Chester Arthur Burnett (June 10, 1910 – January 10, 1976), better known by his stage name Howlin' Wolf, was an American blues singer, guitarist and harmonica player. He was at the forefront of transforming acoustic Delta blues into electric Chicago blues, and over a four-decade career, recorded blues, rhythm and blues, rock and roll, and psychedelic rock. He is regarded as one of the most influential blues musicians ever.
Born into poverty in Mississippi, Burnett became a protégé of Delta blues musician Charley Patton in the 1930s. In the Deep South, he began a solo career by performing with other notable blues musicians of the day. By the end of the decade, he had established himself in the Mississippi Delta. Following a number of legal issues, a stint in prison, and Army service, he was recruited by A&R man Ike Turner to record for producer Sam Phillips in Memphis. His first record "Moanin' at Midnight" (1951) led to a record deal with Chess Records in Chicago. Between 1951 and 1969, six of his songs reached the Billboard R&B chart. His studio albums include Howlin' Wolf a.k.a. The Rocking Chair Album, a collection of singles from 1957 to 1961, The Howlin' Wolf Album (1969), Message to the Young (1971), The London Howlin' Wolf Sessions (1971), and The Back Door Wolf (1973). His reputation grew throughout the blues revival of the 1960s, and he continued to perform until November 1975, when he performed for the last time alongside fellow blues musician B.B. King. He died on January 10, 1976, after years of deteriorating health. In 1980, Howlin' Wolf was inducted into the Blues Hall of Fame, and in 1991, he was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.
With a booming voice and an imposing physical presence, he is one of the best-known Chicago blues artists. AllMusic has described him as "a primal, ferocious blues belter with a roster of classics rivaling anyone else, and a sandpaper growl of a voice that has been widely imitated". Several of his songs have become blues and blues rock standards. The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame listed "Little Red Rooster", "Smokestack Lightning", "Killing Floor", and "Spoonful" in its "500 Songs That Shaped Rock and Roll" and “Smokestack Lightning" was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame in 1999. In 2011, Rolling Stone magazine ranked him number 54 on its list of the "100 Greatest Artists of All Time".
Chester Arthur Burnett was born on June 10, 1910, in White Station, near West Point, Mississippi, to Gertrude Jones and Leon "Dock" Burnett. He later said that his father was "Ethiopian", while Jones had Choctaw ancestry on her father's side. He was named for Chester A. Arthur, the 21st President of the United States. The name "Howlin' Wolf" originated from Burnett's maternal grandfather, John Jones; Burnett had been squeezing his grandmother's chicks so hard he was likely to kill them, and his grandfather told him wolves would come and get him. The blues historian Paul Oliver wrote that Burnett once claimed to have been given his nickname by his idol Jimmie Rodgers.
Burnett's parents separated when he was a year old. Dock, who had worked seasonally as a farm laborer in the Mississippi Delta, moved there permanently while Jones and Burnett moved to Monroe County. Jones and Burnett would sing together in the choir of the Life Boat Baptist Church near Gibson, Mississippi, and Burnett would later claim that he got his musical talent from her. Jones kicked Burnett out of the house, for unknown reasons, during the winter when he was a child. At the peak of his success, he returned from Chicago to see his mother in Mississippi and was driven to tears when she refused to take money offered by him, saying it was from his playing the "devil's music".
He moved in with his great uncle Will Young, who had a large household and treated him badly. While in the Young household he worked almost all day and did not receive an education at the school house. When he was thirteen, he killed one of Young's hogs in a rage after the hog had caused him to ruin his dress clothes; this enraged Young who then whipped him while chasing him on a mule. He then ran away and claimed to have walked 85 miles (137 km) barefoot to join his father, where he finally found a happy home with his father's large family. During this era he went by the name "John D." to dissociate himself from his past, a name by which several of his relatives would know him for the rest of his life.
His physique garnered him the nicknames "Big Foot Chester" and "Bull Cow" as a young man: he was 6 feet 3 inches (191 cm) tall and weighed 275 pounds (125 kg).
On January 15, 1928, at the age of 17, Burnett gathered enough money to buy his first guitar. It was a date that Burnett reportedly never forgot until "the day he died".
In 1930, Burnett met Charley Patton, the most popular bluesman in the Mississippi Delta at the time. He would listen to Patton play nightly from outside a nearby juke joint. There he remembered Patton playing "Pony Blues", "High Water Everywhere", "A Spoonful Blues", and "Banty Rooster Blues". The two became acquainted, and soon Patton was teaching him guitar. Burnett recalled that "the first piece I ever played in my life was ... a tune about hook up my pony and saddle up my black mare"—Patton's "Pony Blues". He also learned about showmanship from Patton: "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". He played with Patton often in small Delta communities and would perform the guitar tricks he learned from him for the rest of his life.
Burnett was influenced by other popular blues performers of the time, including the Mississippi Sheiks, Blind Lemon Jefferson, Ma Rainey, Lonnie Johnson, Tampa Red, Blind Blake, and Tommy Johnson. Two of the earliest songs he mastered were Jefferson's "Match Box Blues" and Leroy Carr's "How Long, How Long Blues". The country singer Jimmie Rodgers was also an influence. Burnett tried to emulate Rodgers's "blue yodel" but found that his efforts sounded more like a growl or a howl: "I couldn't do no yodelin', so I turned to howlin'. And it's done me just fine". His harmonica playing was modeled after that of Sonny Boy Williamson II, who taught him how to play when Burnett moved to Parkin, Arkansas, in 1933.
During the 1930s, Burnett performed in the South as a solo performer and with numerous blues musicians, including Floyd Jones, Johnny Shines, Honeyboy Edwards, Sonny Boy Williamson II, Robert Johnson, Robert Lockwood Jr., Willie Brown, Son House and Willie Johnson. By the end of the decade, he was a fixture in clubs, with a harmonica and an early electric guitar. It was around this time that Burnett got into some legal trouble in Hughes, Arkansas: While he was in town, he tried to protect a female acquaintance from an angry boyfriend, and the two men fought, with Burnett killing the man with a hoe. What happened after this is a matter of dispute; Burnett either fled the area, or did some jail time.
On April 9, 1941, he was inducted into the U.S. Army and was stationed at several bases around the country. Years later, he stated that the plantation workers in the Delta had alerted military authorities because he refused to work in the fields. He was assigned to the 9th Cavalry Regiment, which was famous for being one of the units dubbed "Buffalo Soldiers". Burnett was first sent to Pine Bluff, Arkansas, for basic training, and was given long hours performing menial work. Then he was transferred to Camp Blanding, in Starke, Florida, where he was assigned to the kitchen patrol. During the day he would cook food for the enlisted soldiers, and at night he would play the guitar in the assembly room. Burnett was later sent to Fort Gordon in Georgia, and he would play his guitar on the steps of the mess hall, which is where a young James Brown, who came to the Fort nearly every day to earn money shining shoes and performing buck dances for the troops, first heard him play.