Howlin' Wolf

The biggest voice in the blues

Chester Arthur Burnett was a farmer in his late thirties before he made a record, and when he finally did, in Memphis in 1951, the producer Sam Phillips thought he had found the most remarkable singer he would ever hear. As Howlin' Wolf he sang in a huge, rough, gravel-and-thunder voice, blew raw harmonica, and moved across a stage with a menace and a comic grace that left audiences shaken. He was six foot three and, by most accounts, somewhere between 275 and 300 pounds.

He learned his trade in the Mississippi Delta from Charley Patton, the founding father of the style, and carried Patton's driving rhythm and showmanship all the way to Chicago. At Chess Records he became Muddy Waters's great rival, and the label's songwriter Willie Dixon gave him some of the strangest and strongest material in the blues: "Spoonful", "Back Door Man", "Little Red Rooster".

Through his guitarist Hubert Sumlin and those records, his sound went straight into British rock. The Rolling Stones' "Little Red Rooster" reached number one in Britain, Cream recorded "Spoonful", and Jimi Hendrix opened shows with "Killing Floor".

He was also, unusually for a bluesman of his era, a careful and fair businessman, and the musicians who worked for him never forgot it.

Worth knowing

Eleven things about Howlin' Wolf

1. He was named after a president.

   Chester Arthur Burnett was named for Chester A. Arthur, the twenty-first president of the United States.

2. The wolf was a threat.

   His grandfather, John Jones, warned the boy that if he kept bothering his grandmother's chickens, the wolves would get him. The family started calling him "the Wolf", and it stuck.

3. He wanted to yodel.

   His idol was the country singer Jimmie Rodgers. He later explained that he could not manage a yodel, so he howled instead.

4. He had other nicknames first.

   As a huge young man in the Delta he was known as "Big Foot Chester" and "Bull Cow".

5. He walked out on a cruel childhood.

   His parents separated when he was a baby, his mother sent him away, and the great-uncle who took him in worked him hard and beat him. At thirteen he ran away to find his father's family, by his own account walking some 85 miles barefoot.

6. He served in the Army.

   Drafted in April 1941, he served at posts in Arkansas, Florida, Georgia and Washington State before an honourable discharge in November 1943.

7. Two rival labels issued his first records.

   Sam Phillips licensed his recordings to Chess in Chicago, but the Bihari brothers' RPM label in Los Angeles was also recording him, and both put out Wolf singles in 1951.

8. He drove himself to Chicago.

   He arrived in his own car with about $4,000 in his pocket, a rarity for a Southern bluesman, and liked to say he was the only one who drove himself up from the Delta.

9. He went back to school in his forties.

   Functionally illiterate into middle age, he earned a high school equivalency diploma and then took accounting and business courses.

10. His name is on a Led Zeppelin song.

    "The Lemon Song" on Led Zeppelin II credits Chester Burnett among its writers.

11. His gravestone shows his tools.

    He is buried in Oakridge Cemetery in Hillside, Illinois, under a stone etched with a guitar and a harmonica.

Life in brief

From White Station to Hines

1. 1910Born June 10 in White Station, just north of West Point, Mississippi.
2. 1923Runs away at thirteen to join his father's family on a plantation near Ruleville, in the heart of the Delta.
3. 1928His father buys him his first guitar.
4. 1930Meets Charley Patton, who becomes his teacher and model, and who played regularly around nearby Dockery Plantation.
5. 1930sLearns harmonica from Sonny Boy Williamson II (Aleck "Rice" Miller), who married into the Burnett family.
6. 1941Drafted into the U.S. Army in April; discharged in November 1943.
7. 1948West Memphis, Arkansas. He forms an electric band with guitarists Willie Johnson and Matt "Guitar" Murphy, and radio station KWEM broadcasts him live.
8. 1951Records for Sam Phillips in Memphis. "Moanin' at Midnight" backed with "How Many More Years" reaches the national R&B chart on Chess.
9. 1952Moves to Chicago, in late 1952 or early 1953 (accounts differ), and signs with Chess. In 1954 he hires the young guitarist Hubert Sumlin.
10. 1956"Smokestack Lightnin'", his signature song, reaches number 11 on the R&B chart.
11. 1965Network television, on ABC's Shindig!, on the same episode as the Rolling Stones.
12. 1976Dies January 10 at the Veterans Administration hospital in Hines, Illinois, after years of heart and kidney illness. He was 65.

Memphis, 1951

The soul of man never dies

By 1951 Wolf was a big name around West Memphis, broadcasting on KWEM and leading a fierce electric band. Ike Turner, then working as a talent scout, brought him to Sam Phillips's Memphis Recording Service, the small studio that would later become home to Sun Records and Elvis Presley. Phillips was transfixed.

"This is for me. This is where the soul of man never dies."

Sam Phillips, recalling the first time he heard Howlin' Wolf

On "How Many More Years", with Turner on piano and Willie Johnson playing distorted electric guitar, Phillips pushed the rhythm section right to the front of the sound. The critic Robert Palmer heard in Johnson's playing perhaps the first power chord on record, and others have called the track a contender for the first rock and roll record.

Sun Records did not yet exist, so Phillips licensed the masters to Leonard Chess in Chicago. But the Bihari brothers of RPM had also got Wolf into a studio, and for a while two labels were releasing his records at once. Chess won the tug of war, and Wolf moved north.

Two kings on one label

The rivalry with Muddy Waters

When Wolf arrived in Chicago, Muddy Waters was the undisputed boss of the South Side, and by some accounts Muddy helped him find his first work in town. The friendliness did not last. For two decades the two men competed for the same clubs, the same audiences and the same attention at Chess, and their rivalry became blues legend, though historians note it has often been exaggerated.

They competed for musicians, too. Hubert Sumlin, Wolf's guitarist and protégé, left for a spell with Muddy in the mid-1950s; Sumlin later said it was simply that Muddy offered him far more money. He came back, and stayed with Wolf until the end. Wolf, for his part, later lured the saxophonist Eddie Shaw out of Muddy's band.

Willie Dixon wrote for both, and Wolf watched closely. Dixon recalled that Wolf would ask why Dixon never wrote him songs like the ones he gave Muddy, and then dislike the songs Dixon did write for him. Some of those songs, "Spoonful", "Back Door Man", "Little Red Rooster", turned out to be among the most influential he ever recorded.

Hollywood, May 1965

On prime-time television

In May 1965 Howlin' Wolf appeared alongside the Rolling Stones on Shindig!, ABC's prime-time pop show, filmed in Los Angeles.

Brian Jones introduced Wolf to a national television audience. Wolf, then in his mid-fifties, roared through "How Many More Years", the song he had cut for Sam Phillips fourteen years earlier, in front of a studio full of teenagers. Millions of young Americans who knew his songs only from British covers saw the source for the first time.

Start here

Songs to hear, and where they went

• 1951 How Many More Years Ike Turner's piano, Willie Johnson's fuzzed guitar and Wolf's roar, recorded by Sam Phillips.
• 1956 Smokestack Lightnin' A one-chord, hypnotic train song he had been working on since his days with Patton, about watching sparks fly from passing locomotives at night. The Yardbirds recorded it live in 1964. The Yardbirds 1964
• 1960 Spoonful Willie Dixon's stark, one-chord song of desire, with roots in Charley Patton's 1929 "A Spoonful Blues". Cream recorded it for their 1966 debut album. Cream 1966
• 1961 Back Door Man Another Dixon song, sly and threatening, issued as the B-side of "Wang Dang Doodle". The Doors recorded it for their first album in 1967. The Doors 1967
• 1961 Little Red Rooster A lazy, sly Dixon blues with Wolf himself on slide guitar. Sam Cooke cut a smoother version, and the Rolling Stones' recording, with Brian Jones on slide, topped the British chart in December 1964, the only blues song ever to do so. Sam Cooke 1963Rolling Stones 1964
• 1964 Killing Floor Hubert Sumlin's riff drives a song about being brought low by love. Jimi Hendrix played it at Monterey in 1967 and often opened his shows with it, and "The Lemon Song" on Led Zeppelin II (1969) credits Howlin' Wolf. Jimi Hendrix 1967Led Zeppelin 1969

Why he matters

The howl that crossed the ocean

Wolf's records are a direct line from Charley Patton's Delta to the loudest rock of the late 1960s. His songs have been recorded by bands on both sides of the Atlantic. In May 1970 Eric Clapton, Steve Winwood, Bill Wyman, Charlie Watts and Ian Stewart backed him in London for The London Howlin' Wolf Sessions, released the following year.

His last years were hard. A heart attack in 1969 and a car accident in 1970 left him on kidney dialysis, and his saxophonist and bandleader Eddie Shaw limited him to a handful of songs a night. His final concert, in November 1975 at the International Amphitheatre in Chicago, was alongside B.B. King.

He was inducted into the Blues Hall of Fame in 1980 and the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1991. His home town of West Point, Mississippi, holds a Howlin' Wolf blues festival every year, opened a blues museum in 2005, and has a Mississippi Blues Trail marker in his honour.