![]() Anyway, four years and a nervous breakdown later, he returned to the farm life in Ruleville, where he simultaneously helped out his dad and played at local joints. All was going well for Howlin’ Wolf before being abruptly interrupted by his Army duty. ![]() He continued practicing with the rural masters, among which his half-sister’s (alleged) husband, harmonica player Sonny Boy Williamson (Rice Miller) from who he learned the instrument. 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,” “Patton started me off playing,” Wolf told writer Pete Welding. His large hands were more suited for farming than the guitar as his teacher noted, but this doesn’t stop his passion for the blues to shine. When his father gave him his first guitar at age 18, he also somehow convinced Patton to be his tutor. ![]() Where his home was, by the town of Ruleville, there were already some blues stars – most notably the founder of the Delta blues Charley Patton, Wolf’s idol and greatest influence. ![]() Reunited with a loving parent, half-sister and step-siblings, Wolf could at last focus on what was truly fascinating him – the blues. This time though, instead of waiting around for someone to save him, he took the matter into his own hands (feet rather) and walked 85 miles barefoot, finally arriving at his father’s home down at the Delta where he found the big loving family he’s longed for. The baptist preacher uncle treated him so harshly that young Chester ran away at the age of 13 and once again found himself homeless. After wandering the streets for a little while, his great-uncle took him under his wing, but what an unloving wing it was. “So I turned to growlin’, and the howlin’, and it’s done me just fine.”Īt just a year old his parents separate, and as a little child is left thrown out of the house by his mother for apparently being disinterested in helping around the house and the farm. “I couldn’t do no yodeling,” the Wolf said. His trademark hoarse growl has influenced countless of aspiring and well renowned singers, but has remained incomparable. With the crack musicians he hired, he broke the basic chords down, tunneling into their roots, bursting them apart and finding strange charms in them that few musicians had explored previously.īut before he became giant of the blues he’d have to walk the walk towards stardom and earn the hard way the right to stand among the most influential, the most recognized and the most emotional artists of our time.īorn June 10th, 1910 and in a plantation close to the small town of White Station, Mississippi with the name Chester Arthur Burnett.Īn unmistakable character even before his fame Wolf was a big, imposing man – towering at just shy of 6 feet 3 inches, with an equally striking voice. These 25 recordings encapsulate the broad reach of Mississippi's influence on the blues.It’s impossible to guess what the blues might’ve sounded like, had there never been a Howlin’ Wolf – that mountain of a man, with a voice like a thunder-crack, a sulphur-throated force of nature whose bone-rattling voice screeching tales of betrayal, loneliness and death at fans whom he stared at bug-eyed and sweaty as he howled. So it's only fitting to celebrate some of the most noted musicians who came from Mississippi or whose ties to the genre were formed here. Blues is inspired by place - the railroads, fields and slaughterhouses where the musicians once worked by day by the triumphs and struggles in life by love found and love lost.Īnd no place has produced more influential American bluesmen and women than the Mississippi Delta. Photo: Eric Shelton, Clarion Ledger, Illustration: Andrea Brunty, USA TODAY NetworkĪs the National Museum of African American Music opens its doors, journalists from the USA TODAY Network explore the stories, places and people who helped make music what it is today in our expansive series, Hallowed Sound. Photo: Eric Shelton, Clarion Ledger, Illustration: Andrea Brunty, USA TODAY Network Jimmy “Duck” Holmes plays his guitar in front of the Blue Front Café in Bentonia, Miss. ![]() Jimmy “Duck” Holmes plays his guitar in front of the Blue Front Café in Bentonia, Miss. ![]()
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