He assembled a blues band in the area called the House Rockers and made a commitment to make music his career. West Memphis, then a town bustling with blues clubs and gambling, was at the forefront of the newly amplified blues music, and Burnett adapted quickly. He took a job in a factory there, but the area’s blues clubs were the real draw for him. In 1948, Burnett moved to West Memphis (Crittenden County). In Penton, he met Katie Mae Johnson, and they were married on May 3, 1947. Then he went to Penton, Mississippi, to farm for two years, farming by day and playing music by night. After serving in the army, Burnett returned home to farm on the Phillips Plantation. Lockwood.īurnett enlisted in the army, for which he was not well suited. Along with Williamson, Burnett also performed in the 1930s alongside Robert Johnson, Son House, Johnny Shines, Willie Brown, and Robert Jr. He learned to play harmonica from blues legend Sonny Boy Williamson and added it to his performing arsenal. Despite his commitment to his music, Burnett faithfully returned each spring to plow his father’s land.īurnett began traveling in Oklahoma and all over the south, but Arkansas remained his main stomping ground. Francis River approximately fifteen miles north of Parkin (Cross County). In early 1934, they moved to the Nat Phillips Plantation on the St. In 1933, the Burnett family left Mississippi and moved to a large Arkansas plantation in Wilson (Mississippi County). He was a giant of a man, standing over six feet three inches and weighing some 275 pounds, and he became well known in the region as a blues performer, not only for his showmanship but also for his large size and loud, howling voice. Preferring the life of a blues musician to the harsh life of sharecropping, Burnett began wandering the delta regions of Mississippi and Arkansas, playing music anywhere he could make money. In January 1928, Burnett’s father bought him a guitar, and he began to play regularly, eventually teaming with Patton, who taught him many tricks of showmanship. While there, Charlie Patton, the most popular musician in the Delta, showed him a few chords on the guitar. He eventually found his father and his father’s new family on a plantation near Ruleville, Mississippi, and he began working on the plantation. At age thirteen, he ran away from home and moved to the Mississippi Delta. When he was still a child, Burnett’s mother sent him away to live with his uncle, who was particularly hard on him, whipping him with a bullwhip and making him eat separately from the rest of the family. The rest of the family would then call him “Wolf” and howl at him. His parents separated when he was one year old his father moved to the Mississippi Delta to farm, and he and his mother moved to Monroe County, Mississippi, where she became an eccentric religious singer who performed and sold self-penned spirituals on the street.īurnett got the nickname “Wolf” because his grandfather would scare the youngster by telling him that the wolf in the woods would get him if he misbehaved. His electric blues guitar, backing his powerful, howling voice, helped shape rock and roll.Ĭhester Burnett was born on June 10, 1910, in White Station, Mississippi, four miles northeast of West Point, Mississippi, to Leon “Dock” Burnett, a sharecropper, and Gertrude Jones. Chester Arthur Burnett, known as Howlin’ Wolf or Howling Wolf, was one of the most influential musicians of the post–World War II era.
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