Sunday, December 10, 2017

HONORING THE WOLF

by Pete Welding

Howlin' Wolf, the powerful Mississippi born singer who was one of the major shapers of the electrically amplified modern blues style that has been so dominant an influence on all popular music since his time, died January 10, 1976, of complications arising from a kidney disease for which he was being treated. At the time of his death he was 65 and had been active as a blues performer for more than four decades, first as an itinerant singer-guitarist at simple back country entertainments in his native Mississippi and Arkansas, and from the late 1940s as a recording artist, radio per-former, and leader of one of the first electric blues ensembles to achieve national prominence.

For the last 25 years of his life he was one of the foremost and greatly respected blues artists resident in Chicago, where he had moved in '1952 after signing an exclusive recording contract with that city's Chess Records, for which he made his finest recordings and continued to record until the recurring illness of his final years forced him to curtail much of his performing and recording activities. Still, despite several heart attacks and a kidney illness of such severity that he required regular dialysis treatment and heavy medication, Howlin' Wolf did not give up performing entirely, and he invariably made his scheduled concert appearances.

Like most of the performers of the early postwar period, Wolf was fundamentally a traditional Mississippi blues musician, a spell-bindingly powerful singer, guitarist, and harmonica player whose strongest and most durable musical allegiance over a long profession-al career was to the traditional blues of the Southern countryside where he had been born, raised and first drawn to music. Many of Wolfs early recordings derived in fact from the work of older musicians he had encountered in the Mississippi Delta region, most notably his mentor Charley Patton, and, as do few recordings of the postwar period. they possess a sense of dark power and naked emotional force that are almost overwhelming in their intensity. Typical of this approach are recordings such as Saddle My Pony (learned from Patton and recorded in 1948); Moanin' At Midnight, How Many More Years and Dog Me Around (from 1951); Baby How Long, No Place To Go and Evil Is Goin' On (all from 1954 Forty-Four (1955); Smokestack Lightnin' and I Asked For Water (from 1956), and Who's Been Talkin'?, 'Moanin' For My Baby, Tell Me and Sittin' On Top Of The World (all recorded in 1957), among others. His wry, vinegary harmonica playing, more rural in orientation than that of virtually any other postwar player of the instrument, is heard on just about every one of these performances, for he tended to feature harp on his most country-styled songs, though not exclusively so, and he continued to utilize it throughout his recording career.

Additionally, a number of his performances were organized on scalar and modal rather than on harmonic principles as, for examples, Moanin' At Midnight, Riding In The Moonlight, Crying At Daybreak, Smokestack Lightnin', No Place To Go, I Asked For Water and Moanin' For My Baby—an approach that is typical of some of the older forms of Mississippi and Deep South blues and which permits the projection of a particularly forceful rhythmic base of hypnotic intensity. On numbers of this sort Wolf frequently employed to striking effect a wordless moaning and falsetto melisma, giving his recordings a highly distinctive character as a result.

In light of his early background as an exponent of the blues of his native state, the strong, sustained traditional bias of Wolfs music is explicable. He was born Chester Arthur Burnett on June 10, 1910, in West Point, near Tupelo, Miss.. and as a young teenager moved. in 1923, to Ruleville, in the heart of the Mississippi Delta. It was while living in this cotton-producing area, where his parents were employed on Young and Mara's plantation, that Wolf was first drawn to music, his inspiration being the great Delta singer and guitarist Charley Patton who lived on the nearby Dockery's plantation.

"It was he who started me off to playing," Wolf recalled. "He showed me things on the guitar, because after we got through picking cotton at night, we'd go and hang around him, listen at him play. He took a liking to me, and I asked him would he learn me, and at night after I'd get off work I'd go and hang around.

He used to play out on the plantations, at different one's homes out there. They'd give a supper, call it a 'Saturday night hop' or some-thing like that. There weren't no clubs like nowadays. Mostly on weekends they'd have them. He'd play different spots., he'd be playing here tonight and somewhere else the next night, and so on. He mostly worked by himself because his way of playing was kind of different from other people's. It took a good musician to play behind him, because it was kind of off-beat and off-time but it had a good sound the way he played. I never did work with him because he was a traveling man. In the spring of the year he'd be gone; he never came in until the fall. He followed the money. He couldn't make too much money in Mississippi in the spring of the year because people didn't have any money until harvest time. He'd always conic back in the fall.

"I felt like I got the most from Charley Patton and Lemon Jefferson—from his records, that is. He came through Mississippi, in different areas, but I never did see him. What I like about Lemon's music most was that he made a clear chord. He didn't stumble in his music like a lot of people do—plink! No, he made clear chords on his guitar, his strings sounded clearly. The positions he was playing in—that made his strings sound clear. There wasn't a smothered sound to his chords. As a kid I also heard records by Lonnie Johnson, Tampa Red and Blind Blake—they played nice guitar. heard tell of Tommy Johnson too but I never did see him.

"After Charley started showing me guitar I came along slow. I didn't really pick up my time—didn't get that right—until somewhere in the '40s. I got my first guitar in 1928. My father bought it for me before we left Ruleville. We were living out there on the Quiver River, on Boosey's plantation...At that time I was working on the farm with my father, baling hay and driving tractors, fixing fences, picking cotton and pulling corn....It was in the late 1920s when 1 decided to go out on my own. to go for myself. 1 just went running 'round through the country playing, like Charley and them did. ... Just all through the cottonbelt country, and mostly by myself. I was just playing blues and stuff like that. Some of the first things I learned how to play was How Many More Years and Smokestack Lightnin', just common songs you heard down there. When I started playing guitar and blowing my harp, anything come to mind I'd just sing it and rhyme it up and make me a song out of it. Mostly I'd just take things 1 heard from people round there. I just picked up music, just playing guitar. I mostly just stayed in the country farming.





"It was Sonny Boy Williamson—the second one, Rice Miller—who learnt me harmonica. He married my sister Mary in the '30s. That's when I met him. He was just loafing around, blowing his harp. He could blow though. But he lived too fast; he was drinking a lot of whisky and that whisky killed him. Sonny Boy showed me how to play. 1 used to strum guitar for him. See, he used to come there and sit up half the night and blow the harp to Mary. I like the harp, so I'd fool around and while he's kissing Mary I'd try to get him to show me something, you know. He'd grab the harp and then he'd show me a couple of chords. I'd go around the house then, and I'd work on it.

"It was somewhere around this time that 1 met Robert Johnson. Me and him played together, and me and him and Sonny Boy—Rice Miller—played together awhile...I worked a little while with him around through the country; we was playing around Greenwood. Itta Bena and Moorhead Mississippi). We didn't stay together too long because I would go back and forth to my father and help him in the farming. 'Cause I really wasn't ready for it—the music, you know. At that time I couldn't play near as well as he could; I'd just be hanging around trying to catch onto something. Rice, though, he could play with him. We took turns performing our own tunes. If I played lead and sang, they'd back me up, see, 'cause at that time I wasn't good enough to back them up.

"I don't know how long Robert had been playing when I met him but at that time he was playing nice...I believe Son House mostly taught him because, Son and Willie Brown, I used to play a little with them. I worked with the two of them at some of those Saturday night hops. They was playing music for dancing mostly, fast numbers to dance to. That's the only time those people would have a chance to enjoy themselves—on a Saturday night or a Sunday—'cause those landlords would want them to work any other time.

"When I'd go out on them plantations, the people played me so hard. They look for you to play from 7 o'clock in the evening until 7 o'clock of the next morning. That's too rough! I was getting about a dollar and a half and that was too much playing by myself. People would yell, 'Come on, play a little, baby!' A bunch would come in and they was ready to play and dance. So I decided I would get a band, get two or three more fellows to help me out, but I didn't do that until 1948. Some of the jobs I had taken was 50 cents a night, back in Hoover's days. Seven in the evening 'til seven the next morning."

Wolf continued this life of farming and occasional or part-time performing until he was inducted into the Army in 1941 . He remained in the service for the duration of the war, spending much of his tour stationed in Seattle, Wash. He returned to Mississippi and farm work in 1945, later rejoining his father on a plantation in Arkansas. After two years of farming on his own in Penton, Miss., he moved to West Memphis, Ark.

"It was there." he recalled, "in 1948, when I formed my first band and began to follow music as a career. On guitars I had Willie Johnson and M. T. Murphy. Junior Parker on harp, a piano player who was called Destruction [Bill Johnson]--he was from Memphis, and I had a drummer called Willie Steele. We played all through the states of Arkansas. Alabama, Mississippi and Missouri. The band was using all electric, amplified instruments at that time. After I had come to West Memphis I had gotten me an electric guitar. I had one before I went into the Army and when I came out 1 bought another one. I was broadcasting too, on a radio station in West Memphis, KWEM. It came on at 3 o'clock in the evening I afternoon. It was in '49 that I started to broadcast. I produced the show myself, went around and spoke to store owners to sponsor it, and I advertised shopping goods. Soon I commenced advertising grain, different seeds such as corn, oats, wheat. then tractors, tools and plows. Sold the advertising myself, got my own sponsors."

Wolfs regular radio broadcasts were extremely helpful in creating a demand for the music of his group, and he began to perform widely through the Deep South. Also helpful were recordings, for at about the same time he began making records, his earliest sides being made in Memphis for the then newly established Sun Records operation of Sam Phillips. The recordings—which included Saddle My Pony, Worried All The Time, Moanin' At Midnight, How Many More Years, Howlin' Wolf Boogie, My Last Affair, Oh! Red, and others—were issued as singles on Chess Records, the Chicago-based independent to which Phillips was providing master recordings. At much the same time Wolf was recording for RPM Records through the agency of the young Ike Turner. who was serving as talent scout and record producer for the West Coast label. As a result of the success he enjoyed with Moanin' At Midnight/How Many More Years (Chess 1515), Wolf was signed to an exclusive recording contract with Chess and, following a second recording session for them in Mem-phis, he moved to Chicago late in 1952, where he made his home for the rest of his life.

The move was to prove beneficial to the development of his music. With few exceptions his Memphis-made recordings were not particularly distinguished, at least when com-pared with the strong, well-focused recordings he soon was making under the direction of
Leonard Chess. As a result of his recording of Muddy Waters and others. Chess had developed a real understanding of rural-based modern blues of the type Wolf performed so well, and he lavished considerable care and attention to recording Wolf's music, providing him supporting musicians sensitive to its demands. It paid off' handsomely: Wolf's finest and most successful records, artistically as well as commercially, have all appeared on Chess Records.

After recordings had created a demand for his music, Wolf set about establishing himself on the busy competitive Chicago blues performing scene and put together a solid band of his own with which he began working the city's blues clubs. The most notable addition to his band was guitarist Hubert Sumlin, who under Wolf's tutelage and encouragement developed into one of the most consistently interesting and individualistic of all modern blues guitarists. From the start Sumlin has been one of the most important contributors to the distinctive, characteristic sound of Wolf's records. For the rest, Wolf employed Chicago musicians. drawing from the large reservoir of superior bluesmen resident there.

During the 1960s he settled in to a long stint at Sylvio's Lounge on Chicago's near West Side and for a number of years his was among the finest, most consistent and satisfying club presentations to be heard in the city. With regular employment, the personnel of his band remained considerably more stable and, consequently, the performance quality invariably higher than that of just about any other ensemble on the Chicago blues performing scene. And the live performances of his music were fully the equal of his recordings.

"Now, I don't consider myself a profession-al musician," Wolf observed. "I couldn't say I'm a professional 'cause I don't know too much about music, I'm just an entertainer: I can entertain pretty well in my way of doing. Before I became an entertainer, though, I sang for myself. Anything I set up and figured was good, I made up a song about it. I just watch people, their ways. I play by the movement of the people, the way they live. You see, every-thing that I sing is a story. The songs have to tell a story. See. if you don't put a story in there, people won't want to listen to it, because people mostly have been through the same emotions. Since I'm an entertainer, that's what I have to give the people who come to hear me, buy my records. I always tried to play a different sound from the other fellow ... have a good sound, to play something different. My music."

Howlin' Wolf left a rich legacy of music behind him. The best single introduction to his glorious Mississippi-based modern blues is provided by the low-priced 2-LP set Chester Burnett A.K.A. Howlin' Wolf (Chess 60016). His early RPM recordings have been collected on Howlin' Wolf Sings the Blues (Crown 5240), which also has been issued as Big City Blues (United 7717). Single LP al-bums on Chess include Moanin' In The Moonlight (Chess 1434), which later was issued as Evil (1540); Howlin' Wolf (1496); The Real Folk Blues (1502): More Real Folk Blues (151 2); Change My Way (418); Message To the Young (50002); Live And Cookin' At Alice's Revisited (50015); The Back Door Wolf (50045); The London Sessions (60008) and The Howlin' Wolf Album (Cadet Concept 319). He will be missed, and sorely too.

Honor his memory.


Thursday, December 7, 2017

Obituary: Van Zula Carter Hunt

Van Zula Carter Hunt (1901-95), singer and guitarist, moved from her hometown of Somerville to Memphis around the late 1910s and began her professional musical activity, traveling for several years with larger minstrel shows (such as Rabbit Foot, and Silas Green) as well as with her own show, Madame Hunt's Traveling Show. She played with local blues artists such as Sleepy John Estes, Frank Stokes, Gus Cannon, and Memphis Minnie, and the Memphis Jug Band. 


New Park Cemetery in Memphis, TN

She recorded some gospel sides as a chorus member with Rev. E.D. Campbell for Victor Records in 1927.  In 1930, she recorded the vocal "Selling That Jelly" with the Carolina Peanut Boys (Noah Lewis, John Estes, Ham Lewis, and others) for Victor Records. She reportedly made other recordings in the prewar era and recorded for Sun in the 1950s. Two songs were released on Adelphi LP 10105 Memphis Blues Again, Vol. 2 in 1970.  Hunt is backed on a number of tracks on the first volume of the Blues At Home Collection by pianist Mose Vinson, who was also recorded solo, as well as Hunt's daughter Sweet Charlene.

Steve LaVere, who learned of Hunt through washtub bass extraordinaire Dewey Corley, said of her, “She knows everything about everybody." In an obituary, Ed Tremewan stated that Hunt appeared locally in festivals from the "early 1960s and well into the 1980s, when declining health slowed her activities down. 

Obituary: Mose Vinson (1917-2002)


By Richard Allen Burns - 2002


Barrelhouse blues piano player Mose Vinson was born June 2, 1917 in Holly Springs, Mississippi. He passed away on November 16, 2002 from complications from diabetes.  He was eighty-five. One of the last of his kind, Vinson approached music by mixing blues with jazz and gospel. A regular on Beale Street, he played with such greats as Booker T. Laury, Sunnyland Slim, and B.B. King.

Vinson learned to play piano from his mother in church, but this religious influence contrasts with that which his father provided. In a 1993 interview, when Vinson performed on the campus of Arkansas State University, he recalled that his mother attended a church near Memphis. He remembered: "They [his parents] used to send me around--well, you know--to sing a solo. Wasn't nobody in there. She'd take my finger and make me go over the song. My pa, he took me around to hear the people play. I listened to the people play a little bit though, come back, and in two or three days, I'd he playing their songs." But that same year, Vinson's father also took him to jook joints, and by the time he was a teenager, Vinson was playing jazz and blues. "I'd been playing since I was a little boy, five years old. When I got big enough (by 1932 I was fifteen years old), I was playing for nightclubs. They put me in a reform school for that, and 1 had to quit that!" he recalled. Tired of country life, his family moved to Memphis in 1932. There Vinson met Sunnyland Slim. By then he was playing in a style that was typical of the 1930s, and throughout the 1940s, Vinson continued playing in jook joints and at parties in and around Memphis. His friends called him "Boogie," reflecting the style he played best.

Blues scholar David Evans said of Vinson, "He was one of the last of the old-time solo piano players." He worked, as a studio caretaker at Sun Records and played piano between sets until Sun founder Sam Phillips heard him and recorded him in 1953. Though none of these initial recordings were released at the time, most of these can now be heard on the CD boxed set Sun Records: The Blues Years, 1950-1958. The year following his first recording with Sun, Vinson recorded on one of Sun's greatest singles, James Cotton's "Cotton Crop Blues." He also recorded on Sun with Walter Horton, Joe Hill Louis, and several other recording
artists.

During the last three decades of his life, Vinson played in festivals and at colleges and universities, including the Chicago Blues Festival, the University of Chicago Folk Festival and the 1982 World's Fair in Knoxville, Tennessee. In 1992, he was featured on National Public Radio's program, Bluestage. During the 1980s and 1990s, Vinson could be heard playing at the Memphis Music and Heritage Festival and at the Center for Southern Folklore. The Center's director, Judy Peiser, co-produced Mose Vinson: Piano Man, Vinson's only album. The album features eighteen cuts of some of Vinson's finest piano playing that he had perfected over a span of seventy years. He was also featured, along with Booker T. Laury in Memphis Piano Blues Today, a collection of 1990s Memphis blues. In 1998, he appeared on the Junkyardmen's album, Scrapheap Full of Blues.


Evans told a reporter that like other musicians of his time, Vinson was "under-appreciated, more or less taken for granted here in Memphis . . . a real jewel." Peiser remembered him as quite personable, inspiring others, both young and old, to play along with him. When Peiser brought Vinson to perform at ASU, there was a standing-room-only crowd. Vinson invited audience members to join him onstage. Taking the hands of adults as well as children, he guided them across the keyboard in familiar tunes. An unsung hero on Beale Street, Mose Vinson will be missed throughout Memphis and the Mississippi Delta.

Two guys snuck into the cemetery in 2015.  Instead of asking former acquaintances and friends to help honor Mose Vinson properly, they laid a small footer in his plot at New Park Cemetery.

Wednesday, December 6, 2017

A Dark Collusion in a Mississippi Juke

A Dark Collusion in a Mississippi Juke
By Bughouse Pile - Dec 2017


The Year was 1979 and we had set out to find Sammy Myers, the Blues singer whose classic “Sleeping in the Ground” was a favorite anthem of British Blues collectors. [To read more about the Mississippi artist, please read this interview from 1980To experience a room full of slightly drunk young English punktards, grasping Brown Ale bottles and rocking back and forth on upright chairs to the rhythm of this tune was to be assured that all was well with our world. No matter how long it took, or to what lengths we had to go, or what energy we expended, we simply had to find this heroic singer and photograph him, for the lads back home were depending upon us! It wasn’t difficult, we were not very smart. We had his address and still had trouble. Bill interviewed him for Blues Unlimited, took the photos, and we left with an invitation to see him perform that night at the local juke joint. We hung out in downtown Jackson and then, as the sun removed its afternoon cap, we went and found Richard’s Playhouse, where Sammy had said he’d be. 

It was a long, low, dark, narrow and deafeningly noisy juke joint. You HAD to shout to be heard, thereby adding to the cacophony. Boy Scouts would have to have used semaphore to offer Bob-a-Job week services.[1] I don’t think they bothered. We took seats up front, near the shoebox-sized bandstand and watched the band set up. Bill recognized the guitarist King Edwards and introduced himself. We were joined by the tenor sax player, a guy called Cadillac Shorty, who immediately told us he’d been on every Little Richard record ever made. The drummer chimed in to inform us that his was the insistent beat we heard on Isaac Hayes' Shaft.

If they wanted big time bullshit, we were the guys to deliver...

When they kicked in, however, they were good and the place suddenly exploded as the tight little dance area in front of us quickly filled with a motley selection of interesting characters. A pot-bellied mid-life guy with a pork pie hat and a chomped cigar dancing with a woman twice his size. A tall, lanky solo dancer was doing Limbo moves without a pole, and getting deeply into it. We never saw him again. Two large and tightly clad women danced around each other, followed by many eyes linked directly to libidos. We sat, whitely, and observed.

Sammy came on stage and played a solid, very loud set of Blues. His voice was still good, his harmonica playing still sharp, the overall sound thick, woolly and chugging. I’d never been in a juke joint before; the pace was frantic, the noise deafening, the edge palpable. The owner, a tough -looking woman in the middle range of her life, tolerated neither trouble nor the seeds of it. Yanking one guy out the door with just one hand, for crimes we didn’t understand, she shot a glare across the room that indicated immediate rough justice for anyone else who might get above-station ideas. When the set had finished, I went to take a leak in the snug little men’s room behind the bandstand. As I was standing at the wall, Sammy Myers appeared at my side. His very limited vision and the dark that we stood in immediately colluded in his dampening my jeans and shoes. I came out shaking drops off my leg and squelching ever so slightly, explaining to Bill what had happened. “You lucky bitch”, he laughed, “you’ll dine out on that story more than once”.


Notes:
[1] Semaphore - an apparatus for visual signaling (as by the position of one or more movable arms or flags)

Bob-a-Job week is when the boy scouts go round the village once a year doing jobs for a bob, which was the old name for a shilling, now 5 pence.


[2] Paul Vernon often goes by his nicknames, Garbage Pile or Bughouse Brister.