Howlin Wolf sings as if he's at the mike in a joint you may not make it out of alive. So I can't say I was shocked to read that a fellow blues musician came to see him perform and, arriving in the middle of his set, found a dead man lying on the floor. Audience members were resting their feet on him. Another night, the music was cut off by gunfire. Wolf took a guitar with him on his way out. As he ran across the field behind the bar, the guitar got shot.
Life was always dicey. First because he was black and born in Mississippi in 1910. Also because his mother was a mentally unstable religious fanatic who had him young and raised him alone after his father left. He was still a child when she cast him out of the house. From there he walked for miles with burlap sacks tied around his feet for shoes to his great-uncle's home. This second parental figure was a vicious church deacon who was fond of the whip and later chased Wolf, then a teenager, off his property for good lashing at him. Wolf didn't care to talk about his childhood.
Stop your train.
Let a poor boy ride.
Why don't you hear me crying?
A-wooo-hooo.
Well, fare you well.
I'll never see
you no more.
Oh, don't you hear me crying?
He followed the train tracks deep into the Delta, plantation country, where black sharecroppers were commonly chained to the land, kept in debt by white owners who underpaid them for their hard labor and overcharged them for basic necessities. His wanderings through the area finally led him to something of a haven. But having discovered music, working on his voice as he worked the field, he wouldn't stick around too long.
Once on the road, he managed to survive with his guitar. Self-sufficiency would earn him the resentment of white folks who'd one day put him in his place by forcing him into the military. But before then he acquired his most important musical lessons directly from a legendary bluesman named Charlie Patton. One was how to be an entertainer. Onstage, the Wolf actually got on all fours and he seems rarely to have ever failed to display such commitment, whether busking on the street for passersby during the day or playing for drunken revelers and gamblers through the night.
Though the details are somewhat murky, he apparently killed a man for severely beating his girlfriend, a woman the Wolf was seeing. Everyone remarks on his size - 6'3, about 300 pounds at his peak. He would use it to navigate the dangers of the scene as well as intimidate and push around his own young, unruly band members. One or two pulled guns on him. But he's generally remembered as a tough but fair - and, by some accounts, even lovable - leader.
The Wolf wasn't above performing for children and giving them the full experience.
A girlfriend of Wolf's once discovered a pair of panties in his car that one of his band members had kindly received and carelessly left behind. Wolf was coming home from the grocery store, happily singing to himself about his groceries, when she blasted him in the ass with buckshot. Took hours to get it all out.
In Mississippi, he and his band were on tour, obeying the rules of the South, staying in black-only hotels and coming in through the back door of venues along the way, when they stopped at a Shell station. Wolf asked an attendant pumping his gas if there was a bathroom. The attendant said they didn't have one for niggers. In a life-risking act of defiance, Wolf told him to stop pumping gas, paid him, and left.
His recording career took off relatively late, as he neared his 40s, when he first began forming a musical group to accompany him. He would go on to move north, to Chicago, the city he'd be most closely associated with and where he'd be honored with a statue, and record a number of hits that became classics. Before I encountered Howlin Wolf's music, I heard it filtered mostly through white performers of a later generation. Whether era-defining or terrible or somewhere in between, I became familiar with and somewhat bored of the conventions and standard musical structure of the blues and for a long time resisted going further back. I'm not sure that punk has ever been adequately defined but there are certain qualities I associate with it: deliberately and endearingly rough in style and recording, at times confrontational, often funny, unpretentious, punchy, catchy, songs over in a minute or two or maybe three. In time I came to think that Nuggets-style garage groups of the mid- to late-60s, for instance, weren't so different. And the Wolf's music through the 50s and early 60s shares many of the same qualities and exposes depths of pain. His voice is the star of the show - how could it not be? - and the show is often wild, sounds as if it could collapse. (Live, sometimes it did.) The conventions appear in consummate form because it wasn't mere form for him. It would spread his name internationally.
Please write my mama
Tell her the shape I'm in
Please write my mother
Tell her the shape I'm in
Tell her to pray for me
Forgive me for my sins
On his deathbed, he asked his beloved wife Lillian to call the mother who was able to push her child out defenseless to fend for himself so many years before, in one last attempt to see if she'd finally be a mother to him. She refused to come to the phone.
The material for my sketch comes from a biography, Moanin' at Midnight: The Life and Times of Howlin' Wolf, by James Segrest and Mark Hoffman. The book is composed largely of interviews with those who were there. Crazy anecdote links to scary anecdote links to moving anecdote, at its best, resulting in a varied portrait of the bluesman - his ferocity, his talent, his contradictions - and, to some extent, the community around him, in their own words. The prose is serviceable, overall. It's the sort of biography that doesn't do so much to place him within the broader context of the period yet doesn't suffer for it. The main weakness of the book is the music writing: It's helpful to discover his recording output and a long list of other blues musicians for the novice to look into in one place. But the summaries of individual tracks across multiple albums, which comprise much of the non-interview material, get a bit repetitive and tiresome. Each time they say he's recorded a "blues" number, to take one example, I can't help but think or murmur that it's understood he plays the blues. To utter an understatement. Based on the evidence provided by the book, and especially the music, whatever the blues is, Howlin Wolf is it.
