION
Wolf had a humble start before his musical trek to immortality. He was born into a family of sharecroppers and field hands.
Charley Patton’s frequent performances changed that. Wolf fell under Patton’s equally gravel-voiced spell and was mesmerized by the Delta blues pioneer’s skill as an entertainer, watching spellbound as Patton played guitar behind his back and flat on his lap, and tossed his instrument in the air to catch it exactly on the right chord.
Patton’s showmanship would influence Wolf’s own performances, which were marked by stunts like floor crawling, curtain climbing, and, of course, his trademark howl, immortalized on 1959’s “Howlin’ for My Darlin’ ” and used to ghostly, mournful effect on ’53’s “Mama Died and Left Me,” which Wolf recorded with Phillips at Sun just before leaving for Chicago.
Wolf cajoled the elder Patton into showing him guitar licks during breaks in Patton’s appearances at Dockery’s fish fries and house parties. And when Sonny Boy Williamson II, a.k.a. Rice Miller, married Wolf’s sister, Wolf became a shoo-in for harmonica lessons, too.
Although Wolf was not a virtuoso on either instrument, his playing was solid as granite and perfectly complimented his roof-raising voice. By the late 1920s Wolf was hoofing, thumbing, and riding the rails―sometimes beneath the box cars―as a touring musician with Williamson, Robert Lockwood, and even occasionally Robert Johnson.
Big Foot Chester learned to make the repertoire of others his own during his early traveling years. He rearranged and rewrote Tommy Johnson’s “Cool Drink of Water Blues” into “I Asked for Water” (“
and she gave me gasoline”) and energized the Mississippi Sheiks’ “Sittin’ On Top of the World” in a way that would inspired Cream to cut the tune for 1968’s
Wheels of Fire.
CHICAGO BOUNDWhen Wolf settled in West Memphis, Arkansas, in the upper Delta after returning from the Army in 1945, he found himself in a hotbed of musical activity. Memphis, Tennessee, was near, and the city’s wealth, in contrast to the Delta’s poverty, sustained numerous juke joints and provided many radio outlets for local performers. Wolf found himself a broadcast slot on West Memphis’ KWEM, where he performed, plugged his upcoming shows, and sold ads for farm implements. He was a regional smash thanks to his leadership of one of the area’s hottest electric bands, with the gnarly guitarist Willie Johnson as his main sparring partner along with fellow six-stringer Pat Hare and James Cotton on harmonica.
In 1951 Ike Turner had just made “Rocket 88”
at Sam Phillips’ studio and began bringing Phillips other unrecorded talent, including Wolf. Phillips’ first sessions with Wolf hit pay dirt. They cut “Moanin’ at Midnight” and “How Many More Years,” and Phillips leased both tunes to Chicago’s Chess Records, who sold boatloads. Wolf’s recording debut made him a national overnight sensation in the “race records” field, at age 41.
Wolf liked to brag that of all the blues greats to depart the South for Chicago, as he did in 1953, he was “the onliest one to leave driving my own car and with money in my pocket.”
A short time later he summoned Sumlin north as well, vowing to his mother that he’d take care of him―a promise Wolf had also made when he began
taking the then-teenager on gigs around Memphis whenever Johnson or Hare was unavailable. (
Read about Hubert and Wolf's 10 hippest riffs here!)
ENTER THE ROCKERS
As Wolf’s recording career at Chess continued and was supercharged by Sumlin’s slippery finger-picked style, colored by shivery vibrato, sliding chords and licks, and abruptly bent strings, his music began to reach an increasingly white audience―first in Europe, and then, as bands like the Stones and the Animals spread word about Wolf and their other blues heroes to their fans, back in the States.
The producer and musical eccentric Giorgio Gomelsky set the scene in an interview with journalist Don Snowden that’s quoted in the excellent
Howlin’ Wolf Chess Box: “In the early ’60s there were about 40 blues fans in London that had collected some records and had been looking toward the blues for regenerating the entire music scene, which was dying on its feet at the time. We didn’t have access to [American blues] records. If somebody found a Howlin’ Wolf album, we would all sit around listening for hours.”
British bands in particular mined Howlin’ Wolf’s catalog for hits. The Yardbirds cut “Smokestack Lightning,” Cream also tapped “Spoonful,” the Rolling Stones recorded “The Red Rooster,” and the Jeff Beck Group let Rod Stewart wrap his own sandpaper pipes around “I Ain’t Superstitious.” Hendrix and the Electric Flag with Mike Bloomfield were among the American bands who performed “Killing Floor,” and the Doors made “Back Door Man” a familiar term among white teens.
In 1964, when the American Folk Blues Festival went to Europe, Wolf was one of the headliners, lacerating adoring, youthful crowds with tunes like “
Smokestack Lightnin’.” Two years later he was
the showstopper of a blues-devoted Newport Folk Festival.
Chess Records got swept up by Wolf’s new wave of popularity with rock fans and in 1968 paired the Delta-raised veteran with a team of young rock and jazz players for
This is Howlin’ Wolf’s New Album… To say that the psychedelic session was less artistically and commercially successful than Muddy Waters’ similarly conceived
Electric Mud, cut six months earlier, is an understatement. Wolf described it as “dog shit.”
Part of the appeal of Wolf’s recordings for rock era listeners was his guitar tones―rawer and more ragged than much of what came from Chess, always burnished with a hint of distortion thanks to an early generation of Silvertone, Fender, and Gibson amps. They were also more sophisticated thanks to Sumlin’s unfettered riff spinning.
In the ’50s and ’60s Wolf played a variety of guitars but is most associated with the Kay K-161 ThinTwin, a flimsy beauty that looked like a tennis racket in his oversized paws. He was also photographed with Harmony acoustics and an Epiphone Casino, while Sumlin was often seen with
his beloved Les Paul Goldtop and photographed occasionally with no-name Italian and German models.
THE FINAL YEARS
Chess made amends for the abomination of ’68 with 1970’s
The London Howlin’ Wolf Sessions. Eric Clapton, playing with soulful restraint, the Stones’ rhythm section of Charlie Watts and Bill Wyman, Ringo Starr, and Steve Winwood all contributed.
But Wolf was already on the ebb, or, as he put it in song, “Going Down Slow.” In 1969 the big man had been temporarily felled by a heart attack. And he’d been in an auto accident that had sent him through the windshield of his car and left him with permanent kidney damage that required regular dialysis. Nonetheless, he kept performing, often booking dates around hospitals where he could receive his blood purifying treatments.
Then came cancer. Still he plugged on, often playing entire shows from a chair, with his famed antics reduced to mugging facial expressions and fist waving. Howlin’ Wolf played his last gigs in Chicago in 1975, headlining a November blues bill at the International Amphitheatre and holding down his usual night at the 1815 Club on the West Side, the neighborhood that yielded the razor-edged electric urban blues of some of Wolf’s key successors: Buddy Guy, Magic Sam, Otis Rush, Freddie King.
Chester Burnett died on January 10, 1976, five months short of his 66th birthday, at the Veterans Administration Hospital in Hines, Illinois. He was buried at Oakridge Cemetery in Hillside―now a Mecca for acolytes, much like Stevie Ray Vaughan’s grave in Dallas’ Laurel Land Memorial Park and Sonny Boy Williamson II’s marker aside a collapsed church in Tutwiler, Mississippi.
And though the Wolf is gone, his incredible musical legacy lives on as every generation of guitarists and blues fans discover the powerful, pummeling songs he cut more than 50 years ago.
For 10 of the Wolf's hippest riffs, click here!