Chester Arthur Burnett known as Howlin' Wolf, was a Chicago
blues singer, guitarist, and harmonica player, originally from Mississippi.
With a booming voice and looming physical presence, he is one of the best-known
Chicago blues artists. The musician and critic Cub Koda noted, "no one
could match Howlin' Wolf for the singular ability to rock the house down to the
foundation while simultaneously scaring its patrons out of its wits."
Producer Sam Phillips recalled, "When I heard Howlin' Wolf, I said, 'This
is for me. This is where the soul of man never dies'". Several of his
songs, including "Smokestack Lightnin'", "Killing Floor"
and "Spoonful", have become blues and blues rock standards. In 2004,
Rolling Stone magazine ranked him number 51 on its list of the "100 Greatest
Artists of All Time".
Burnett was born on June 10, 1910, in White Station,
Mississippi, near West Point. He was given the name Chester Arthur, after
Chester A. Arthur, the 21st President of the United States. His physique
garnered him the nicknames "Big Foot Chester" and "Bull
Cow" as a young man: he was 6 feet 3 inches tall and often weighed close
to 300 pounds. He explained the origin of the name Howlin' Wolf: "I got
that from my grandfather", who would tell him stories about wolves in that
part of the country and warn him that if he misbehaved the "howling
wolves" would get him. The blues historian Paul Oliver wrote that Burnett
once claimed to have been given his nickname by his idol Jimmie Rodgers.
Burnett's parents separated when he was only a year old. His
mother, Gertrude, threw him out of the house when he was a child for refusing
to work on the farm. He then moved in with his uncle, Will Young, who treated
him badly. When he was thirteen, he ran away and claimed to have walked 85
miles barefoot to join his father, where he finally found a happy home with his
father's large family. At the peak of his success, he returned from Chicago to
see his mother in Mississippi and was driven to tears when she rebuffed him:
she refused to take money offered by him, saying it was from his playing the "devil's
music".
In 1930, Burnett met Charlie Patton, the most popular
bluesman in the Mississippi Delta at the time. He would listen to Patton play
nightly from outside a nearby juke joint. There he remembered Patton playing
"Pony Blues", "High Water Everywhere", "A Spoonful
Blues", and "Banty Rooster Blues". The two became acquainted,
and soon Patton was teaching him guitar. Burnett recalled that "the first
piece I ever played in my life was ... a tune about hook up my pony and saddle
up my black mare"—Patton's "Pony Blues." He also learned about
showmanship from Patton: "When he played his guitar, he would turn it over
backwards and forwards, and throw it around over his shoulders, between his
legs, throw it up in the sky." Burnett would perform the guitar tricks he
learned from Patton for the rest of his life. He played with Patton often in
small Delta communities.
Burnett was influenced by other popular blues performers of
the time, including the Mississippi Sheiks, Blind Lemon Jefferson, Ma Rainey,
Lonnie Johnson, Tampa Red, Blind Blake, and Tommy Johnson. Two of the earliest
songs he mastered were Jefferson's "Match Box Blues" and Leroy Carr's
"How Long, How Long Blues". The country singer Jimmie Rodgers was
also an influence. Burnett tried to emulate Rodgers's "blue yodel"
but found that his efforts sounded more like a growl or a howl: "I
couldn't do no yodelin', so I turned to howlin'. And it's done me just fine."
His harmonica playing was modeled after that of Sonny Boy Williamson II, who
taught him how to play when Burnett moved to Parkin, Arkansas, in 1933.
During the 1930s, Burnett performed in the South as a solo
performer and with numerous blues musicians, including Floyd Jones, Johnny
Shines, Honeyboy Edwards, Sonny Boy Williamson II, Robert Johnson, Robert Jr.
Lockwood, Willie Brown, Son House and Willie Johnson. By the end of the decade,
he was a fixture in clubs, with a harmonica and an early electric guitar. On
April 9, 1941, he was inducted into the U.S. Army and was stationed at several
bases around the country. Finding it difficult to adjust to military life, he
was discharged on November 3, 1943. He returned to his family, who had recently
moved near West Memphis, Arkansas, and helped with the farming while also
performing, as he had done in the 1930s, with Floyd Jones and others. In 1948
he formed a band, which included the guitarists Willie Johnson and Matt
"Guitar" Murphy, the harmonica player Junior Parker, a pianist
remembered only as "Destruction" and the drummer Willie Steele. Radio
station KWEM in West Memphis began broadcasting his live performances, and he
occasionally sat in with Williamson on KFFA in Helena, Arkansas.
In 1951, Sam Phillips recorded several songs by Howlin' Wolf
at his Memphis Recording Service. Phillips praised his singing, saying,
"God, what it would be worth on film to see the fervour in that man's face
when he sang. His eyes would light up, you'd see the veins come out on his neck
and, buddy, there was nothing on his mind but that song. He sang with his damn
soul." Howlin' Wolf quickly became a local celebrity and began working
with a band that included the guitarists Willie Johnson and Pat Hare. His first
singles were issued by two different record companies in 1951: "How Many
More Years" backed with "Moaning at Midnight", released by Chess
Records, and "Riding in the Moonlight" backed with "Moaning at
Midnight", released by RPM Records. Later, Leonard Chess was able to
secure his contract, and Howlin' Wolf relocated to Chicago in 1952. There he
assembled a new band and recruited the Chicagoan Jody Williams from Memphis
Slim's band as his first guitarist.
Within a year he had persuaded the
guitarist Hubert Sumlin to leave Memphis and join him in Chicago; Sumlin's
understated solos and surprisingly subtle phrasing perfectly complemented
Burnett's huge voice. The lineup of the Howlin' Wolf band changed often over
the years. He employed many different guitarists, both on recordings and in
live performance, including Willie Johnson, Jody Williams, Lee Cooper, L.D.
McGhee, Otis "Big Smokey" Smothers, his brother Little Smokey
Smothers, Jimmy Rogers, Freddie Robinson, and Buddy Guy, among others. Burnett
was able to attract some of the best musicians available because of his policy,
unusual among bandleaders, of paying his musicians well and on time, even including
unemployment insurance and Social Security contributions. With the exception of
a couple of brief absences in the late 1950s, Sumlin remained a member of the
band for the rest of Howlin' Wolf's career and is the guitarist most often
associated with the Chicago Howlin' Wolf sound.
Howlin' Wolf had a series of hits with songs written by
Willie Dixon, who had been hired by the Chess brothers in 1950 as a songwriter,
and during that period the competition between Muddy Waters and Howlin' Wolf
was intense. Dixon reported "Every once in a while Wolf would mention the
fact that, 'Hey man, you wrote that song for Muddy. How come you won't write me
one like that?' But when you'd write for him he wouldn't like it." So,
Dixon decided to use reverse psychology on him, by introducing the songs to
Wolf as written for Muddy, thus inducing Wolf to accept them. In the 1950s, Howlin' Wolf had five songs on the Billboard
national R&B charts: "Moanin' at Midnight", "How Many More
Years", "Who Will Be Next", "Smokestack Lightning",
and "I Asked for Water (She Gave Me Gasoline)." His first LP, Moanin'
in the Moonlight, was released in 1959. As was standard practice in that era,
it was a collection of previously released singles.
In the early 1960s, Howlin' Wolf recorded several songs that
became his most famous, despite receiving no radio play: "Wang Dang
Doodle", "Back Door Man", "Spoonful", "The Red
Rooster" (later known as "Little Red Rooster"), "I Ain't
Superstitious", "Goin' Down Slow", and "Killing
Floor", many of which were written by Willie Dixon. Several became part of
the repertoires of British and American rock groups, who further popularized
them. Howlin' Wolf's second compilation album, Howlin' Wolf (often called
"the rocking chair album", from its cover illustration), was released
in 1962. During the blues revival in the 1950s and 1960s, black blues
musicians found a new audience among white youths, and Howlin' Wolf was among
the first to capitalize on it. He toured Europe in 1964 as part of the American
Folk Blues Festival, produced by the German promoters Horst Lippmann and Fritz
Rau. In 1965, he appeared on the popular television program Shindig! at the
insistence of the Rolling Stones, whose recording of "Little Red Rooster"
had reached number one in the UK in 1964.
In the late 1960s and early 1970s,
Howlin' Wolf recorded albums with others, including The Super Super Blues Band,
with Bo Diddley and Muddy Waters; The Howlin' Wolf Album, with psychedelic rock
and free-jazz musicians like Gene Barge, Pete Cosey, Roland Faulkner, Morris
Jennings, Louis Satterfield, Charles Stepney and Phil Upchurch; and The London
Howlin' Wolf Sessions, accompanied by the British rock musicians Eric Clapton,
Steve Winwood, Ian Stewart, Bill Wyman, Charlie Watts and others. The Howlin' Wolf Album, like rival bluesman Muddy Waters's
album Electric Mud, was designed to appeal to the hippie audience. The album
had an attention-getting cover: large black letters on a white background
proclaiming "This is Howlin' Wolf's new album. He doesn't like it. He
didn't like his electric guitar at first either." The album cover may have
contributed to its poor sales. Chess co-founder Leonard Chess admitted that the
cover was a bad idea, saying, "I guess negativity isn't a good way to sell
records. Who wants to hear that a musician doesn't like his own music?"
The London Howlin' Wolf Sessions, like Muddy Waters's London
album, proved more successful with British audiences than American. Wolf's last
album was 1973's The Back Door Wolf. Entirely composed of new material, it was
recorded with musicians who regularly backed him on stage, including Hubert
Sumlin, Detroit Junior, Chico Chism, Lafayette "Shorty" Gilbert and
the bandleader Eddie Shaw. The album is shorter (a little more than 35 minutes)
than any other he recorded, as a result of his declining health. Burnett's health began declining in the late 1960s. He had
several heart attacks and suffered bruised kidneys in a car accident in 1970.
Concerned for his health, the bandleader Eddie Shaw limited him to performing
six songs per concert. In January 1976, Burnett checked into the Veterans
Administration Hospital in Hines, Illinois, for kidney surgery. He died of
complications from the procedure on January 10, 1976, and was buried in
Oakridge Cemetery, outside Chicago, in a plot in Section 18, on the east side
of the road. His gravestone has an image of a guitar and harmonica etched into
it. He died at the age of 65.
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