Howlin' Wolf

Chester Arthur Burnett learned the blues at the source: as a young man near Dockery Plantation he was tutored by Charley Patton himself, absorbing the growl, the showmanship and the stomping rhythm, and adding a falsetto howl learned from yodeling records — country music feeding back into the blues (Segrest & Hoffman 2004).

He came north late and fully formed. After farming and an army stint, he broke out of West Memphis radio in 1951, when Sam Phillips — three years before he found Elvis — recorded him and called the Wolf’s voice the greatest sound he ever captured. By 1953 he was in Chicago, Chess Records’ other giant, locked in a decade of creative rivalry with Muddy Waters. “Smokestack Lightnin’” (1956), one chord and a freight-train moan, and the Willie Dixon songs that followed — “Spoonful,” “Back Door Man,” “The Red Rooster” — are bedrock of the electric blues (Palmer 1981).

The British generation worshipped him. The Rolling Stones made their 1965 US television appearance conditional on Howlin’ Wolf performing too — the student bands, for once, using their leverage to point the camera at the teacher.