Some Notes Prompted By Moanin' At Midnight

(Installment number 1 in a series of...)

Moanin' At Midnight: The Life And Times Of Howlin' Wolf, by James Segrest and Mark Hoffman. Pantheon. 397 p. $26.95.

I was asked to review this biography for The Dallas Morning News. In the process of assembling my final copy, I filled several pages with observations, reactions and speculations I knew would never even make a draft, not even as material to be ultimately discarded. Said review was written for a very specific audience, i.e., one unblemished by much familiarity with sharecropping, West Memphis, the Chess brothers, or the man-mountain Chester Burnett himself. These unnumbered notes will never be written into a real piece, but, even in their formlessness -- more like that of lava than of pudding, I hope -- I feel they say more about my experience with the book, and with Wolf's art, than the 450 polished words I have submitted elsewhere. (In fact, the review may not even make it to print, what with layoffs looming at the Belo Death Star.)

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Wolf's beginnings are, of course, obscure. Who cared about another black boy in 1910 in rural Mississippi, beyond what he represented in terms of toting, hauling, hoeing, and picking capacity? His mother Gertrude cared only as long as the rewards of motherhood appealed to her.

"Maybe, as Chester told a friend [actually, Hubert Sumlin, who Wolf named in his last will and testament as kin, as his son, with no distinction drawn between ties of blood and the bond of legality, i.e., adoption], his mother became enraged because he would not work in the fields for 15 cents a day. Maybe, as he told his last wife, his mother rejected him because he refused to sing spirituals with her because he already had his sights set on another calling -- singing the blues. [Switch mother for father, make the protagonist Jewish instead of black, and isn't this basically the plot of The Jazz Singer?] (6)

His uncle Will Young didn't care for young Wolf, but he tended or minded him like he would a mule. One has something of a hard time picturing a giant such as Howlin' Wolf as Cinderella. But if we are to believe Segrest and Hoffman -- and I can hardly argue with them -- the rough-and-tumble was all-too conscious of his scarring boyhood. The authors describe the wastrel Burnett thrown to the vagaries of winter, shoeless, following the railroad tracks to wherever he might be taken in. Its an image they then reveal lurks behind the lyrics to "Smokestack Lightnin'": "Well, who been here, baby, since I been gone? / Little bitty boy, derby on..."

And so it occurs to me that, more than any other outwardly on-the-go-on-the-make Americans, Black Americans are fated, or perhaps cursed, with discovering their roots over and over again. The truth of this people's origins seems continually repressed, like the McCaslin genealogies in Faulkner's "The Bear". I suppose it is because they have been so denied their history, first by capture, then by enslavement, segregation, consignment to the underclass, eventually even by pride -- the always problematic phenomenon of (Pan-)Africanism -- and by political correctness.

Corollary to the question, then, of how Chester Burnett became Howlin' Wolf is that of how Howlin' Wolf saw himself. Or: how did Howlin' Wolf understand his transformation? Did he conceive of himself as a kind of brujo, or a denizen (sort of) Dr. Moreau's isle? Man-made, or self-made man? The authors cannot possible answer these questions, and neither can I, unless I resort to the medium of fiction.

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"By the light / of the silvery moon…"

How might the Wolf have held his tonk hand? When he gambled, was he reckless or was he so parsimonious his opponents could never read him?

How would Howlin' Wolf down himself a bottle of beer?

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Wolf is not so much remembered here as is his span, his bulk, his appetites, the way women were drawn to his violent charisma (women so thick around him they blotted out even his eminence), the iron in his discipline, his wariness, his illiteracy… What can musical theorizing make of all this?

Hubert Sumlin, who, I shit you not, was listed in Chester Burnett's funeral program as his son:

"We got to be so close, like father and son… Hubert was Wolf, Wolf was Hubert. That's the way we had it, that's the way it was…" (184)

Wolf's biological son, Floyd Burnett, describing what he felt when he learned of his father's death:

"[H]e thought he heard a voice in his kitchen asking him for water. 'I said, "That's my daddy's voice! Wait a minute! Somethin' ain't right."' He called Lillie [Floyd's step-mother] and asked, 'My daddy is dead, ain't he?' She said, 'How do you know?' He said, 'He just called me from the grave to bring him some water. And from the Bible speaking, that's hell-bound.'" (318)

So much for sacraments. But what does it mean to sacrifice one's manhood for the sake of becoming mythology incarnate?

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Wolf the "tail dragger" (also the title of one of the songs written for him by Willie Dixon, with whom he had a tempestuous relationship; Wolf considered Dixon's tunes not much more than what we might call "novelties"). On stage, he would tuck a handkerchief or between his belt and his trousers and shake his hips. At first -- according to Willie Lee Johnson -- the handkerchief was a towel, and the sweat-drenched Wolf needed it handy to wipe down in the roadhouses through which he passed, leaving his tracks, not really wiping them out, as he liked to euphemize the lasciviousness of his performances.

Necessities become affectations, I suppose. Elvis's pelvis could never compare to the convulsive reality of all six feet, three inches, and 300 pounds of Howlin' Wolf in accusatory breakdown. Wolf's (in)famous appearance on the teenybopper ABC program Shindig from 1965 (made at the bequest of The Rolling Stones) makes this all too clear. It is almost frightening to see a man that big apparently lose control of his body, or have his sense of self taken utterly away by the music. Stared at by pasty, acne-d white faces, kids in beach-wear clapping politely, Wolf is a tornado in gabardine. Astounding.

Then, too, there is an image in my mind that is absent from the portrait Segrest and Hoffman paint of the sharecropping life Wolf would have known so intimately. It is an image, moving, of black men and women making their way through the cotton fields at harvest time, nipping the buds, trailing behind them huge sacks of white burlap, often patched together crudely from many disparate swatches of cloth. (And think of the KKK costumes in Griffith's Birth Of A Nation.) Sacks more like tunnels to be filled with the cash crop, growing steadily heavier even as the cessation of beast of burden's efforts looms at the far end of the row. And hungry ghosts are riding on their backs.

"When the mighty Wolf come along draggin' his tail, he done stole somebody's daughter."

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"'I never knowed him [Wolf] to do a thing but pat his foots [size 16] and sing those songs,' said [cousin Dorothy] Spencer. 'Now he was sure lazy -- I'll tell you the truth!' Wolf would have called it wisdom -- choosing a better life." (25)

The vagabond existence of the bluesman as an escape from the deathly tedium of rural life, that life's crushing cyclical nature. The blues offer a succession of temporary highs -- drink, women, celebrity -- that can nonetheless be strung by its most inventive and conscience-free practitioners so that it builds to a long, sustained crescendo. The blues singer and the community he / she (rarely, but there were some) "serves" are like wheels in some mechanism turning against one another.

The blues as the sound of autumn, Robbie Robertson's "King Harvest". For the bluesman, the disposable income earned by the reapers just rolls in. For his audience, his songs are as hard as moonshine, as sweet and numbing as patent medicine taken not by the drop -- or spoonful -- but by the gulp. Yes, the bluesman only stays in one place long enough to get paid. He gets out before his vagrancy can be detected and he can be pressed into labor. Your wits, your timing are key. Keep to the shadows. Like the Wolf, your movements must always be furtive, your whereabouts should never be fully known.

And so Segrest's and Hoffman's narrative often becomes not much more than a number of paragraphs beginning with "And then…" All these witnesses who saw Wolf hitchhike or, late, drive through in his Pontiac station wagon. "I heard him once, here, there, then." Chronology defines his life, although his art is timeless.

Isn't it?

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Juke joints. The floors of such places, rough joints of unsanded, unvarnished planks, Splinters in waiting. Boards stained with tiger-piss brown liquor, spilt blood, the flaky powder of cigarette ashes mixed with sweat and other lubricants into a light gray paste, snuff juice. Wolf's huge foot (one nickname, Foots, is kept alive by old associates, his guise for them, striding, wandering) keeping time so loud on this floor. Does it rest on the dirt, or is there a resonating crawl space between the foundation and dancing surface? Wolf sits on a cane-bottomed chair with his huge legs spread wide. He performs seated, his ass almost twice the size of the chair's seat, but he becomes animated, and the chair is scooted about the room as if by a mischievous or more dire and restless spirit summoned in a séance. And the lanterns shake, squashed paper cups litter the floor, and outside the thin and leaning walls is a world of swamps and hoots and gloomily swaying trees. A magic forest, a green and ochre darkness. Wolf, a creature himself who is barely able to make his wildness (as well as his wiles) heel, unites the inside and outside. Yet the bluesman himself fears nothing in nature except the ferocity of other people.

So Wolf's greatest performances, such as "Smokestack Lightnin'", "Back Door Man" and "I Ain't Superstitious", reveal that his art is primarily one of paranoia. And if paranoia is fear emboldened by rage, well, perhaps this is why Wolf's blues are more macabre and exhibitionistic than they are lonesome and sorrowful. Still, a man fighting with everything his has to rescue his humanity from racist ideas about his reputed evil is hardly an unreasonable man -- nor is he a man governed by bad faith.

~ Joe Milazzo

Posted by joe on October 3, 2004 1:21 PM