"Moaning at Midnight"
By El Dormido

I recently finished reading "Moaning at Midnight, The Life and Times of Howlin' Wolf", by James Segrest and Mark Hoffman, published by Pantheon Books, NY.

I was unexpectedly affected by the book. It seemed like a standard bio, charting Wolf's life through a chronology of places, people and events, with significant portions of the story carried by what people said who were there then, when things happened. But the sum total is overwhelming.

Frankly, when I read through the last years of his life and came to his passing, I cried.

Segrest and Hoffman have assembled this portrait through decades of research and interviews. The interviews are snippets of longer conversations with the musicians, relatives, bystanders, observers, and competitors that were collected by going door to door, seeking the people out wherever they could be found. The complexity and depth of the story snuck up on me.

It is one thing to read a book like Alan Lomax's "Land where the Blues Began", and follow the music as it develops in black socio-cultural history, through slavery, onto the riverboats and into the levee and railroad camps, out of the plantation and share cropping systems, the people enduring oppression and dispossession, rampant lawlessness, murderous violence, broken family structure. One gets the broad perspective of the shaping of the music: African roots, church ecstasy, field hollers and chants, and so on. It is a good, factual reportage that definitely broadens understanding of the music.

It is quite another to read the chilling progression of one man's life through that same world.

Howlin' Wolf was born Chester Arthur Burnett in 1910 on a sharecropping plantation in West Point, MS, south of Tupelo. He grew up with rejection, in turmoil, subject to destructive violence from those closest to him. At first the facts just sit there, stoic, inert, dispassionately told. But
as the authors construct the past, story by story, from one interview to another, the sheer accumulation of the violence and degradation the boy endured is astonishing in its brutality. That pain resonates throughout Wolf's onward rush to express himself through music, that pain a constant,
even to the end of his life when his mother, in her madness, rejected his plea for acceptance.

The book shows how Wolf's life and music truly encompass the whole of blues history, from rural roots to the electric blast of Chicago blues. Wolf always carried what he got from his beginnings with Charley Patton, who taught him not only what to play, but how to play it. He carried that
essence within him, unchanged yet changing, his innovations transforming form and substance yet still expressing that essence, until a whole genre was born, from which came most all of what we know as blues today.

The recorded music we have, limited to the 3 minute song format of the 45 RPM record, doesn't begin to reflect the power of Wolf's music because, more than anything, Wolf's power was as a performer.

Segrest and Hoffman provide us tantalizing glimpses of the Wolf in his native habitat, in the West Memphis gin mills, in the ramshackle juke joints down the country dirt road, in the smoke filled Chicago blues clubs, even at an Ole Miss fraternity party the same year that James Meredith cracked the color barrier there.

But the gritty reality of Wolf's life were also the fist fights with his musicians at the road side, the confrontation at the bar with knife or gun, the pistol shot and the dead man slumped against the bandstand.  Each incident is tellingly recounted with the personality of the participants vividly declared in their own words, Wolf's story their story too. Yet all these tales picturing the man in his milieu in the end serve to underscore the essential nobility and dignity with which the Wolf
conducted his life, inside and outside the music.

Howlin' Wolf was one of those few who really changed things, not just in his own context, but in the global culture, with reverberations still echoing. What Wolf accomplished is best summed up by Vann Shaw, guitarist and Eddie Shaw's son, (page 310-311): "That was his whole thing, he could create. Out of him being what he was, he could create.. The thing that makes Wolf so magical is that you see a person create a whole genre of music through just their mind, and you ain't supposed to do it. You're supposed to have a sheet of paper, a desk, a quiet room, you're supposed to think and
concentrate. And here's a guy using just his ego, creating lyrics in a room full of smoke, alcohol, four-letter words, and intimidating individuals - and yet he still creates. And that's the magic."

I suggest you read this book Wolf's music at hand. Reading about the sessions and the musicians involved, and then listening, that nails it all down. I listened to my Chess 3 CD boxed set (CHD-9332). There are others out there, but find something, because the words of the book demand the
sound of the music.

This is a must read for a deeper understanding of modern blues, not just the music, but the men who lived it. Even more, this is the story of the power of the human spirit not just to triumph over adversity, but to create an enduring legacy that continues to speak to us. This book is a chance to
know Wolf's essence in such a way you feel you've walked with him for a while, and you will be better for it.